Benefits of Having a Landing Page for Your App

Apps shouldn’t stand alone. Mobile app landing page design is a critical support structure.

Sure, at their best, apps are discrete, specialist bits of software – uniquely and intuitively suited to a particular task. But marketing them, and offering app users support for them, means that it’s always a good idea also to build a website for each app you design.

This site doesn’t have to be extensive – that’s why “landing page” is often a good description of the streamlined web presence an app should offer. Having an app in the app store is great, but such a landing page is just as essential if you are to boast a good conversion rate. Simple, clean and uncluttered, it can nevertheless be crucial to your app’s success.

If your app is the all-singing, all-dancing Swiss army knife, your landing page might be its box: critical to sales and marketing campaigns, full of useful information … and always worth keeping.

Let’s look at the key benefits of a good landing page in turn.

Begin marketing before your launch

Your landing page should be central to your app marketing plan: acting as a magnet for potential users, the site can serve as a call to action – pre-registration, early beta testing, sign-up to a newsletter – before your app ever reached the app store.

Branding is important, and your landing page will be the home of that identity. Before launch, it can generate interest among your target demographic, be the destination for any pay-per-click campaigns, and tell the story of your app in such a way that buzz for it begins early.

Grow organic user base before launch

Think of your landing page as a salesperson. Let it convince potential users now that your app will be helpful to them, and your launch will be more successful than it otherwise might have been. Landing pages enhance conversion rates because they educate users who have yet to even see your listing over on Google Play or social media.

By identifying and gathering users’ email addresses or social account details, a landing page can grow your user base before there is even an app to download. It isn’t just about marketing, either: by engaging with these potential users earlier in your app development process, you will understand your audience better – and build an app more finely-tuned to their needs.

Great platform for a soft launch campaign

Once you have built a pre-launch user base via your landing page and built a version of your app ready for testing, you can offer your early adopters a first-glance chance to use your app. This sort of ‘soft launch’ – a release of the app to a small group of initial users – can offer invaluable feedback that will improve the app ready for its full launch on the app stores.

These “beta testers” will usually be tech-savvy and enthusiastic, and will put your app through its paces. Don’t be afraid of this: it’s better to find and avoid faults with this smaller, pre-launch group than once the app is fully live! Beta testers understand the process of software development – and are keen to help you perfect yours.

Improved brand awareness

All the time you are building a pre-launch audience for your app, sharing sneak peeks of your app and even early releases of it to beta testers, you are letting your brand seep into the world. From your site’s logos and typefaces to the newsletter and social copy you send out to your pre-registered users, landing pages enable you to establish a brand before you launch a product.

This early brand awareness ensures that your app doesn’t launch cold: audiences are aware of its purpose, values and identity long before it first pops up on the app store. Style and tone matter – they help potential users engage with an app on an emotional, intuitive level. Early brand awareness of this sort means greater early adoption at launch: needless to say, people like brands they already understand.

Enhanced credibility

A landing page isn’t all about the ephemeral aspects of branding, however: it’s also about establishing some hard credentials. The very simplicity of a landing page – no fuss, no extraneous data – will emphasise the focus of your app; the clarity of this messaging will enhance the sense of your brand’s credibility that potential users will take home.

In other words, use your landing page to provide clear information: data about your business, its past successes and the logic – even the code, where appropriate – behind your app. Encourage confidence; your early user base will be making a leap of faith.

In other words, a good landing page is a trove of information, a means of two-way communication, and the best launchpad possible for a new app. That’s why mobile app landing page design can be so crucial to getting marketing campaigns – and app launches – right.