The Best Landing Page Formats for Lead-Gen Campaigns
If you’ve arrived at this blog post, chances are you have a product you’re trying to promote. Maybe your company and product are new, and you’re just now planning your website’s look and feel. Or maybe you’re adding an existing product to your company’s website, and you’re deciding the best way to approach your landing page design. Either way, we want to help you choose the best type of lead-gen landing page for your specific goals.
For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll focus exclusively on lead-gen landing pages and won’t go into sales pages, e-commerce, or content pages. So, let’s dive right into it: here two of the most effective landing pages for lead generation, and our thoughts on which verticals are the best fit for each type.
Squeeze page
Stage of the Customer Journey: Top of funnel
Most Applicable For: Content, subscription services
Squeeze pages are one of the most straightforward and commonly used formats for lead-gen. These pages – which often look like a popup box – prompt the visitor to provide their email address to access content like an article, or to get a free e-book, podcast or white paper.
There are a few benefits to using squeeze pages. First, they tend to be light on text and heavy on images. That means you don’t need to spend too much time writing copy. And because squeeze pages are designed to reduce as much friction as possible, they’re easy for visitors to understand at a glance. This easy readability means that you can get superb conversion rates with squeeze pages – that is, if they’re well designed with a clear value proposition.
Squeeze pages are also quite flexible since you can choose exactly how to engage with your customers depending on your marketing goals. Does your marketing funnel rely on newsletter signups? Or maybe you want visitors to download a free e-book now, and later on purchase another book at full price. Tons of different top-funnel marketing goals can be addressed with squeeze pages.
Finally, squeeze pages allow for creative expression. There are no fixed designs or locked-in sizes for squeeze pages. You can go all-out on wild, innovate designs. Some squeeze pages even include built-in surveys to help increase user engagement. Nothing is off the table.
That being said, squeeze pages aren’t a cure-all for all your lead-gen needs. By design, they interrupt the customer journey by acting as a gatekeeper before the customer can access your content. And the fact that squeeze pages are light on text means that you won’t have an opportunity to flesh out a narrative for your product. These are important trade-offs that you’ll need to think through carefully about before committing to a squeeze page.
Lead Capture Page
Stage of the Customer Journey: Mid-funnel
Most Applicable For: Subscription services, insurance, SAAS services
Lead capture pages are probably the most common type of lead-gen landing page, because they sit squarely in the middle of the marketing funnel and can be designed for a wide variety of different products and services.
What sets apart lead capture pages from squeeze pages? The biggest difference is that they have more real estate; they are not constrained to a small popup window and thus allow marketers a lot of flexibility.
First and foremost, more real estate allows more space for marketing copy, images and video. This means more breathing room to put together a compelling narrative for your product. Secondly, because you can put together a great narrative and sales pitch, you can also request more information from your customers, such as their email address, name, phone number and company name.
Of course, getting so much information from someone who’s a complete newcomer to your product is no easy task. That’s why you should design your lead capture pages to retarget existing, top-funnel leads, with the goal of moving them further down the marketing funnel.
Lead capture pages aren’t without their shortcomings. If you want people to relinquish a lot of their personal contact info, you need to make sure you have a very compelling sales pitch. Furthermore, lead capture pages work best when you’re retargeting a specific customer segment that you’re confident will convert.
Lead capture pages are just one step away from sales pages. Sales pages are bottom-funnel landing pages with a completely fleshed out sales pitch, including a purchase or add to cart link at the bottom. These pages aren’t interested in lead generation – they’re focused on closing sales, plain and simple.
As you’re browsing the web today, take note of the various squeeze pages and lead capture pages that you encounter. See which ones are piquing your interest, and which are total turnoffs. Take those learnings back to your team and get prepped for your next campaign!