Landing pages are lazy pages. They're used by people who don't want to take the time to integrate a campaign into their overall marketing efforts. Your home page is your best landing page. It can be versioned for different offers and will convey a much deeper experience of your business, leaving prospects with a balanced understanding of who you are.

There are four main reasons not to use landing pages:

1. They lack context.
2. They bounce enough traffic to beat rubber balls.
3. They turn people off.
4. Your home page should be your best converting page.

They lack context.

Landing pages (also known as squeeze pages or capture pages) exist to convert.

My argument with that is this: Your home page should serve that purpose. If it doesn't, why have it?

I'll go as far as asserting that landing pages alone simply do not work for considered purchases. If they do perform, it's most likely a business that has billions of dollars of stored brand equity and can be instantly recognized and trusted. It's not going to work for more obscure brands. There are millions of small businesses nobody has heard of. Consumers need the whole story.

Take, for example, Wrike. They sell web-based project management software. They're not Basecamp. They're not Microsoft. Most people don't know what they do when they hear the name or see the logo. So even if they're giving away free trials with a landing page, it's not going to convert as well as if they gave away free trials with their home page. Because their home page provides the necessary context and background to tell prospects the whole story, the right way. Even if you're spending just $10 or downloading a piece of software for free, you still want to know who you're dealing with and that it's a secure and trustworthy company before handing over personal information.

They bounce enough traffic to beat rubber balls.

Don't get me wrong, I speak from experience. I was once a believer in the old LP. I've done the landing page/ squeeze page route and have seen results. It's hard to stop doing something or try it a different way when you continue to see at least some kind of results. Squeeze pages do still convert a certain percentage of the traffic that hits them.  But they also have a crushing bounce rate.  Whether it's the overuse of them by affiliate marketers or their aggressive nature or both, they turn more and more people off. They're meant to be slippery slides that get people down the funnel fast but they end up being turbo charged trampolines instead. The vast majority of the people that land on a landing page jump right back off.

Why? Because there's nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do except make a purchase or fill in a form or both. Really, because they turn people off.

They turn people off.

Most of the time, those who do make the purchase are people who were already sold on the product or service before they arrived at the landing page. The rest, the majority of your Internet marketing audience, does not like to be siloed. They don't want to be squeezed.

How well have you responded to an aggressive sales person in a store? How much do you trust that person? If you're like me, you're at the very least annoyed and sometimes angered by pushy or buttery or otherwise manipulative sales people.

Control your home page.

If you need to present different content to different audiences, why not do that with different versions of your Web site's home page? Not only can you serve different versions of a home page to different audiences, but you can also optimize each through multivariate testing. If you don't have that kind of control over your home page, why not? This way, prospects get to see your offer in the context of your whole business. This makes the offer more credible.

Why not create multiple versions of a home page with different focuses and calls to action then test different variables on each for creative performance and optimize based on the results? The effect is dramatically increased conversion rates. It's a better, more effective and more sophisticated approach to online lead generation and sales.

If you try this tactic versus landing pages, you'll see a much lower bounce rate, many more page views and often quite a bit more conversions. When the message is in the context of a professional and well organized Web site, there is a wealth of additional information at the user's fingertips should she be interested. She will be more likely to trust the message when she has the option to go into the Web site and learn more. He will feel more confident about giving his personal information through a professional and branded Web site rather than a seedy old squeeze page. Visitors are much more likely to self select into your list than be pushed or coerced into it.

Let me know what you think.

What do you think? Do you think squeeze pages still work and are perhaps a necessary evil of Internet marketing? Do you think they work for small and medium businesses or just big brands? Or, do you believe that audiences are savvier online these days and would much prefer landing on your home page and having the option to dig a little deeper?

I welcome your comments.

Next week, I'll talk about prospect navigation. Let them explore, but walk them down the right trail.