It’s Time to Break Up With Landing Pages
While many spend the weeks and days leading up to Thanksgiving pulling out old recipes and gearing up to answer family members’ uncomfortable questions, those in long-term relationships have something else to prepare for— the "turkey drop". Although the term is most commonly associated with college freshman ditching their high school sweethearts around holiday time, all long-term relationships get put to the test during the holiday season.
When it comes time to RSVP to your family’s Thanksgiving celebration you’ve got to ask some tough questions—is she Mrs. Right, or Mrs. Right Now? Are they the one, or one of many? And while we wish you and yours nothing but the best as you consider these gut-wrenching and at times life-changing questions…we do have one request:
PLEASE break up with landing pages.
That’s right, we’re calling for a mass turkey drop of landing page-driven website personalization strategies! We know that you thought your relationship with landing pages would just be a fling until your engineers got around to updating your base website for you…but now it’s been a while and you deserve better!
Keep reading to learn why when it comes to landing pages, it’s them not you.
When a visitor comes to your website for the first time you must make a great first impression. Because of this, it’s only natural that you’d want to create a personalized customer experience from the start. While it can be tempting to create landing pages to give each visitor a unique experience without having to ask your engineering team for help, this can lead to other problems down the road.
Here’s why—when using landing pages to give visitors differentiated experiences you’re likely to end up with a cumbersome archive of pages that need to be updated individually. More than that, to create a unique landing page you’ll need to make design and content choices based on assumptions about the segment of visitors you intend to show the page to. The likelihood that these choices will resonate with most, let alone all of the folks within that segment is slim. This means landing pages lead to countless missed opportunities for conversions.
That’s why it’s time to invest in software that enables you to programmatically update your base website instead of just settling for the old landing page workaround. In doing so you’ll be able to create 1:1 personalization and eliminate your graveyard of old landing pages. The right CRO software will dynamically show each visitor a variation of your website that’s right for them based on real-time data. More than that, a platform like Intellimize allows you to do all of this without asking for help from your engineers. Wahoo!
But, enough about us—let’s get back to your soon-to-be-ex, landing pages.
Sometimes when deciding whether or not to end a relationship, it’s important to look down the road ahead to see if the future is what you had in mind. We recommend doing the same when it comes to a customer journey that begins with a landing page.
Let’s take a look into the crystal ball and imagine a scenario where every single one of the assumptions that inform your landing pages are correct for each visitor. As such, your site visitors are eager to learn more about your brand and maybe even make a purchase! Unfortunately, even in this case, you’ll be met with a different problem.
That is, the moment visitors move on from the safety of your targeted landing page they’ll be met with your generic base website—one that reflects none of the personalization you have in place on your landing page. The base website may even look visually disparate from the landing page they initially found you through. Needless to say, this is not a great customer experience and can lead to confusion or even worse, distrust of your brand by visitors.
As we said before, it’s not your fault that you’ve been in a loveless relationship with landing pages for so long…it’s just that the technology you needed to personalize your base website without technical help wasn’t readily available. But, now it is, and you can do so much better!
This holiday season we encourage you to take a long and hard look at your website personalization strategy. Are the landing pages that once made your strategy easier to execute still supporting you the way they once did? Will they be there for you as more and more businesses adopt programmatic CRO strategies? If the answer to these questions is “no,” it’s time for a turkey drop.
We know that breaking up is hard to do, but it’s the right thing to do—for you, your team, and your site visitors.
