Technically speaking, a pre-lander is a crisp one pager which prepares the visitors for what they can expect to see on the landing page of a website. The pre-lander, therefore, offers the visitors something attractive. This convinces them to go to the landing page. The main purpose of a pre-lander is to ensure better conversion rates. The actual offer would be on the landing page. But the visitor would get some interesting and attractive information on the pre-lander. This article provides you with lots of information that can help you create a pre-lander which has a good conversion rate.
What are the Advantages of a Pre-Lander?
• The visitor to a pre-lander page is primed to prepare him for what he can expect on a landing page. So if he has taken the option of going to the landing page, the chances are high that this visit count will not become another statistic on your website’s landing page.
• A pre-lander usually contains a specific actionable opportunity for the visitor.
• The visitor can quickly and simply get the most useful and pertinent information on a pre-lander page.
• A pre-lander helps the visitor to get a smooth transition to the actual website, instead of taking him directly to the landing page where he might get lost in a sea of information.
What are the Disadvantages of a Pre-Lander?
• If you are not an affiliate with loads of experience, you might find it difficult to set up an effective pre-lander, and might require professional help for it.
• The messaging on a pre-lander might not give you great success the first time, and you might need to carry out multiple iterations to get the page right.
• All merchants do not allow the use of pre-landing pages.
Important Elements in a pre-lander
The following are the important elements in a pre-lander:
• Content:
The pre-lander should have the perfect and precise content that will help to improve organic conversions on your landing page. If the content is not attractive enough, then the visitors might not go to the landing page at all.
And if the content is too hyped and talks about unrelated stuff which is not covered by your landing page, then you run the risk of getting penalized by the search engine algorithms.
• Images:
Apart from crisp and attractive text, it is a good idea to have a few attractive (but relevant) images on the pre-landing page as well. The necessity of using an image, as well as the choice of the image, would both depend on which industry you are in.
• Speed:
The best content and images in the world won’t help retain the visitors if the pre-lander takes anything more than 4-5 seconds to load completely, so while working on the text and images in the content, you also need to focus on designing the page in such a way that it doesn’t become too heavy.
• Testing:
All the effort you will make on creating a pre-lander might go to waste if the response from the visitors doesn’t match your expectations.
That is why a few test runs are a better idea before you launch your final pre-lander page. This is called A/B testing, and you can decide which of A or B versions of your page worked better.
• Actionable:
An effective pre-landing page is one that has a very precise and specific call to action so that you can get the visitor to do exactly what you need him to do. It could be a simple ‘click here’ or ‘submit’ or an invite to fill up a short form or a survey.
• Layout:
As we said at the beginning, a pre-lander is just a crisp preview of what the visitor can expect to see and experience on the landing page. Therefore, it should have an easy layout which doesn’t scare away visitors and prevents them from moving on to the landing page.
Types of Pre-Landers
There are the following five types of pre-landers:
1. Utilities:
You can offer a visitor the chance to improve the security of his system.
In these days of killer virus attacks, security is a prime concern for everyone, so a visitor would always be keen to find out how he can improve the performance and security of his system.
2. Sweepstakes:
These are great ideas to entice people who want to get a chance to win some prizes. The prizes offered would depend on your budget, but most pre-landers with sweepstakes offer some kind of useful gadget.
3. Dating:
This is one of the most common tools to entice visitors, and they get a chance to join a community where they can hope to find their perfect match.
In this age of Tinder, your content and database need to be very dependable.
4. Gaming:
This strategy is a proven winner, and can easily get visitors hooked.
But to ensure good page speeds, you will need to ensure that your hardware can handle the enhanced graphics that would be required for any game.
5. Cleanup:
Many pre-landers offer to increase speeds and generally improve the performance of your system. For the geeky visitors, these kinds of pre-landers are as attractive as the ones with utilities.
Wrap-Up:
It is true that pre-landers have received some bad press in the past. It is because their content and layout used to border on the unethical ways. But if done correctly, a good pre-landing page would really help improve the conversion rates for your affiliate campaign. It is for you to decide the correct one for your landing page and reap the benefits from it.
