Landing Page Optimization | How are Landing Pages Used?

Landing page optimization and landing pages or email opt-in pages are used to gather a list of emails of people who are interested in your niche. Landing pages are not to be confused with what some marketers refer to as a webpage linked off of a banner ad, email, or search result trying to sell something.

You’ve seen it before, those web pages that offer you a free download, wallpaper, e-book, a free entry into a sweepstakes, contest, and drawing. -- all in exchange for your name and email address.

Let’s break it down on how exactly landing pages are used:

1. You search on a search engine like Yahoo, Google, or Bing for, let’s say, bowling.

2. You click on one of the results from the search and it takes you to a landing page.

3. This bowling webpage offers you a free e-book on tips from professionals on how to bowl a perfect game. And all you have to do is give them your email address.

4. Of course you’d want to know how to bowl a perfect game and who better to teach you than professionals? You enter in your email address.

5. As promised, the site administrator sends over the e-book instantly through an autoresponder (an email sending service).

6. A few days later you may receive an email from that site about what you think about the ebook. The site administrator may be trying to sell you more information on bowling because they know you are interested in it.

That's a quick break down about how your landing page would work well with landing page optimization.

That’s a great example on how landing pages work. If that person does decide to purchase something, the landing page marketer then has a customer that he can sell to. The importance of how relevant the email is makes all the difference. If someone who hates bowling stumbled on the page on accident and was searching for 300 the movie instead of bowling a perfect 300, they wouldn’t want to enter in their email address. Even if they did, that email would be useless to the marketer because that person has no interest in bowling. Keep that example in mind when doing your landing page optimization.

So it makes the difference what you offer to your visitors. You wouldn’t offer a cookbook on how to steam the best clams. Because although there may be some people who are into seafood and bowling, those two are not directly related and your chances will be slimmer than if you offered something more similar like bowling ball cleaning supplies.

In layman’s terms, that’s how landing pages are used – to collect targeted email addresses and then sell to them targeted products or services.