I'm always amazed at how little landing pages ar ebrought up in dialogue with even experienced Marketing Managers. Perhaps its because of their relative youth.
Actually, I had a good question the other day from a client who wants to optimise their landing page.; "What if they want to browse the rest of my site and find out info about my company etc".
I don't blame her - a lot of Landing and Name Squeeze strategies reccommend NOT having any top navigation etc. Isn't that the point - to focus the user. Still good question which I have not fully resolved.
Dave?
Good point Peter. In general, you can increase the conversion rate of your landing page by anywhere up to 50% (yes, I have seen it) by "removing" your navigation but I don't remove it completely. I am almost certain that one of the factors leading to a good quality score is having navigation links in the landing page. After all, if I am going to buy something, I want to know a little about the company, staff etc.
The best way I have found to do this is to take the navigation "out of the flow" of your message. Usually, this means the footer. It's a nice compromise. Another way I have been successful in making this work is have the navigation linked pages "pop up" in a new window.
You just have to test what works best for you.
When it comes to checkout, it is 100% appropriate to remove navigation COMPLETELY. This is an absolute must.
If you are interested in landing page optimization, I am currently doing the landing page course on marketing experiments. It's expensive but worth ten times the price of the course. It's pretty advanced stuff but any designer who completes it and understands it is destined to make a LOT of money. I'd gladly hire a designer at 3 times their yearly rate if they understood landing page optimization. Most designers learn their basic design principles from college or whatever and most of it applies to print media where the closest thing to landing page design comes in the form of formatting direct mail promotions. Most of the selling is done with the words in the mailing anyway so design has little to do with it (apart from colour of course).
It's a VERY complex subject but very VERY interesting. You can relate a lot of it to yourself and you notice a well optimized landing page when you come to it. Not that it matters, but I prefer buying from a company with an optimized landing page and sales funnel. It shows they are serious.
Many companies are only coming online now, let alone testing and experimenting. Believe me, there are a LOT of opportunities out there for those willing to spend to test. If I had have known two years ago what I know now, I certainly wouldn't be in the business I am in.
