What it is. Give away something genuinely useful in exchange for an email. Nurture over time. Sell when they're ready.
When to use it. Long sales cycles. High-priced offers. Anything requiring education before purchase. Any business trying to prove that social media does something measurable.
The build:
Why it works. Not everyone who downloads is your customer, and that's fine. When we ran the luxury and beauty reports at Vayner, we'd pull five to six thousand signups. A tiny fraction were buyers of six-figure websites. But the sales cycle for a website rebuild is often a year. You capture them at the research stage and stay top of mind until the budget exists.
Benchmark. Unbounce's analysis of roughly 41,000 landing pages puts the median landing page conversion at 6.6%. Below 3% and you have a traffic mismatch or a friction problem. Above 10% is good. Above 15% is excellent, and usually means warm traffic. Opt-in-focused pages skew higher than that median because the ask is small.
Where it fails. The thank you page does nothing. You worked to earn attention and then handed them a PDF and let them leave.
What it is. Sell something at a very low price, then present a higher-value offer immediately after purchase.
When to use it. When you want buyers, not subscribers. When you're running paid ads and need the economics to work.
The build: