Prelanders: What are they and how use them effectively

Our guide on pre-landers will help you make a significant impact. Learn how to refine the user experience and make your affiliate strategies more effective. With the right approach, you can make antivirus popunders and social media buttons work to your advantage. Whether a newbie or experienced marketer, a well-crafted pre-lander with the right call to action can help you “win” more visitors and achieve better results, and this article will explain how!

What is pre-lander? 

First, let us define the term itself. Pre-lander or pre-landing page is the page that appears before a landing page with your offer.

Its main purpose is to inform and intrigue users, including hesitant ones. In other words, it is aimed to encourage and interest even those who are completely sure that they don’t want to make any purchases and make them actually buy a product or service.

Pros of pre-landers

First, let’s take a look at the benefits of using pre-landers::

• Better conversion, better CTRs
• Engages users
• Prepare users, inform them about the offer
• Smoother transition
• Allows identifying successful steps and drawbacks of your marketing strategy

Cons of pre-landers

Though good pre-landing pages usually work well, they are not perfect, and here are the reasons why:

• You will likely need to test a few approaches before you find the one that works best
• It might be difficult for a beginner to create pre-landers
• Some advertisers don’t allow using such pages.

Do you really need a pre-landing page?

Do you really need that intermediary between the offer page and a customer? In general, a pre-landing page will likely help you acquire conversions and definitely won’t be bad for your business (of course, if the page is quality enough.)

One may argue there are no reasons to use them if your landing page already works well enough. Well, while your landing page might perform well, prelanders can offer and provide additional benefits to improve your lead generation:

1. Increase User Engagement - Provide relevant information about the product and set the stage for the main offer. This can be particularly useful for weight-loss products or dating offers, where the user's interest needs to be piqued before they reach the main page.
2. Raise Conversion Rates - Acting as a pre-sell page, it can inform the user about the benefits of the product and what they can expect from the offer. Better make an impression to increase the chances of conversion!
3. SEO and Media Buying - Such pages can be optimized for SEO and used in media buying strategies to redirect users more effectively. Use different approaches and formats that suit various geos and ad campaigns.
4. Reduce Bounce Rates - Well-crafted prelanders with engaging copywriting, product reviews, and testimonials keep users interested. It ensures that visitors who land on your page won’t wait long to find the information they need.
5. Effective CTA - A prelanding page allows for a clear call-to-action (CTA) to guide users to the final conversion point. Attention-grabbing elements like a “chance to win” bonus or a wheel of fortune can further motivate users to proceed.
6. Testing and Optimization - Trying different creative elements and formats can help you tweak your approach and find the best practices.
7. Even if many of your users don’t mind taking action (registration) without warming up just after they click on your push ads, you never know how many clients you lost because there was no pre-lander. Why miss out on opportunities?

Types of pre-landing pages

When it comes to pre-landers, the only limit is your imagination. However, there are a few common types of such pages. They are as follows:

• Dating pages — quizzes, “16476 girls near you,” catchy messages from “real” people
  • "Single women in your area want to meet you!"
  • "Gorgeous models are looking for a date tonight"
  • "Sexy singles are waiting for your message"
  • "Horny housewives are ready to chat"
• Engaging games prelanders 
  • Scratch-off games to reveal a "prize"
  • Spinning wheel games to win a "reward"
  • Trivia quizzes with a "special offer" at the end
  • Arcade-style games with a "limited time deal"
• Sweepstakes — “win the prize” pages or questionnaires (to find out more about sweepstakes advertisement, we recommend reading this article)
  • "Win a free vacation to Hawaii!"
  • "Enter to win a brand new sports car!"
  • "Chance to get $10,000 cash prize!"
  • "Opportunity to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe!"
• Utilities that scare users with viruses
  • "Your computer is infected with 17 viruses!"
  • "Your device has been hacked! Click here to fix it."
  • "Your IP address has been blacklisted. Verify now."
  • "Your browser is not secure. Update it immediately."
• Fake News
  • "Breaking news: The government is giving away free money!"
  • "Shocking video of a celebrity caught cheating!"
  • "You won't believe what this celebrity did next!"
  • "Miracle weight loss pill approved by doctors!"
• Fake Surveys
  • "Take this quick survey and get a free gift!"
  • "Help us improve our product by taking this survey."
  • "Share your opinion and get a chance to win a prize!"
  • "Complete this survey to get a special discount!"

What’s a perfect pre-lander & how to create it?

What distinguishes a good pre-lander from a bad one? Plenty of things, actually. The do’s and don'ts you can see below are based on these things, so if you want to get an ideal page, follow these tips.

Do’s — tips to get a 100% effective pre-lander

Let us start with do’s — here are the most important things to use when creating a pre-landing page.

1. Carefully choose the general message of the pre-land. What is your main goal? Do you want to intrigue, encourage, or scare a customer? Think about the product or service you are going to suggest, find out if you need to make a customer feel positive or negative emotions, and create a strategy.
2. Brevity is the soul of wit, so make your message short and simple. It is like a PowerPoint presentation — if you add too much text, it just won’t work.
3. Add the comment section (real or not.) Make sure that all comments are positive, realistically positive.

In general, your pre-lander should be catchy, brief, engaging, and, more importantly, it should look good.

Don’ts — tips to avoid mistakes when creating a pre-lander

Here are the main things to avoid when working on your pre-landing page:

1. Don’t spam with links — it is useless and confusing.
2. Don’t create a website that looks like it was made in the early 90s.
3. Use bold font to make a user remember the most important part of the information.

How to get a good pre-lander?

There are two options. Often, one can choose between the pre-made landers and pre-landers offered by a partner or just copy someone’s pre-lander and edit it. However, such pages are not unique, and users who see different ads will be redirected to the same offers. This will not help you gain their trust. That’s why creating your own pre-lander is usually a very good idea.

Here are a few more tips for those who are going to start working on their first pre-landers.

1. Use good old A/B testing at the very beginning.
2. Create engaging, catchy headlines.
3. Upload top-quality pictures only.
4. Focus on making the page easy to navigate.
5. CTAs are a must-have.
6. Loading speed should be as fast as possible.

My pre-land works not so well, what should I do?

So, now you have a pre-landing page. However, it doesn’t increase the conversion rate significantly. Here are the things that might help you make your pre-lander more effective.

1. Audit. Ensure that it loads very fast and has no technical errors.
2. Look for content errors. Pay attention to all the details — any mistakes in currency, data, slang for particular geo may affect conversion rates.
3. Check your comments. If there are comments on your pre-landing page, make sure that they sound natural (if you ordered them) and that all of them are positive if they are real. You can even initiate an interesting discussion in this section to get more attention.
4. Use retargeting not to miss the chance to show other ads to this user in the future.
5. Make sure that your page is targeted, that it looks good, that it is not too messy.

Summary

Like any other ad, pre-landers work perfectly if they are made in the right way. There are many nuances to consider, but if you handle it and create a top-quality, genuinely effective pre-lander, your project will bring you more profit than ever.