And in all cases, landing page must be consistent with marketing piece. If prospect is suddenly confronted with a landing page that seems different or just doesn’t seem to connect with piece they came from, a number of unfortunate things happen. There is a credibility gap. The prospect senses this is different and becomes on guard. And you lose momentum of sell, where one benefit leads to another until close.

Let’s say you’ve determined length of sell copy on landing page. At this point, there is a crucial decision to be made. After sell, do you put order form or signup form on same page or have prospects click to go to another page to fill out form?

There are two opposing prospect tendencies to deal with. The more clicks a prospect needs to go through to get to order or signup, more likely prospect will not continue. On other hand, make prospects do too much scrolling and you’ll lose a certain percentage of them. In addition, if there is too much copy and graphics on a page, there is danger that page looks too cluttered and intimidating.

There is no cookie-cutter solution. Generally, it is preferable to have order form on same page as preceding sell copy; that is, on landing page. Having said that, there are numerous cases when having prospects click to go to a separate order page is better.

So you see, a landing page is an important, yet flexible, stage in selling process. Always keep in mind marketing piece prospect came from and develop your landing page accordingly.

As we've all been told many times, features aren't important in themselves, rather they're important for benefits they confer. Yet, benefits tend to dead-end, that is, there's a tendency to stop analyzing once we've identified them.

Thinking of consequences, rather than benefits, helps extend our analyses to another level, to values. Admittedly, this may be as much about semantics as substance, but nevertheless it matters.

From another perspective, consequences help us move from concrete to abstract. We can touch or experience features directly; that takes no imagination. Values, on other hand, are all in mind; they can't be touched or experienced in same way.

For example, wash your hair with this shampoo, which contains ingredient X-15 (a feature) and you'll feel more confident (a consequence) when you go out for an evening, and a feeling of confidence helps you enjoy social occasions (a value satisfier, and ultimate result).

You've no doubt seen this strategy used in shampoo commercials and display ads. Which makes sense, because most of us don't value nice hair for its own sake; we value it for social reasons.

In summary, understanding connection between features and values, through consequences, helps make our communication more effective.