The Conversion Code, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3How to Build Landing Pages That Capture High-Quality Leads

In 2003, the IT department at Microsoft invented landing pages in response to poor online sales of their flagship business product, Office. Microsoft.com had become bloated with information, so they extracted the content about just Office and put it on its own dedicated page and URL. As legend has it, sales of Office immediately skyrocketed by 30%.

The reason landing pages are so effective for lead generation is simple: they are simple. They only have one goal. Compare that to your website, which may have dozens of navigation options or categories to choose from, and you can see why professional marketers use landing pages for any lead generation campaigns involving ad spend. Because as Wikipedia perfectly puts it, “The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads.”¹

Unlike the website traffic that Google sends you through searches and ads, where the “preview” of the content is text-based, social media and email marketing allow you to be very visual and descriptive about the lead magnet they can access if they decide to click. This technique, called coupling, increases the conversion rate of the landing page you send them to because they head there with a crystal-clear expectation.

Before you start sending traffic to your landing pages, just like we did with your website's design, you probably need to clean up the landing pages you are already using. More likely, you need to ...