Landing Pages

3:46 PM

In this first post I will look at Landing Pages and their importance to the nonprofit sector when implementing fundraising campaigns.

What is a landing page? A landing page is the first page a visitor arrives at on your website based on a specific marketing effort.  When driving traffic to your website in a specific marketing campaign, a nonprofit fundraising effort for example, a landing page will allow visitors to quickly take action without having to search around through your website. By effectively using a landing page, the nonprofit creates a single page for visitors to learn about the company, a specific project or campaign and a place to immediately take action.

A landing page is used to elicit an immediate action that addresses a marketing goal. They are clean and simple while conveying the specifics of the requested action and goal.

Elements of an effective landing page:
          • A call to action form
          • Simplicity in design
          • Images that support the goal


In this Charity Water example, the background image tells the story and provides information on where the donation is going. The page title states the request, "Donate" and the goal, "Give Clean Water." The page includes a donation form that also states that 100% of the donation funds go towards the project.

In a case study conducted by ArcStone, simplifying one non-profit’s landing page (along with some AdWords optimization) resulted in a 178% increase in conversions.” (Vrountas, T. (2016)
  
If your organization is soliciting donations, tell them clearly and simply, where the money is going. Charity Water is genius for their transparency with the 100% donation concept in separating their financial accounts so that 100% of all donations go directly to the project. All administration and support costs are pulled from a separate account that gets funding from other sources.

Charity Water goes beyond the "campaign landing page" by providing a template landing page for their supporters to create their own campaign.

"The Benefits of Online Fundraising
Though online gifts still only constitute a small piece of the overall pie, that piece is getting thicker and thicker. M+R's 2015 Benchmark Study of 83 nonprofits measured an average 13% increase in online revenue in 2014. Recurring monthly donations shot up 32% as nonprofits placed emphasis on building monthly giving options into their messaging and site design." (Guengerich, 2015)

Measuring the Results:

Using the landing page as a place for measurement is considered a “Visit Characterization.” Google Analytics is able to track the source of visitors to the landing page, the number of visitors, the average time they spent on the page, the the number of new visitors, and the bounce rate. Bounce rate is often related to poor keywords and phrases where search results bring someone to the site where they discover your site wasn't in fact, what they were looking for.

After creating a Google Analytics account, set up a goal to define your measurement criteria.   



The goal in this example would be to measure the sources that drive traffic to the landing page. The campaign may have included social media or email marketing that included links to the specific landing page.




The landing page report provides a wealth of information that can address issues on the page itself, issues with sources and SEO as well as provide insight into the visitor behavior.

Understanding where the traffic to the site is coming from helps organizations determine the best sources for their marketing efforts and can determine future integrative marketing campaign channels.

Marketing campaigns also include offline promotions in print or tv, such as a coupon or call to action message, “visit,” “get involved,” “donate now.” In setting up the source tracking information for these types of nonline promotions, digital marketing expert, Avinash Kaushik recommends using the following:

“1) using easy to remember vanity urls and
2) ensuring these vanity urls are permanent redirects and that
3) they are encoded with the correct tracking parameters (version of the ad, name of the magazine, location of the billboard, offer in the radio ad, etc etc).” (Kaushik, 2008)

The benefit of using landing pages has been proven to increase conversions. Conversions are the actions taken that results in meeting the goal you have established, whether that is signing up for email or making a donation.

In the next post, I’ll discuss the measurement of conversion rate which will help us to determine the most successful source of traffic to the landing page and where we should focus our efforts.  Click here to read more.

Resources: 

Vrountas, T. (2016, September 21). 4 Ways to Make Your Non-Profit Landing Pages Instill Donor Confidence. Instapage.com. Retrieved by https://instapage.com/blog/non-profit-landing-pages

Guengerich, G. (2015, October 27). Online Fundraising. Upleaf.com. Retrieved from
https://upleaf.com/nonprofit-resources/online-fundraising 






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