One of the questions that come up when I am teaching my Supercharge Membership about building their email list regarding the difference between a landing page and a website.

If you have an email sign-up form on your website, why does having a landing page even matter? Can’t you just direct your users to your website homepage and get them to sign-up to your email list that way?

Same principle for if you’re running Facebook Ads – what’s wrong with directing users to your homepage? Why do you need a landing page…surely your homepage is the landing page?

I’m going to provide you with a clear definition of both in this post and explain why you DO need a landing page if you are looking to build your email list with online marketing tactics.

The key difference between a landing page and a homepage

So here’s the thing…they’re BOTH websites, it’s just that consists of one page (usually) – the landing page and your website (should) have two or more pages.

Your website should act as a collection of all of the different parts of your business: an ‘about’ page, a ‘services’ page, ‘pricing’ or your products and a ‘contact’ page at the very least. It’s meant to be browsed and your homepage should be the starting point to that journey for your website visitor.

A landing page has a very specific action.

Quite often it’s to sign-up to an offer or an email list or any other marketing goal.

You may need to spend money or a significant amount of time driving a user to convert to a customer or an email list subscriber and so landing page were designed to ensure that the user doesn’t click elsewhere about the page.

Their eye should be trained to focus on the one thing.

If you are running some sort of campaign to generate more leads, sell more products or build your email list then you’ll need to ensure that you don’t waste your time and energy and get your users to stay and convert.

Different ways to use landing pages

Email List Building

Typically you will see that email list building campaigns will use a landing page, rather than direct you to a page on a website.

This means that they can accompany the sign-up form with a headline and a CTA button (more on that here) plus add features and benefits for joining the list.

You may be giving away a lead magnet to entice users to sign-up, so showing a picture of said lead magnet can help to build the trust that your lead magnet is real and adding testimonials throughout the page can help provide the back-up that what you’re giving away for free works.

In the examples below you can see that the eye is drawn to the headline and to the call to action button at the top of the page.

Sell a Product

If you already have an online store, you might wonder why having landing page for any one product is a good use of your time and energy.

However it’s worth considering if you have a signature product or a promotional product that you want to sell via an email or advertising campaign.

The difference between sending users to your homepage versus sending them to a dedicated page where it can answers all of their concerns and objections is all about time (i.e the time it takes them to convert).

On your website you’re asking your customers to go and find your product or be tempted to look at other products or pages.

With a landing page you focus their direction to take an action.

You can’t even see this particular product on the homepage, so if you were to drive the Facebook user there you’d need to then direct them to the product page. Not a great user experience.

Why conversion should matter to you

So hopefully you’re starting to see the benefit of why you would need a landing page alongside your website.

It means that you can truly measure the effectiveness of the page if there is a dedicated campaign driving traffic to it.

There will be no other temptations on the page to draw the user away and you can then address the issues which can deter users from buying or converting.

This means focuses on writing better headlines and crafting better calls to actions on your landing pages.

You can experiment in a way that you can’t on your homepage with different images and placement of those images around the page.

Maybe try including a video and see if you can answer objections and show off your personality at the same time?

A different colour button?

The point is that you are giving yourself a testbed to test your campaign in a way that you cannot measure if you were using your website homepage

If you want to see my free 5-Day Challenge landing page in action, then check it out right here: https://superchargeyourwebsite.com/5-day-challenge