What’s the best landing page for a health club, corporate wellness program, weight loss center or yoga studio? For a healthy lifestyle program or a women’s wellness center?
The right answer aligns your marketing campaign objective with your target customer’s buying process and position in your sales funnel, from very early to practically ready to get out the credit card.
What’s a landing page?
It’s wherever you send your prospect after they watch that Facebook video, click on that Google Ad, tap that email newsletter link, or visit the web address printed on a direct mail postcard.
It’s often a special page on your website — but not always. For example, if you’re running a lead campaign on Facebook with a “call us” button, the form interested people fill out and submit acts as the landing page.
What’s the purpose of a landing page?
Landing pages for medical practices, health clubs and other wellness businesses exist to provide enough information to get your prospective client, patient or member to follow through on your call to action — to actually take the next step.
The next step might be to schedule an appointment for a fitness assessment, drop in for a free tour and guest pass, complete a lifestyle self-assessment or make an immediate purchase of a yoga studio class pass or nutrition supplement.
[Read more about the best call to action for a health, fitness or wellness business.]
Standalone landing pages
These one-page landing pages are often hosted somewhere other than your medical practice or wellness center’s main website. They might be hosted on a subdomain, or they might even be located on a third-party website like Hubspot, Unbounce or Leadpages.
Standalone pages are traditionally very light on content. They often lack links to your main site altogether. Their goal is usually to have exactly what’s needed to get the prospect to convert — nothing more, nothing less. That usually just means a few quick bullets and a massive discount, all designed to get the prospect to BUY NOW!
Use pages like these with caution…or not at all. More and more, online advertising platforms cast a suspicious eye toward off-domain content or landing pages used by ads, and rightly so, because often such practices are a sign that a site isn’t selling what it says it is, but rather serving as a funneling device for some other product or service.
Moreover, as we discussed in our article on choosing the right call to action, many people are already cautious when they’re considering a health and wellness service. They’re not likely to jump into your lap on the basis of a single landing page.
Keep in mind that each prospect brings his or her own life experiences and approaches the buying process somewhat differently. Some prospects connect with emotionally-driven marketing messages, while others are very interested in specific program features or something else.
That makes it hard to design a landing page that actually works for everyone.
Sure, you can create multiple landing pages — but you’re also multiplying the effort to manage, update and analyze results from all those pages. It can get out of hand pretty quickly.
Opt-in lead capture pages
Lead capture pages are popular among health and wellness businesses. These pages typically offer a quid-pro-quo: you give us your contact info so we can market to you on our own timeline, in the ways we prefer. In exchange you get a complimentary e-book or some other freebie.
The problem with lead capture pages is that they throw up barriers to prospects who already know they want to explore more. You’re so insistent on forcing your prospect into your process that you risk overlooking or alienating people who are actually quite interested in what you offer.
These pages are usually “squeeze” pages — there’s no way to leave the page, no link to your main site. Literally the only thing the site visitor can do is fill out the lead form — or leave.
That means your freebie incentive better be the right one. Is your e-book really that compelling? Is your free seminar signup really that appealing?
Video landing pages
Often another form of “squeeze” page, visitors to these landing pages typically have to watch most or all of a video before the call to action is revealed and becomes available for them to act on.
It’s also important to implement non-video landing pages as well, because many customers don’t enjoy video and won’t watch. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are especially helpful here.
While strategic video content can be compelling, it’s critically important to test video duration and dropoff rates. You also need to test when during viewing the call to action is most effective.
Long-form landing pages
We’ve seen a lot of long-form lead landing pages over the years. These are the pages that go on…and on…and on, often 10,000 words or more.
When well-done, they can sometimes be useful for lifestyle change and healthy lifestyle coaching programs if they target prospects on the verge of making a decision.
However, their laserlike focus on their specific program and their relentless “buy now” focus isn’t effective at attracting prospects earlier in their buying process. Those folks are still weighing alternatives and thinking about pros and cons. The typical long-form sales page just doesn’t have the content they’re looking for.
Moreover, these days, pages like these often scream “scam” or “huckster” to too many consumers.
The language is often incredibly confident, way over the top, and piles on the selling points and benefits. The claims of success are extravagant, and the offer usually layers on the bonuses, incentives and special offers.
Often, they emphasize scarcity: “only 10 spots available,” “I’m not normally able to take individual clients but….” They may have a very short time window for action: “The next class starts in 72 hours. It’s not scheduled again in 20xx.”
Consumers are often jaded and skeptical. Marketing messages like these just make them roll their eyes.
Microsites
We frequently deploy microsites or minisites for clients. Microsites are tightly focused yet complete websites. They get their own web address — often a “vanity address” tailored to the marketing campaign, or a subdomain or subdirectory on the main site.
Importantly, they’re multiple pages — a landing page supported by sub-pages. That means you’ve got the real estate to fully articulate all of the relevant marketing points — program descriptions, customer testimonials, case studies and more — and build in meaningful connection points with prospective clients.
Microsites are especially useful if your wellness business is launching an important new program or service, or targeting a brand new and very different market segment.
Consider a health club that decides to a launch a sports conditioning center for competitive middle school and high school athletes. It’s housed at the same facility but has its own staff, programs and completely separate pricing.
You could create a brand-new site — expensive, one more thing to maintain, and you have to build up site traffic from scratch.
Or, you could launch a microsite specifically for your new sports conditioning initiative and include a landing page tailored to your sports conditioning marketing campaigns.
A microsite is also a good choice when you want to co-brand programs with another business or organization. For example, if your health club partners with a local group of health coaches to chase corporate wellness accounts, a microsite might be smarter than creating an entirely new website.
One more nice thing about microsites is that they rarely redirect prospects of-domain to complete a purchase, while at the same time allowing for an appropriate sales experience uniquely matched to the purpose of the microsite rather than a giant, nameless holding company that sells every fitness or wellness service under the sun.
Program & service pages
Sometimes, we’ll use the existing detailed sub-page for a specific program or service as the landing page for a campaign promoting that service. When the design and content are right, this kind of page can be very effective.
For example, a women’s health practice that offers, say, fertility counseling, menopause support and weight management probably has a page devoted to each of these. A weight loss marketing campaign could potentially use the detailed weight management page as a landing page.
Detail pages often also lack a clear call to action and can be unfocused. Sometimes they’re more of a data dump on a topic than a landing page.
This approach may not be a good fit for a site with elaborate navigation links and lots of images, videos, buttons, and other bells and whistles. Too many distractions!
Your home page
Entirely too many fitness and wellness businesses use their home page as their landing page.
Why is this a problem?
Because your home page usually gets the worst conversion rate.
Why does it get the worst conversion rate? Because it’s often about your company in general, not a specific product or service.
A good home page has something for everyone! And it should.
If the copy is specific enough, navigable and well-matched to your ads, home pages can work as landing pages. But your home page needs to connect with people just entering the sales funnel, in the earliest stages of their buying process, AND with people who are in the middle of their decision…and so on. That requires a variety of content, and as a result things can get really cluttered. That’s why it’s often better to set up landing pages SPECIFIC to a product or service.
Good landing pages intentionally skinny down the content and navigation choices to only the paths that are most relevant to that site visitor at a precise point in the sales process.
Unconventional landing pages
We mentioned “contact us” buttons on Facebook ads earlier. That’s a great example of an unconventional landing page.
When Facebook users click that contact button, Facebook presents them with forms that ask for certain information.
Take those forms seriously. Customize every bit of it, because those forms are essentially acting as “squeeze” pages!
Think of landing-page selection like a wine pairing at a fancy dinner. The right wine, with the food — it’s magical!
