etailology

The design of landing pages is an interesting challenge — but I think the challenge comes from people thinking about them differently from other pages on their website, when in fact, they should function as the best examples of a typical web page.

Obviously, “landing pages” are usually developed in coordination with some other online marketing “campaign” and are coordinated and tracked to that campaign’s activities. But, at the heart of it, treating some small set of your web sites pages as “more special” than the others is a philosophy which will cost you sales. Your entire presence on the Internet is a campaign: every link, every spider, every email, every organic search ranking — heck, even your URL is an element in a campaign.

I’m glad we’ve got that settled. Now, on to the core of this post. What are the seven things that your landing pages need to accomplish in order to drive sales?

(See the image at below/right for a summary of what follows.)

1. Capture Online Traffic: The picture at above/right (sourced from the excellent ExperienceSolutions Blog*) says so much of what I want to say here. Ultimately, your online advertising is a suggestion to your customers of what you want them to believe/see/do on your site. Your site can either jibe-with or contradict that suggestion — building an experience which will drive conversions and brand, or one which will detract. Make sure your landing pages closely align with expectations you’ve set for the user on the link antecedent. For online traffic, this is particularly important because the timespan between setting and redeeming customer expectations is only as long as the load-time of your page.
2. Capture Offline Traffic: Offline traffic generation comes with a similar caveat; make sure you build on previously set expectations with your customers. The difference is that in offline situations, the customer is relying on their memory quite heavily — both to find your site and to remember the expectations that you set in your offline communications. In this case, it’s important to remind these offline prospects of the promises/offers/suggestions/benefits you made in previous communications. It may have been hours or days since they received your marketing message!
3. Drive Conversion: One of the first rules in sales is to ask for the sale! And yet, you’d be surprised how often pages are created which do no such thing. Don’t make this simple mistake — ensure that your page calls the user to act with language and graphics which communicate “Buy Now” “Order Now” and “Add to Basket” prominently. Be sure to clear the path to the sale by minimizing clicks, providing instructive copy for items with multiple size/selections, and confirming to the customer when they’ve successfully added an item to their basket.
4. Upsell/Crosssell: Upsell and Cross-sell functionality is built into nearly every ecommerce system right out of the box. The question is what to upsell, and where. The answer? The ONLY answer? Testing.
5. Drive Secondary Conversions: If they don’t want to buy your product, what’s the next best transaction you can initiate? For complex sales, it might be for the customer to print the page. For gift sales, it might be a bookmark or email referral. For viral products, a single post on Facebook is probably worth 30 conversions. Make sure to provide options for these other types of “secondary conversions.”
6. Generate Referrals: For those customers who do convert, referrals are the golden opportunity (just like upsells for customers who have not yet converted). Referrals provide a source of low-cost (but high quality) leads and should not be overlooked. Especially important is that you ask for referrals in transaction, confirmation, and customer service emails; customers provide an unusual level of attention to these messages (and you are providing SERVICE through them) so what better time/place to ask for a referral?
7. Capture Defection/Abandoners: People leave. It’s a fact. Tracking abandonment is the first step, but doing something about it is what’s important. Ideas? Make sure to ask for email address upfront in your site/conversion process… then you’ll be able to contact the defectors and invite them back. Email them a few times. People are stubborn.

There you have it. Go forth and landing-page-ify.

And if you’re looking for some meatier and more quantitative discourse on landing page design, look here.
(*Faced with such a perfect diagram of the point I was trying to make, my choices were to either 1) create my own version based on someone else’s idea or 2) src the image and provide clear credit. Having done the latter, if someone from ExperienceSolutions needs me to pull down this picture, just drop me a note and I’d be happy to.)