Every offer made online through email, social media, ads, or sponsored links should direct people to a webpage on your site dedicated to that offer.  These landing pages are a tried and true best practice because if people land on a page that doesn’t reinforce the offer they were interested in, confusion and abandonment multiply.  However, good landing pages bring additional reasons for recipients to take advantage of an offer.

Your online target audience is looking for reasons not to take advantage of your offer.  And with good reason, there are so many opportunities and promotions online that we tend to have a strict filter.  There simply isn’t enough time in the day to keep up with every marketing message we encounter online.  So your landing page needs to reinforce the benefit of completing the offer.

The problem is that many landing pages repeat information rather than build on it.  How is this done? Many landing pages just repeat the initial marketing message.  For example, it’s not uncommon to receive an email marketing communication, click on the offer link, and find the exact same info and layout but with a form at the bottom.  Sometimes this is done strategically like if the page has a promotional video that couldn’t be delivered directly via email.  Many times, however, it’s done because it’s quicker to copy and paste the information than to build a custom landing page.

It’s a good idea to use some formatting and content from your online promotions to create consistency.  It’s a bad idea to copy it verbatim with no additional selling points.

The reason is that you usually don’t need to repeat yourself.  Some people will be very motivated to take advantage of your promotion.  They won’t look at your landing page and complete it as long as they clearly see the offer is the same.  Reinforcing the offer on the landing page is for the group of people who are interested but not quite convinced.  Repeating what they already saw is a poor way to convince them to complete the offer.  The landing page should have additional information about the offer that highlights subsequent or additional advantages.

There are a lot of schools of thought on landing page effectiveness and optimization.  Only two rules apply to everyone.  Your landing page needs to have a single focus of getting visitors to complete the offer and tests should be run to improve results.  Beyond that you are free to customize your content and layout.  Use that freedom to build a page that reinforces the promotions done for the offer.  Reinforce the offer with additional benefits and more in depth information so that people that need to know more to complete a landing page conversion are reassured to do so.