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A Best Practices Guide
SUCCESSFUL
LANDING PAGES

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Executive Summary
Keep Pages Clean And Branded
Keep Forms Short
Use Limited Links
Feature Valuable Content
Utilize Tracked Emails
Use Progressive Profiling
Test Your Landing Pages
Conclusion
Successful Landing Pages

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01
Landing pages are often the de facto
site for these conversions, making their
optimization crucial to the sales and
marketing process. There are four distinct
groups of people that are interacting with
your landing pages (check out Figure 01.):
1. Visitors that leave within 10 seconds of
arriving at your landing page make up the
vast majority of viewers.
2. Visitors that leave when they decide
your landing page is not compelling are
the next largest segment.
3. Some visitors attempt to fill out your
form but fail or give up and then drop off.
4. A small percentage of your visitors
successfully convert and become leads.
As the four groups illustrate, you have
a very limited time window in which you
need to showcase your value proposition.
The tips that follow will help you learn how
to boost the effectiveness of your landing
pages and raise the number and quality
of your B2B conversions. Some of these
steps are simple best practices and others
are made possible by recently developed
web technologies, but all will contribute
directly to your online lead generation
program.
For B2B marketers, the sales process really heats up at conversion.
You need to design and optimize every aspect of your landing pages
to maximize your visitor conversions.
Executive Summary
Figure 01. Breakdown of landing page
visitors.
Leave within
10 seconds.
Decide your page
is not compelling.
Attempt form.
Successfully
convert.

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As with all elements of your marketing
campaign, your landing pages should
match your brand. This not only helps
develop your position in the market, but
also appears legitimate and trustworthy to
visitors who may already be familiar with
your brand image.
You don’t want to send your site visitors
to a page that will leave them wondering
where your link has taken them. They
should know your landing page is a
part of your website at a glance and
understand what it is offering just as fast.
This consistent user experience reduces
the friction between users and conversion
points to help convert more visitors to
leads.
It is also important to keep your landing
page simple and closely related to the
keywordoremailcampaignthatisdirecting
your visitors. This way your prospects will
be handed the targeted information they
are looking for and you are more likely
to capture their interest. Overwhelming
visitors with too much information about
your company can distract them and
prevent them from following through.
Try to stick to the 1-1-1 rule for landing
pages: Your landing page should have 1
call to action, 1 value proposition, and 1
form. This will help you keep your page
simple and easy to navigate.
Maintain the look and feel of your product or company across your
website and landing pages to create a consistent user experience and
build familiarity with your brand.
02Keep Pages Clean And
Branded
They should know your landing page is a part of your
website at a glance and understand what it is offering.

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Though visitors looking to download
your valuable content have become
accustomed to filling out forms, a long form
can still be intimidating and cause visitors
to abandon your page. Remember, their
time is valuable, and you should treat it
that way.
A short, easy to complete form will be
especially appealing to visitors who
aren’t fully committed to obtaining your
information; perhaps they received an
email that mildly interested them and
clicked on a link, therefore you only have a
very short amount of time to convert them
when they arrive at your page. Don’t worry
about collecting all the data you need on
the first pass – stick to the essentials.
B2B sales are typically multi-touch and
complex, rather than instantaneous,
impulse buys. Because there is a long
sales cycle, marketers can flesh out
a prospect’s profile over time as each
touch point provides an opportunity
to collect more data. A solution called
progressive profiling uses what are known
as conditional fields to ask for just one or
two data points during each interaction
and gradually build an in-depth prospect
profile. This lessens the burden on
prospects while still collecting the valuable
information that the marketing and sales
teams need to move forward.
In many cases, all you really need is
the prospect’s name, email address,
and perhaps job title or company at the
first conversion point. More detailed
information can follow in later forms.
No matter how compelling your landing page offer, you can still
scare visitors away from converting with a long form demanding
lots of information.
03Keep Forms Short
A short, easy to complete form will be especially
appealing to visitors who aren’t fully committed.

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The most effective landing pages are
those that reflect the look and feel of your
website, but do not allow for navigation
to your actual home page. Prospects can
easily get distracted and click away from
your landing page, preventing you from
collecting information that is beneficial in
crafting your sales messages. It is more
appropriate to place links in the “thank
you content” on your landing page, so
they are only accessible after the form is
completed.
You certainly don’t want to trap visitors
on your page as this will only service to
frustrate them. Nobody likes to feel as if
their hand is being forced. You do however,
want to limit the number of navigation
options you provide. You should reduce
your top menu bar to only one or two
options and make your form a prominent
part of the page.
Once your visitor has converted, you have
an opportunity to drive them to additional
content or specific sections within your
site. Once a form has completed, you can
display links to additional, relevant content
to keep your visitors on your site.
Once you’ve driven prospects to your page, you want to take every
opportunity to keep them there to convert. Be cautious about the
links and navigation you are providing on your landing pages.
04Use Limited Links
Prospects can easily get distracted and click away
from your landing page.

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In order to keep visitors interested and
your reputation intact, it is essential that
you only use forms and landing pages
to promote items of value to your target
audience. When potential customers put
forth that extra energy to fill out a form
on your site, they should be provided
with quality content. It is also suggested
that you leave some amount of content
freely accessible on your site (as opposed
to “locked down” with a form) in order
to demonstrate the type of materials a
prospect can expect.
Another idea is to use landing pages to
promote special offers, only accessible
through your pay-per-click (PPC)
advertisements or email blasts. This
gives an air of exclusivity and tells your
prospects to act quickly to cash in on this
valuable offer. These are both powerful
psychological triggers that can yield
impressive reactions. It will act as an
instant reward for those who complete
the form and reinforce the fact that you
appreciate their interest in your product or
service.
In order to attract a wider variety of
potential clients, you should use landing
pages and forms to provide a variety of
different pieces of content, including white
papers, product trials, and contact forms.
This will help you collect information from
prospects in all different stages of the
buying process.
Content should entice visitors by promising real, actionable value,
and delivering on that promise. Consumers are picky and only the
best content can motivate conversions.
Feature Valuable
Content
You should use landing pages and forms to provide a
variety of different pieces of content.

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Typically, landing pages act to provide
some form of content to those who
complete a form. This can be done in a
few ways:
• Prospects can be redirected to the
requested content
• The content can be loaded in the
“thank you message” for a smoother
transition
• The content can be sent to prospects
as a link in a tracked email
Of these options, the most advantageous
is to present the content in a tracked
email. Using a program that monitors
visitor activity on your site, you will be
able to see if the prospect opened the
email, clicked on the link and how much
time the prospect spent reviewing your
content. This also brings your prospects
back to your website and gives you the
opportunity to view what other activities
they may perform while browsing.
Many form builders allow you to set up
an autoresponder email, making it easy
to send out instant, personalized emails
containing tracked links that direct leads
to the requested content.
Sending emails also allows you to weed
out prospects that may not be serious
by determining if they provided a false
email address. You can set your forms to
automatically validate a provided email
address in real time, to make sure all
conversions have a valid business email.
Don’t lose track of your prospects after a form is completed. Make
use of emails and tracked links when providing content to gather
further data on a converted visitor.
Utilize Tracked Emails

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Once your prospects have completed the
form, you are ready to help them navigate
away from your landing page and deeper
into your site. It is often effective to offer
links to additional white papers or content
that is similar to what they requested. This
way you can keep them on your website.
Progressive profiling is a way of
collecting additional data points from your
prospects. When you create your form,
you designate secondary fields, called
conditional fields, which will only appear
if the prospect has completed your basic
form. This allows you to obtain a few data
points at a time without burdening your
visitors with lengthy forms. You can slowly
build a customer profile – and “cookied”
users will receive new fields to complete
on each return visit to your pages.
You set up the same form for all of your
white papers, flash demos, and live
demo requests, but you set them up to
intelligently display only the fields that
you are missing for a given prospect. Your
marketing automation software identifies
your prospects and remembers what
information they have already given you.
Even the most compelling landing page
can scare visitors away with a form that
asks for too much information too fast.
Progressive profiling allows you to build
your relationship with a prospect naturally
over time.
07Redirect your prospects strategically to gain more information with
progressive profiling. Build your prospect profile naturally over time
with conditional form fields that never ask the same question twice.
Use Progressive
Profiling
This allows you to obtain a few data points at a time
without burdening your visitors with lengthy forms.

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The one great truth about landing pages
is that you can always improve upon them
through testing. If you aren’t getting much
traffic, stick with A/B testing and examine
two different designs. If you are getting a
significant amount of visitors to your site,
try multivariate testing instead.
Assign an equal distribution of traffic to
your variations, evaluate after a week
or two, and pick the winner based on
conversion rate. Don’t rest on your laurels
though. A landing page can always be
made more effective.
At a loss for things to test? Try a few of the
following variables:
• Headline: keep it short and compelling;
the headline should describe an
immediate benefit to the reader
• Offer: experiment with white papers,
demos, free consultations, and more
• Imagery: try a shot of your white paper
cover, an internal page, or a screen
shot of your demo
• Length of form: though you always
want to keep forms short, experiment
to see how long is too long
• Form fields: try department vs. job
title, making phone number optional,
drop downs vs. free text.
Although testing can be difficult to do
manually, many marketing automation
solutions can make complex tests a
breeze, automatically assigning traffic to
each of your page designs and reporting
on the results.
Continuously improving your landing pages through multivariate
testing is key to maximizing conversions, and marketing automation
platforms can do this testing for you.
08Test Your Landing
Pages

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09Conclusion
Good landing page design is crucial to converting site visitors into
leads. Creating landing pages that truly deliver results is easy with
the proper strategy and planning.
With only seconds to convert visitors into
prospects, it is essential that you create
compelling and strategic landing pages
for your campaigns.
By making your landing pages easy
to understand and complete, you will
successfully gain valuable data on
your prospects. To continue building a
customer profile, your pages should nudge
along prospects using related links and
conditional fields. Providing truly valuable
content will keep your leads coming back
for more.
A strategic plan to well designed and
optimized landing pages can yield
staggering results for your marketing
department. This white paper has given
you the tools you need, now get started!
Pardot offers a best-in-class marketing
automation platform that manages
prospect interactions such as site visits,
email, forms, and more. The on-demand
suite solves the integration challenges
faced by B2B marketers by allowing
control of once disparate online and offline
marketing tools in one central interface.
Tel: 877.3.B2B.ROI
Tel: 404.492.6845
Online: www.pardot.com
Pardot LLC
950 East Paces Ferry Rd
Suite 3300
Atlanta, GA 30326
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