As an integrated marketer, responsible for driving enquiries and year on year sales increases, with so many tracking and reporting mechanisms at my fingertips it is important to use what I can to generate better enquiries and a better customer experience.

Inexperienced marketers will point campaigns to a current page on the website, or worse still, to the home page.

Landing pages make a large difference to customer experience and enquiry quality to the point that no campaign should go live without one, or several.

1. Better customer service

For customers, this is the holy grail – so it should be for marketers too.  They have clicked on an ad for a reason – don’t make them hunt the product or service out by plonking them on the home page.

If they clicked an ad for women’s party dresses, send them instead to a filter collection of party dresses.

If they want left-handed golf clubs, send them to a landing page highlighting how special your range of left-handed golf clubs are with links to the products.

Make it easy for your customer to move from search, to ad click to engagement or purchase.  It is the equivalent of locating the product they saw on a mannequin, near that same mannequin, to make it easy for them to grab and buy.

2. More information to help you next time round

If everyone lands on the home page, it is hard to gather useful data to make your marketing and advertising campaigns more effective.  But if you send them to landing pages you can measure the success of those landing pages for that customer segment or the campaign.

You can then also track where they went after the landing page.  Perhaps you need to change up your landing page to include that content if 50% of people went there?  Or change the landing page to that new destination?  Using landing pages will give you this sort of information, and more.

3. Increased conversion rate

This is linked to the first point – if you are delivering the right content to the right customer they are more likely to purchase or engage.  If they have to hunt out their product or service, they have increased chance of disengaging, ‘it’s all too hard’.  You can increase your conversion rate, and decrease your cost per acquisition by using landing pages.

4. Increased customer retention

By demonstrating to your customers that you know them, you make it an easy choice for them to come back and continue to purchase or engage.  We all know it is better to keep an existing customer than go to the expense of acquiring a new one.

5. Tracking for remarketing purposes

If your customer hasn’t purchased on the initial visit, fear not!  A specific landing page means that you can customise your remarketing for this audience, again increasing your chance of conversion.

The more data you have to hand, the better your remarketing will be and the more cost effective it will become.  By using landing pages and the data gleaned from their use I decreased the cost of our remarketing from an average for $0.70/click to $0.38/click.  More bang, less buck.

If you aren’t convinced by the need for landing pages yet, I would suggest talking to your customers – they will quickly convert you to the benefits of tailored information for segment and campaign.

Happy building!

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.