15 Tips to The Perfect Landing Page

May 25, 2008

Recently a panel of experts united at the ACCM conference in Orlando, their discussion was based on landing pages.They included DMinSite sales and marketing Karen Crist , Buck World Wide VP of Ecommerce Gavin Galtere and Tim Walter From American Eagle.

An important thing that Tim said that caught my attention was that when developing web pages there are two different roads you can go down, which were paid search and email. “Don’t only do Google.” The reason for this is because you are not tapping into potential earnings that can come from paid search and email.

He also mentioned something that made quite some sense to me (as obvious as it is) which is that an email puts your message directly in front of the potential customer, whereas search requires the same potential customer to look or search for your website, ad, and or message.

All three of them delivered great tips.

Here are the best of the best…

1. Get top-level buy-in for strategic projects; not all projects produce immediate sales, but have more strategic implications for the business.

2. Create urgency, such as a deadline to increase CTR and conversion

3. Print destination URLs on pages in your catalog

4. Separate CSS and data points for ease of use

5. Make sure landing pages deliver on a promise that drove the shopper to the site with consistent products, benefits, offers and branding

6. Split test different paid search landing pages

7. Split test different email landing pages. Don’t throw consumers to a category page, but a specifically designed page using the email messaging, creative and extended product offering

8. Track key performance on all pages

9. With landing pages - think like a consumer

10. Test, test, test

11. Have a platform that enables marketing staff to market.

12. Be prepared to make changes fast

13. Optimize landing pages for natural search with readable URLS (no special characters), included on site maps, no Flash, no duplicate content

14. Keep landing pages up longer than you think. If you are working with outside agency to host, require minimum of 3-6 months hosting

15. Look at competitors’ landing pages. Your customers are likely searching multiple sites for a product. See what they are seeing.