LANDING PAGES HOW TO USE AND TEST
With today's quality refined searches and people getting more familiar with how to shop product and price, the job of the retail website is more difficult than ever, especially when it comes to a multichannel sales strategy. Visitors arrive at your website through a variety of online channels: pay per click and organic search, email offers, mobile coupons, print ads, among other things. Once at your site, consumers need to be able to easily act upon a promotion or buy a specific product.
If visitors don't see anything relevant to what drove them to your site, they're most likely to leave — wasting their time and your marketing dollars. That’s why landing page design is a critical factor in your site’s success. These key elements of your website serve as a bridge between the marketing messages that brought visitors to your site and the site functionality that enables them to take action, such as making purchases.
Creating a successful landing page isn't difficult, and you
can easily experiment and learn as you go. First, decide on which page you'll
use as the landing page for a specific campaign. You very well may have an
existing web page that you can use — one that’s more specific than your
homepage — but if you don’t, consider creating a new landing page. If that's
the case, keep in mind these six best practices:
Include an image along with the offer for visual appeal.
Reduce or eliminate navigation to keep visitors focused on
the goal and reduce distraction.
Keep the look and feel consistent with your primary website
so consumers immediately recognize your brand.
Use a compelling call to action that ties in to the offer.
For example, the copy for a retail promotional offer could have a call to
action such as, “Buy Now and Save 10 Percent.”
Minimize data collection as much as possible to decrease
abandonment. If you must collect additional information, try moving those
fields to a form on a second page.
Whenever asking for personal information, include privacy
and security statements to help establish trust.
Once you've adopted landing pages as part of your marketing toolbox, set your sights on optimizing the pages for greatest effectiveness. Direct marketers have used A/B split testing for decades to find out which competing ad or sales letter works best, and you can do the same with landing pages.
Test two different headlines on a landing page. One would then outperform the other, and you would know which is the top-performing page.
However, there is more you can do with A/B Split testing.
- You can use A/B split testing to better understand visitor behaviors and priorities when visiting your site.
- You can use A/B split testing to solve specific problems you have with your site pages. In other words, use it as a diagnostic tool to find out what is going wrong and how to fix it.
- You can use A/B split testing to dramatically challenge assumptions you may have about the "best" way to design or write a page. (Test not only changes in minor elements, but also complete and dramatic redesigns of an entire page.)
This brings up another important point. Testing yields the most valuable results only when you test repeatedly. A one-shot test will tell you very little. But when you make a consistent habit of testing, cumulative tests over time can have a dramatic impact on the success of your site.
Does putting your product's price on the landing page drive more sales than requiring visitors to click on a subsequent page before showing the price, for example? Using A/B testing, or more sophisticated multivariate testing, you can determine exactly which combination of alternate offers, headlines, copy, images and calls to action are most persuasive to visitors.
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