Pujji like Gucci

I often hold off posting my random observations because they are frequent and of varying excellence (usually marginal). But after quickly starting to knock the following out to the online crew at work, I thought, maybe I should post this one here instead/as well. So here goes, nothing huge, just a minor provocation for any dinosaurs amongst the pack:

What the hell is a landing page? For those who don’t get it.

I won’t get into the semantics about the difference between landing ‘pages’ and landing ‘experiences’, but after getting an email today and seeing that the email had been sent using a list-management service, I typed the URL of the tracking link into my browser to see how good the service was (I’m always on the look-out) and:

• http://list-manage.com/, which was the relevant bit of the URL I was looking into, redirected me to: 
• http://www.mailchimp.com/mcsv.phtml 

Now clearly someone at MailChimp thought about creating a landing, and indeed ‘conversion’ experience for people exactly like me. So that’s what a landing page is if you didn’t know.

That’s a great example of when you might use one. And an example which makes it easy to see how they often don’t exist, and get overlooked in ‘one site fits all’ architectures that presume all users will start their visit from the main home page, or top level section page. This is also a good example of how landing pages are useful in situations other than for hand-shaking a visitor who arrived from a TVC, or Direct campaign.

Folks like this make an art out of this: Do you care?

Here’s an example of why planning these things requires some thought:

The almost identical service provider I currently use, Campaign Monitor (which is in my opinion one of the best) hasn’t done the same thing. They do much the same stuff and also sell their service as a ‘white label’ service, which means they really try to stay hidden from the end-recipient throughout the experience. From this they’ve taken the view that if someone is snooping at the URL, that they should still not reveal themselves (since they should be hidden), and since they can’t tell which user account this visit has originated from anyway (if a user like me has stripped the URL to the basic domain only) they do this:

• See “createsend dot com” (one of their base service/discrete URLs which are used in the emails they send, I’ve not linked it so as to not interfere with their search associations)

Which approach is better? Are they both perfect considering their subtle differences in offer? What are your examples? I love this stuff.

Sorry if it nearly bored you to death (Gibbo).

Update: Un-linked the Campaign monitor URL