Most church communications teams understand the need to have a website. But many don’t know how to maximize the web presence and the traffic coming into the site. Building a landing page is key.
In fact, many people don’t know the difference between the homepage and a landing page. But if you want to have any significant gains due to your online activities, you need to start to learning what landing pages are all about.
ONLY ONE WAY OUT
The main objective of a landing page is to drive the user to the one specified a call to action. Usually that is either an opt-in to your email lists or some other transaction like an event RSVP.
Landing pages are strategically built so that there are reduced or no distractions for the visitor. There are many ways in, but only one pathway out.
No “link leakage” is critical so that people can’t “escape” to other places on your site or the Interwebs. Practically speaking, that usually means that there is no navigation bar, no floating social sharing icons, no links in the footer, etc.
The only links presented are the ones associated with your call to action. Either do what we want you to do, or you need to abandon the page completely.
THE POINT IS TO GAIN PERMISSION
Now one of the main principles of content marketing is to offer a lead magnet — A piece of digital content that can be downloaded or viewed in exchange for the bare minimum sign-up form – usually with just first name and email address.
That exchange of content needs to be radically valuable by the visitor. A real gift of information or experience.
If you put the visitor first, then so many interesting content options to offer become available. Share on XHere are four go-to ideas that churches can use to build your first set of landing pages.
4 LANDING PAGE IDEAS YOU SHOULD CONSIDER FOR YOUR CHURCH WEBSITE
- New neighbors: pull together a downloadable resource to help new residents that move into town (or old-timers too!) get the most out of the neighborhood. Something as simple as a printable list of all take out restaurants in their phone numbers for the fridge. How about a list of all churches in town with a short blurb and links to their websites including yours. How about a printable calendar that has relevant community information such as recycling pick up dates, etc. you can obviously inserts some of your larger events and big church days on it as well!
- Volunteer recruits: offer a “backstage tour” that you deliver in a series of emails sharing some of the key areas of your church where people can pitch in to volunteer. A great way to feature a story about one superstar volunteer in each area that you write about.
- Sermon hits: how about looking at your website media section and finding out which sermons that you have posted either audio or video are the most popular ones. Then write a paragraph intro to each one of them to set up the context and link to that page. Giving people a tour of your top five or 10 most popular sermons from your media archive. Or you could curate a series of sermons to introduced to people that give a good overview of the mission, vision and DNA of your church.
- Book club: for any given sermon or sermon series on a popular topic such as relationships, parenting, finances, etc I am sure you have a lot of research and reading. Take 3, 4, or more of the books you came across and set up a landing page where you introduce each book with a simple paragraph or bullet points of some good highlights from each one through a series of emails. Then during the sermon series, offer it as a resource for people to go deeper into the topic if interested. If you post your sermons online, linking to the landing page will be helpful and acquire emails long term.
There are plenty of other ways and ideas to use landing pages so that your church continues to grow your email list and nurture those relationships after people signed up.
