What makes a good ecommerce landing page?

So, what does make an effective landing page for an Ecommerce site? Well, I’m going to give a typical consultant’s answer – "it depends"; on the campaign and your goal for the landing page. That’s not being evasive, it’s the truth; not all landing pages are born equal. For example, some marketers invest in prize draws and competitions as marketing tactics to drive data capture for their eCRM programs, so the landing page needs to focus on making it quick and easy to enter. Typically ecommerce landing pages are used for tactical marketing campaigns (e.g. from AdWords, Display Re-marketing or Email marketing) and are  designed to drive sales making use of existing site page templates. A good ecommerce landing page should satisfy the following criteria: The creative design is consistent with the marketing campaign that generated the visit. The copy and CTA are consistent with the marketing…

Building your landing pages around the call-to-action

‘Best practice’ learning promotes placing the primary CTA (call-to-action) for your landing page near the top of the page, above the fold. At face value, this seems logical, right? You want visitors to complete the primary goal for the page, which means following your CTA. However, there are several reasons why this basic recommendation isn’t necessarily true or accurate: 1. The ‘fold’ is a myth The mind-numbing variety of devices (it’s estimated there are about 6,500 and counting!) means that the fold is not a fixed entity and depends entirely on the device type accessing your landing page. 2. Your CTA should be placed where an action is most likely to be taken New visitors to your landing page may not know who you are and what you do. These people are less likely to be willing to commit to an action immediately as they need to know that…

Which features do all the best landing pages share?

First impressions are particularly important online - you have only seconds to get your message across. Research from Nature suggested that people form an impression of a site in just 50 milliseconds. There are many practical actions you can take that influence the effectiveness of landing pages which I have summarised before in a previous post giving examples of best practice for landing pages. The relevance of the headline, prominence of call-to-action and points of resolution plus many other factors are all important. But, if you're running a project to drive more leads or sales from landing pages it's worth taking a step back to think about the fundamentals that will drive better results. Otherwise you can be a victim of Meek Tweaking, which is one of the main limiting factors for making large improvements. To think through…