Here’s the scenario:

Your organization has a special upcoming event or a new Exhibit announcement. Naturally, you want to attract people to the event and have them buy tickets. But more than that, you want them to become members.

So, you make an announcement on Facebook about the event; you include it in your e-newsletter; and you send out a direct mail piece. You even take out an online ad. Your communications include a direct link to your website where visitors can register and, hopefully, buy a membership in the process. Thanks to your efforts, you later notice increased traffic to your website—yay! 

Don’t celebrate so fast.

Odds are, once people come to your website, that’s the end of the road. Why? Because your website has distractions that can direct people away from taking your desired action. 

Consider it from your visitor’s perspective:

“Golly jeepers,” your visitor is thinking. “It says ‘Photo Gallery’ on the menu bar. That looks interesting!”

Next thing you know, said visitor is scrolling through your photo gallery. Can you blame her? Words are boring compared to colorful, engaging photos.

That’s not all. Your menu bar lists your organization’s various programs.

“Those summer camps look perfect for Sally and Peter!” muses your visitor. Now she’s perusing you camp offerings. That’s good, but it’s not what you wanted her to do in this instance. 

After a minute or two, your visitor is completely distracted; she’s navigating around the website and clicking through whatever strikes her fancy. Her phone buzzes. She stops to read a text message. She returns to your website, but by this time she has totally forgotten why she came in the first place.

What can you do to keep visitors focused? Simple: Build a Landing page. Landing pages are designed for one purpose and one purpose only—to get people to perform a specific action.

How it works

Let’s revisit the hypothetical scenario from above. Imagine a museum has a special exhibit on Egyptian mummies. The museum hopes to sell tickets for the event and get new members.

Toward that end, you send a branded email to your subscribers about the upcoming exhibit, which includes a distinct eye-catching design that shows an image of a mummy. When people read the email and click through, they’re taken to a Web page that has the same look and feel of the email design, as well as the museum’s website page that advertises the special exhibit. This assures prospects they’ve landed in the right place.

This is what’s key about a landing page: When people arrive, there are no photo galleries, links or information about other exhibits—no distractions. Visitors are limited to learning only about the special exhibit and are prompted to take one call to action—buy tickets. 

See what works for you

As you might have noticed, there are different ways to use landing pages depending on the type of nonprofit you’re running, what you’re promoting or what actions you want your visitors to take. Whatever your goals are, you should test different types of messages and designs to see what works best.

The key to a landing page: They have no photo galleries, links or other distracting info.
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Another thing to consider is tailoring your landing pages based on how people found out about your event. Somebody who clicked on a PPC ad or landed from a Tweet doesn’t know as much about the event than somebody who received an email. So, you’ll want to provide a relevant experience for each.

Finally, a landing page gives you a metric so you can focus on the ratio of landing page views to that of membership purchases and event registration. This will give you powerful insight to help improve your future marketing efforts.

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