VAR Marketing Tip – Naked Landing Pages
By now, most of you recognize that landing pages play an important role in your VAR marketing effort. While there are plenty of “Do’s”, “Don’ts”, and best practices for landing page performance that make good sense, here’s one thing I learned recently while attending a Hubspot webcast that’s not so obvious … the best performing landing pages are naked.
Keep it Simple
A naked landing page is simply stripped of (pun intended) menu navigation and extraneous information that doesn’t serve the primary goal of the page (download white paper, register for webcast, etc.).
While it’s tempting to show off all your great products, services, and other offerings, that stuff will probably just distract your visitors from (what should be) the primary purpose or goal of the landing page … get them to provide contact/lead information in exchange for your great offer. Once they submit contact info or take action on your landing page, THEN you can redirect them to your home page, blog, product overview, or anywhere else on your website.
So c’mon VARs … delete the navigation menu, focus on the call to action, and let’s get naked!
Barbara,
Yes, absolutely! Super long lead capture forms are a BIG no no. We typically recommend that you use no more than 5 fields or so. Name, Company, Email Address and maybe a check box option to subscribe/sign up for your newsletter. Anything longer usually results in “page abandonment” (you know, they close the browser and say “forget it”).
The idea is to get your thought-leading content into the hands of potential customers … not scare them off by asking for a full address (who mails anymore anyway?!), social security number, and rights to their first born!
Thanks for your comments.
Barbara …
P.s. If you want to see a sample, take a look at this landing page that we designed for a Sage CRE client of ours:
[URL Removed – The Page is No Longer Live]
I’d love to hear your thoughts … but I think you’ll agree that we achieved the objective of keeping it clean, simple and to the point. Not too many distractions.
Great points! I am headed off to check and make sure mine are super simple…since they probably aren’t. I would say the other big thing when getting folks to download a white paper or get some type of document would be to make them enter a load of information first. If I have to put in more than my email address and name, I never, never , never do it. I would love to hear your opinion on how to capture names of interested visitors.