Lead Generation Landing Pages – An example from the mortgage industry

In a previous post, we introduced the concept of homepages and spoke about how they are not necessarily the most visited page on any domain.

Toward the end of the article, I teased that the most important pages on a website were landing pages.

Landing pages are designed to funnel visitors towards a single action, rather than giving them the ability to “choose their own adventure.”

Ultimately online lead generation is all about generating contact information, so it’s up to the designers to coax visitors toward that ultimate event.

(This is in contrast to something more along the lines of branding. For example, Disney may be more interested in simply showing people trailers for their new movies with understanding that the ultimate conversion (buying a movie ticket) will likely occur offline.)

Let’s look at a quick example from the mortgage lead generation industry.

Here’s an example of the Quicken Loans homepage:

Lots of navigation and no real action required.

Now, here’s the page I was taken to when I clicked on a quicken loans advertisement on Google:

As you can see, it’s a very different experience. Rather than getting to decide what you want to do, you’re driven directly to accomplish one of two things:

• Call that phone number
• Fill out the information in the dropdowns and click “Get Started”

Either one of those unequivocally moves the visitor closer toward actually taking out a mortgage.

I didn’t go as far as to call that number, but two screens later, guess what was waiting for me as I filled out my information:

That’s right, a contact form.

In future posts, we’ll dig more into the theory behind what makes a good landing page, so take this as an introduction.

As you click around the web and research companies such as your customers, take a look at how they use landing pages.

You’d be surprised to find how ubiquitous they are.

And if you want to talk about your own landing page strategy, give us a shout!