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The job of the retail website is more important and more difficult than ever, especially when it comes to a multichannel sales strategy. Visitors arrive at your website through a variety of online channels: pay per click and organic search, email offers, mobile coupons, print ads, among other things. Once at your site, consumers need to be able to easily act upon a promotion or buy a specific product.
If visitors don't see anything relevant to what drove them to your site, they're most likely to leave — wasting their time and your marketing dollars. That’s why landing page design is a critical factor in your site’s success. These key elements of your website serve as a bridge between the marketing messages that brought visitors to your site and the site functionality that enables them to take action, such as making purchases.
Creating a successful landing page isn't difficult, and you can easily experiment and learn as you go. First, decide on which page you'll use as the landing page for a specific campaign. You very well may have an existing web page that you can use — one that’s more specific than your homepage — but if you don’t, consider creating a new landing page. If that's the case, keep in mind these six best practices:
- Include an image along with the offer for visual appeal.
- Reduce or eliminate navigation to keep visitors focused on the goal and reduce distraction.
- Keep the look and feel consistent with your primary website so consumers immediately recognize your brand.
- Use a compelling call to action that ties in to the offer. For example, the copy for a retail promotional offer could have a call to action such as, “Buy Now and Save 10 Percent.”
- Minimize data collection as much as possible to decrease abandonment. If you must collect additional information, try moving those fields to a form on a second page.
- Whenever asking for personal information, include privacy and security statements to help establish trust.
Once you've adopted landing pages as part of your marketing toolbox, set your sights on optimizing the pages for greatest effectiveness. Direct marketers have used A/B split testing for decades to find out which competing ad or sales letter works best, and you can do the same with landing pages.
Does putting your product's price on the landing page drive more sales than requiring visitors to click on a subsequent page before showing the price, for example? Using A/B testing, or more sophisticated multivariate testing, you can determine exactly which combination of alternate offers, headlines, copy, images and calls to action are most persuasive to visitors.
Kim Ann King is the chief marketing officer at SiteSpect, a Boston-based web optimization firm. Reach Kim at kking@sitespect.com.
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