A consolidation of Top Landing Page Tips from the Pros (via Seldom Static).
Don’t forget my own comments in this regard: Seven Essential Tips for Driving Sales through Landing Pages
Enjoy 
Archive for the 'Etail Site Features' Category
While digital marketers are inventive at reaching customers through search, e-mail, and other methods, it’s critical to conduct website modifications in to capitalize on that qualified traffic. Online marketing efforts should always balance traffic generation efforts with continuous creative improvement around product marketing, merchandising, and retailing on the website itself. It’s the website that converts browsers into buyers, not the advertisements.
Of course, make sure you’re covering the bases in your PPC management as well. Research keywords exhaustively and optimize them based on regular reporting. Look to rules based bidding, active bid management, and bid and campaign scheduling as additional mechanisms for campaign optimization. And don’t overlook the ad copy. David Ogilvy wrote the book on advertising copy; apply his ideas to PPC programs is not only appropriate, it’s rare.
The etail site I talk about the most is Woot.com. They best embody the concept that Auragen calls “Brand Membership,” and they have in a single year amassed 500,000 registered users, despite their small size.
Woot’s online catalog contains only a single item each day, and they do not tell users how much stock is on hand. This strange sales concept is a powerful conceit which enables Woot’s domination as a web marketer, allowing Woot to achieve the “holy grail” of Internet retail marketing: daily visits by users eager to buy. How do they do it? They leverage the promise and purpose of the Internet in a way which demonstrates a deep and abiding understanding for how the Web works.
Woot’s copywriting is reason enough to visit the site. Funny and irreverant, it epitomizes Internet culture through self deprecation, dry wit, and tell-em-like-it-is bravado. They often qualify their products as “mediocre” “ridiculous” or “unecessary” even while asking the user to buy. Add to this the daily “Wootcast” an original song (yes, a song) recorded about each day’s product. In addition, Woot uses other techniques to get people to return to the site each day:
Scheduled Features:
- On Mondays, Woot announces the winners to its weekly Photoshop contest, in which users are encouraged to submit photo-edited images which incorporate Woot products into a particular theme. (Monday typicallys brings a creative reference to Woot’s weekly sister site wine.woot.com.)
- On “YouTubesday” Woot posts a blog entry highlighting the most exciting and noteworthy YouTube posts made during the last week. This YouTube redux is the best on the Internet. Tuesdays also feature “two-fer” deals, where products are offered in pairs.
- Wednesday witnesses “Worst Woot Ever” contestants. The products featured on this day are truly awful. It’s like passing an accident on the highway: you can’t look away. Woot also uses Wednesday to post its own PR and provides an overview of Wiki activity on the Web.
- Fridays see the announcement of the secret theme of Woot’s weekly photoshop contest, and user submitted entries to the contest sustain the site through the weekend with comments on Woot forums.
Real and Implied Contests:
- Woot’s weekly Photoshop contest allows participants to demonstrate their skills and viewers to see side-splittingly-funny visual jokes. Contest entries and comments typically amass hundreds of comments on the Woot forums.
- Many of the items Woot sells are highly desirable and offered at a low price. They can sell out quickly. (Sometimes, literally, in seconds.) Being the first person to buy the new item grants bragging rights in Woot’s online forums. (As an added wrinkle, Woot posts each day’s item at midnight central-standard-time requiring most die-hard customers to stay up late in order to get in on the fun.) Woot publishes who bought the first item (”first sucker”), who bought the last (”wooter to blame”), and how much they sold per hour (”woot wage”).
- Purchaser Experience is a factor as well. Woot publishes statistics on its purchasers to show how many of them have, for example, bought ten Woots or more. Users list their woots in the signature attachments to their forum posts: a point of pride and community standing.
- On user account pages, it reads:
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- Heading: “Your Account”
- Tiny Subprint immediately underneath: “…secretly determines whether you get into heaven.”
“Blockbuster” Events
- “Bag of Crap” is Woot’s biggest blockbuster. Occasionally (and on an unknown schedule), Woot offers an item titled “Random Crap.” This item is a contest of sorts. Typically available in a few thousand units for “$1 for each crap” (limit: three craps per order). Users who order “random crap” truly have no idea what they will receive. While typically worth more than the $1 entry fee, items received range from broken toys, powercords, and empty boxes to the rare and significant “bags of crap” which have contained 61 inch plasma televisions, X-Boxes, DVRs, and more. Users are encouraged to photograph their shipments as they arrive. Crap deliveries are anticipated with no less than Christmas-eve levels of excitement.
- “Woot-Off” is an event (signified by flashing lights on the home page) where Woot, upon selling out of its posted item, immediately posts another item (instead of waiting until midnight). Woot-Offs can last for days, and Woot takes pains to offer particularly desirable items during the middle of the night, just to torture its users. There is even an original “Theme for Wooting Off” musical score delivered via downloadable podcast.
The ultimate measure of consumer Brand Membership is how quickly an oversight or mistake will be forgotten. In Woot’s case, their site regularly crashes at midnight as the new item is offered. But customers quickly forgive: if the site is overwhelmed, it must be a great Woot tonight!
In Woot’s case, Brand Membership has translated into rocketing sales, strong loyalty, and a network of word-of-mouth referrals which can’t be beat. Perhaps you’d be interested in the same results for your etail site?
[techtags: woot, bag_of_crap, brand_membership, etail_design, ecommerce_design, brand_experience]
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.)
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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?
- 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.)
Here’s a brief article from Lifehacker which discloses some of the habits of the online powershopper. It’s got a strong tech-product focus, but still useful for looking into the mind of the consumer.
(And, it makes a nice, light post for Saturday mornings
