Landing pages are usually the first point of contact a visitor reaches. On average you have between 5 – 7 seconds to capture a visitors attention and if they can’t find what they want, they move onto the next website. This is why it is very crucial to be aware of what visitors are looking for. Let’s firstly establish what landing pages are and how they affect your ecommerce business. Then we will look at 5 effective ways to improve your landing pages and lastly you have to test and monitor your results.

What Are Landing Pages?

Copyblogger has a great description of what a landing page is:

A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to. Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

So where does the landing page fit into your ecommerce store? If you are either doing some form of advertising and driving a campaign to a particular product, then your product page would become your landing page. Alternatively if you have optimised your ecommerce website and getting traffic from search engines then either the front page of your store or some product in your store becomes a landing page. No matter where the traffic comes from, our goal is to make sure each page in your ecommerce store is effective for a visitor to either:

1. Leave their details for us to followup with them. (Via a newsletter or contact page)
2. A call to action to purchase a product from your store.

Let’s take a look at a few effective ways to improve your landing pages..

5 Effective Ways To Convert More Sales From Your Landing Page

Call To Action
Once the visitor has arrived and they see what they are looking for on your page, provide a clear and concise call to action. For example, if they landed on your product page, make sure they can see the shopping cart button to take action to buy the product. Or if they landed on the front page, make sure they can navigate to the products section. The call to action must be clear and be recognised as a clickable object. The most common method to do this is to create a three dimensional button or to underline the text in bold.

Live Chat Box Help
A lot of ecommerce businesses have not discovered the power of having a live chat box pop up at the checkout. This is the time when a visitor has many unanswered questions. What if you could answer them on the spot and assist them with the purchase? I explored a few different Live Chat Systems in Creating The Human Touch With A Live Chat System. I explain how effective it is to have a live chat box on your ecommerce website. This will help increase your sales conversions dramatically.

Press Recognition
If your ecommerce business has received recognition from the media it is an excellent way to convey instant credibility. Make sure you show your visitors that you have been featured in the media and show icons of these media companies. This helps your visitors know that your business can be trusted and aids in their buying decision over your competition.

Reduce Download Times
Remember that I mentioned you have only 5-7 seconds to capture the visitor’s attention? It’s not a lot of time and if your landing page takes 15 seconds to load, you have already lost them before they even arrived. Also not every person in the world has high speed internet access, so you need to take this into consideration when your ecommerce website is being designed. Here are a few ways to reduce your download time:

1. Reduce your .jpg and .gif image sizes (compress if possible)
2. Don’t have your images resized within HTML. Create thumbnails instead
3. Cut your images into sections
4. Cleanup unnecessary HTML elements within your website
5. Convert from table to CSS based layout
6. Upgrade to a faster web server

Remove Unnecessary Clutter From Your Landing Page
Ask someone who has never visited your ecommerce website before and watch how they navigate through the shopping cart. Carefully monitor if they follow through to purchasing a product or if they get distracted from links and graphics surrounding the check out. If they click on other links or graphics that capture their attention, then you need to remove this. This will increase your sales conversion dramatically as it is the unnecessary clutter that deters customers from finalising their purchase.

How To Monitor Your Results?

If you want to ensure that you are getting the results, you need to be able to monitor how your landing pages are performing. Luckily for you there are a lot of tools available online that are free and also provide reliable tracking. Below are a some free or low cost analytic solutions to help monitor the effectiveness of your landing pages.

1. Google Website Optimizer – This is a free and popular service that allows you to test multiple variables at once and determine the best combination of them. You will need to setup a Google Adwords account to use this.
2. CrazyEgg – It allows you to see exactly where users click, even if the element is not a hyperlink. The service is free for up to 1000 visitors per month.
3. Clicktale – This is another web analytics solution that allows you to record the the on-screen experience of your visitors, from the first page they visit to the last.

Remember once you have implemented your improvements, remember to constantly test your results. If you are not getting the conversion rates you had before, then jump back one step and try again. A little tweaking doesn’t hurt and when you start to see higher conversion rates that you are happy with, set it and monitor the results. Also don’t forget to let me know by leaving your comments below!

Tyrone Shum
Landing Page Informer