The best landing pages

The best landing pages are the ones that convert. I sometimes call them ‘high-performance’ landing pages. High performing landing pages have 4 characteristics. They are engaging, dynamic, disposable and agile.

An engaging landing experience uses an arsenal of tools like flash, video, social media and pre-conversion segmentation to capture and keep the user’s attention and drive them through conversion.

Dynamic landing experiences are those that are highly context specific, perhaps even personalized with content based on where the user has come from, what they have searched on or what they’ve done in the past. They aren’t static, they are specific.

Most importantly, landing pages should be disposable. The best online marketing campaigns employ continuous testing for continuous improvement. And that means we can’t get too tied down to any one landing page concept. We can’t invest so much into a landing page that it becomes too expensive to trash it and move on if it’s not working.

And finally agile. Landing pages need to be concepted, executed and launched in minutes, hours or days. Not months. We talk to companies every day who can’t get a landing page developed and launched in under 4-12 weeks. That’s a long time. A really long time. A 4-12 week development cycle on a landing page probably means that too many resources are being spent on the page—from IT to agencies to marketing resources—and it probably means it is no longer disposable as well.

So, take a look at your landing pages. Can you use the words engaging, dynamic, disposable and agile to describe them?