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…

New research showing mobile shopping vs browsing habits

Each quarter, the IMRG partner with eDigitalResearch to ask 2,000 UK consumers how they use mobile devices. This useful tracking study shows how consumers purchasing cycle is changing, as they are researching heavily on their mobile platforms before they complete their purchases. Their latest mobile commerce usage report shows that smartphone ownership in the UK is now at 60% with a significant number using them for purchase: Over 54% of Smartphone Users  now browse products each month whilst 40% purchase. We liked this infographic since it also included a breakdown of category showing a variation of 30 to 70% purchase rates depending on category. The infographic highlights other trends including the preferred brands for mobile devices, demographics of Smartphone owners and M-commerce trends across sectors. …

9 approaches to increase conversion through increasing visitor engagement

Marketers spend a lot of time and resource in driving their target audience to their website. However this is when the real challenges of keeping the customer engaged, and on your site, long enough to help support a conversion journey to start.

Engagement strategies to support conversion

Here are 9 methods I have found effective which mainly involve engaging more closely with the visitor through feedback or tailoring the design to their device. 1. Behavioural surveys Software such as Qualaroo can be easily integrated on to your website and allows you to ask visitors simple questions in order to help you understand their behaviour better and improve the website experience. 2. Mobile responsive With smartphone usage increasing rapidly across the globe, businesses need to make sure their website is optimised for multiple devices such as smartphones and tablets. If not potential customers will leave promptly. One…

How intelligent segmentation helped Homebase drive instore bookings and increased revenue

eCircle worked with their client Homebase to support them in increasing their Ecommerce revenue through planning and executing a highly targeted personalised triggered email campaign, to sell their high value kitchens. This blog post takes you through the campaign goals, planning and execution and to show the approach Homebase used. Recommended Guide: Just updated for 2013, our 80 page email guide will help you review all aspects of email marketing from communications strategy to creative and copy. Download our 7 Steps to Email marketing guide.

Email Campaign Goals

The business goal of Homebase was primarily to increase their sales revenue of their high value products (kitchens) by drawing in customers instore to meet their Kitchen Designers,…

Mystery shopping survey on consumer sentiment towards videos

In our new guide to video marketing we show how video marketing can help support marketing goals using examples from across B2B and B2C sectors. In consumer retail it's recognised that videos can have a dramatic impact in some categories. For example, the well known Zappos video conversion test that saw employee demonstration videos yield a sales impact of +6 to +30%. But how do consumers perceive video marketing and what are they looking for? There are useful insights in this research from Etailing Group and Invodo who carried out a Mystery Shopping Survey to draw out ‘consumers use of sentiment towards video with delivering superior shopping experience via video'. It probed questions to look into video consumption, what consumers expect from videos, how it affects their purchasing, where they…

Ideas for improving Basket Abandonment Emails that are relevant to other types of email follow-up

On a recent webinar, a question was posed that I thought was worth a second look: 'On an abandonment programme, sending a discount to encourage a purchase may not necessarily be a good idea, so what would be a good hook to get their interest peeked again?'. This touches on another subject; the inevitable decline in response rates for basket abandonment emails. Some argue against this, but it is inevitable. I consider basket abandonment emails as just another product and therefore they will inevitably follow the same path as any other product, as illustrated in the classic graph below. So, what can you do to ensure that your results do not decline?

5 Tips to improve email response rates for basket abandonment

Tip 1 The Basics Please excuse me…

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…

What Email Marketers need to learn from Retailers

How email marketers can use behavioural email to increase customer loyalty and drive more purchases

I believe email marketers have major lessons to learn from how the world’s leading offline retailers market to customers before, during and after their purchases.  These companies serve as great examples of why email marketers need to go beyond the basic newsletter. One of the best ways to frame email marketing is to focus on one key event; the purchase and then break it into three phases:

3 Phases of behavioural email marketing related to purchase

1. Before: The customer isn’t necessarily ready to make the purchase, but your goal is to stay top of mind and nurture the relationship until they are. 2. During: The customer is in the process of making a purchase, and your goal is to ensure they have…

How to use people-focused analytics to change how you measure search marketing effectiveness

Most marketers will know the volume of visitors generated by search, but are you using visitor quality to measure the effectiveness of search traffic (organic or paid)? If you are, conversion rate is a key measure effectiveness. In this post I'll explain how to increase it without spending a penny more. It's not intended to be an unrealistic boast instead it's a technique that makes allocating marketing spend and identifying successful campaigns easier and more effective.

Why your Conversion Rate is lying to you

Most people would measure Conversion Rate for a paid search campaign (or organic search) like this: However, this formula has one major flaw, it assumes that all visitors from this campaign have the potential to convert. The reality is that only a fraction of search traffic is convertible,…