In marketing there are 2 major communication routes:

• Outbound communication like email, text messages or ads
• Inbound communication, which is mainly handled by landing pages and forms

In my former role as product manager for landing pages and forms in the SAP Marketing Cloud I gathered a lot of insights. In my current position as product manager in Emarsys this topic is still very relevant and with this article I would like to give a general overview and describe the current state.

A landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in a message (like email or WhatsApp) or ads from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or similar places on the web.

Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage exploration, landing pages are designed for a single focus or goal, known as a call to action (or CTA, for short).

Very often there are two parts:

• The page containing the marketing message including images
• The form containing fields asking for additional information and the call-to-action (CTA) button

Capture New Contacts/Leads

Capture new contacts as a result of a link click of the company web page or some advertisement banners

Personalized Campaign

Capture data and interest from a known contact as follow-up of a click in an email of a specific campaign or in a logged-in website.

Profile Page

Offer a contact the possibility to view and change their profile data, including opt-in and newsletters. This is not really a landing page according to the definition but uses the same mechanisms (forms)

Here is a list of the most common requirements I faced so far:

Usability

• Easy page designer
• Value help of field values in Forms
• Provide form elements for opt-in and subscriptions

Personalization

• Pre-fill form fields if a contact is known
• Use of personalization tokens in text of the landing page
• Progressive profiling

Integration

• Awareness of the context in which it was called
• Create new contacts
• Update contacts
• Create triggers for automation based on context

SAP Marketing Cloud (SMC)

Here we started with a rather simple forms builder that you could publish in a stand-alone version. This form evolved quite a bit and even got progressive profiling support in a later stage. But apart from the form fields there was not much other content possible except some titles and CSS styling. The only option was to embed it via iframe into another landing page.

With the addition of the Landing Page editor we offered a way to combine the form with a landing page containing the marketing message and images.

However, still many of our customers are using their own content management system (CMS) and authoring tools and/or agencies. For those customers it is still necessary to embed forms. With SMC this is possible by allowing certain domains for the SMC forms (See this post).

But the life of SMC will end in a few years and therefore other options have to be found.

Emarsys

With the acquisition of Emarsys by SAP a new marketing tool is available in the SAP space. Although is not meant as a complete replacement for SMC it has a lot to offer. There is a powerful omni-channel personalization and automation engine with pre-built tactics that can speed up implementation times a lot.

The forms in Emarsys are somewhat limited though. It is PHP-based and has almost no styling options (no custom CSS) so you can only embed it as-is in your landing page which is not ideal.

I also evaluated the usage of 3rd-party landing page solutions. These are often very good in the area of content creation with simple drag and drop editors. However, they often lack in form capabilities and naturally with the choice of form fields since they need to be as generic as possible. This becomes evident when looking at value help values for dropdown fields or newsletter subscriptions. This would need a tight integration with all the Emarsys fields.
One option could be to build such a tight integration together with those companies. But as many customers prefer to use their own CMS this would still not solve the issue for everyone.

After reading this post you should be able to define landing pages and forms as well as name use cases and requirements.