Table of Contents
*This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
The sole objective of your sales promotion landing page is to convert!
To have the visitor take immediate action.
When you create a sales promotion, you will get your highest campaign results with a very simple landing page design. The best landing pages quickly convey the message and immediately motivates the visitor to take action.
The beauty of having a dedicated landing page for your promotion is that there is no extra information required or needed. The consumer visited your page for one specific reason, the deal. You need to quickly engage them or lose them.
If it’s a sweepstakes promotion entice with a great picture and prize, then get them to enter their email to sign up.
A mobile coupon, display the offer for immediate use. The more information you provide or ask for, the more people will lose interest and move on.
What To Include
1. Incorporate Your Branding
Like all marketing communications, the dedicated landing page layout design should incorporate your brand identity guidelines.
When you have brand identity guidelines as a style guide, your brand image shines through.
Therefore, you don’t need to sell the visitor on your brand. If they need to familiarize themselves with your brand they can link back to your website.
Sell the offer. Don’t waste copy establishing a brand story.
Using the direction provided by your brand style guide the landing page simply needs three elements:
- Your Headline
- The Offer
- The Call To Action.
2. Headlines Need To Do Double Duty
The headline needs to be bold and specific. Your USP and the specific benefit of your offer needs to show up in the headline. The Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is defined as:
“A feature or characteristic of a product/service that distinguishes it from others of a similar nature and makes it more appealing.”
For example, Plated is a gourmet food delivery service. The headline to their landing page:
OPEN THE DOOR
to a new kind of dinner
The headline introduces the concept of home delivery while enticing the reader to try something new and exciting.
3. The Offer Is The Motivating Factor
Your homepage may contain an assortment of products, statements, and other information important to your brand. That’s where all that information belongs.
To be perfectly clear about the difference from your homepage: A Landing Page is used to focus on one particular event, product, service or sales promotional offer.
In a perfect world, every marketing campaign you run should have its own landing page.
Your offer is the design inspiration for your landing page. It should be front and center. Every visitor to the landing page should be able to immediately see what the benefit of claiming the offer is.
The most important thing to the visitor to your landing page should be the thing that attracts them first.
The offer should be bigger, bolder, and perhaps a different color to attract the readers first gaze.
Since landing page visitors scan instead of actually reading an offer, it should be simple and to the point.
Abbreviated terms and conditions may exist in this space, but in a smaller density and type size.
Helpful Hint:
Several elements packed together, surrounded by lots of negative space, makes the offer appear more important. When you spread out terms, conditions, and other information, the landing page becomes cluttered and too hard for the eye to scan. Rather than reading, the viewer will move on.
If the offer is a sweepstakes prize, the headline should introduce the brand USP and sweepstakes. The center of the page should be a big bold picture and a brief description of the grand prize.
The objective is to make the visitor to your sweepstakes landing page feel like they already won and are experiencing the prize.
https://ghergich.com/ Source ^
4. The Call To Action As A No-Brainer
It is important to understand that the more information you ask for to participate in a promotion, the more landing page visitors you will lose. We, humans, get confused easily when presented with too much information or are asked to make a choice.
Your call to action should be a simple instruction or directive. Directives such as Buy Now, or Click Here are very clear.
When your Headline and Offer are exciting the directive command builds on the excitement and moves the consumer toward immediate action.
If your offer is a coupon or promo code, give them a link to find their nearest location. If you have an online store, give them a link to make a purchase (preferably with the offer already included).
The fastest entry for a sweepstakes or contest is to ask for just a first name and email address.
In planning your sales promotion program find a supplier that has the ability to pull up consumer data from email addresses. They should be able to show you several landing page examples that they have successfully done this service for.
Don’t ask consumers for information that they may not have the time or the inclination to share, just to enter a sweepstakes.
Helpful Hint:
Never give two choices as a call to action. For example, do not give the viewer a choice to click through to make an online purchase or to identify their nearest retailer by entering their zip code. When presented with two choices, during a quick decision process, consumers suffer from choice overload. The results of choice overload are that the consumer gets quickly frustrated and leaves to avoid frustration anxiety.
5. The Eyes Have It In Making A Decision
Once you determine the target consumer and the killer offer, the design features of your landing page inspire the consumer to give it a quick click and scan. The above guidelines for attracting the viewer and having them grasp your brand essence and your offer in an instant is the driving force. Essentially it is only a copy layout strategy.
Like traditional advertising, what is a landing page if it’s not pleasing to the eye? It’s a visually boring offer. To spice it up a little here are some things to know about consumer psychology and advertising.
When consumers view your landing page, they don’t look at the page as one visual. Humans use perceptual organization to group things that look alike together. They then give their attention to things that are different.
For example, a barrel of red apples with one orange on top will attract the eye to the one orange instead of the numerous red apples. We are drawn to anomalies and the different item is viewed as more distinctive or important.
Understanding that viewers have dropped by for a quick scan, you need to decide what you want them to see first, second and third. Using type size, color and killer graphics you should lead the consumer on a visual journey that ends at the call to action.
Conditioning Visual Scanning
Visual scanning is also done in a conditioned pattern. Think of this pattern as the letter F.
The viewer scans the top and bottom of the page, with little focus on the middle area. This may actually be an advantage for an offer driven landing page design.
With the offer being featured as the largest and brightest page element, the headline and call to action become a little more subdued. The effect is that the viewer quickly gets the message from a quick visual scan and is hot to take action.
If the headline or call to action is more important than the offer in your promotion, simply adjust the size, color, boldness etc. Then move the consumer’s eyes to what’s most important.
6. Driving Traffic To Your Landing Page
A great promotional offer, featured on a unique landing page, is worthless if none of your target consumers can’t find it. A comprehensive sales promotion communication plan needs to be developed prior to designing your page. Here are a few rapid suggestions:
- Link consumers to your page from an email marketing campaign.
- Work with marketing partners to promote the offer and provide a link to access it from their email, blog or other online channels.
- Create a social media ad campaign and include a link to the offer.
- Provide a banner or sidebar about the offer with a link from your company website.
- Work with retailers to develop a pop-up landing page as consumers are shopping.
- Create a killer headline so that people will email, tweet or pin your page to their social networks.
- Once the visitor has headed the call to action, follow up with a request for a list of social share friends.
Depending on your industry, there are many creative ways to drive consumers to your sales promotion landing page.
Pulling consumers to your offer is a very different marketing strategy than pushing an offer out using an FSI or ad campaign.
Plan diligently. Once you have data perform A/B and other tests to see what offers, colors, layouts or other elements drive higher responses, make changes.
The beauty of a landing page promotional offer is that it can be quickly modified if one test element works better than another.
Multiple campaigns will generate significant consumer and sales data that will have an impact on the way you do business
Helpful Hint:
As omnichannel marketing strategies become more prevalent it will be imperative that every sales promotional, and potentially every marketing campaign have a dedicated landing page. Start planning now so that you can collect data towards creating a future that places your brand smack in the middle of consumer search patterns using a landing page strategy.
