In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement. The page will usually display sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.

In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page can also be customized to compare the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can compare the click-through rates and Conversion rate to determine the most profitable advertisement.

There are two types of landing pages: reference and transactional.

A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links, or other elements. Reference landing pages are effective if they meet the objectives of their publishers, which may be associations, organizations or public service entities. For many reference landing pages, effectiveness can be measured by the revenue value of the advertising that is displayed on them.

A special type of ‘reference landing page’ is the ‘webvert’, the marketing goal focuses on lead generation and interaction with the visitor. A webvert is not ‘transactional’ in nature. A webvert is a reference based, ethical landing page. The webverts consists of an advert, designed on the AIDA principle.

The traffic is driven from Google Adwords and is designed for two specific marketingtactics:

1. To attain high Google Adwords landing page quality scores, the benefit being any Adwords campaign costs are minimized.

2. The webvert has a clear call to action, usually a reply form.

The visitor traffic is immediate as the Adword relies on Google advertising to drive visitors to the webvert.

A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. If information is to be captured, the page will usually withhold information until some minimal amount of visitor information is provided, typically an email address and perhaps a name and telephone number as well – enough to “capture the lead” and add the prospect to a mailing list.

A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is referred to as a conversion. The efficiency or quality of the landing page can be measured by its conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action. Since the economics of many online marketing programs are determined by the conversion rate, marketers constantly test alternatives and improvements to their landing pages. Some of the testing methods used are A/B testing and multivariate testing.

There is also a third landing page apart from these two above mentioned which is commonly used in Direct Marketing, Squeeze Page. These web pages are very targeted and focus on capturing information about a visitor. These pages have a very high conversion rate and these collect data for an upcoming targeted e-mail or direct contact campaigns.

Users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in strong contrast to studies of website usability, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality. Even a website that you visit daily will feel like a tool where you simply want to get in and get out.

The positive emotional aspect of newsletters is that they can create much more of a bond between user and companythan a website can. The negative aspect is that usability problems have much stronger impact on the customer relationship than they normally do.

Users spend 51 seconds reading the average newsletter. The layout and writing both need superb usability to survive in the high-pressure environment of a crowded inbox.

Averaged across our study, newsletters lost 19% of potential subscribers due to usability difficulties in their subscription processes and designs. People often stay subscribed to newsletters they don’t want (cursing the sender with every new issue that clutters their inbox), so the unsubscribe process is also worth improving.

Newsletters need to be smooth and easy: they must be seen to reduce the burdens of modern life. Even if free, the cost in e-mail clutter must be paid for by being helpful and relevant to users – and by communicating these benefits in a few characters in the subject line.