Better landing page content and design may boost ecommerce conversions.
A small difference in an online merchant's conversion rate can make a huge difference in that merchant's profit. Consider an online retailer with about 20,000 monthly visits and an average order value — sometimes called an average market basket — of $75. If that online store had a 1-percent conversion rate, it could expect about 200 sales or about $15,000 in revenue. At a 2-percent conversion rate, sales would jump to $30,000. Likewise, if the store's conversion rate were a quarter of a percent it would have just $3,750 in revenue.
Unfortunately, increasing conversion rates is typically more of an art than a science. Thus there is not a sure-fire formula — based on some stack of statistics — that an online marketer can just implement to suddenly send sales soaring. Some niche merchants with narrow product lines might enjoy conversion rates as high as 10 percent, while other merchants using identical marketing tactics can barely squeeze out a conversion rate of one-tenth of one-percent.
This realization — that boosting conversions requires a bit of art — doesn't mean that improving conversions is impossible. In fact, there are some basic tactics likely to help, but not guaranteed to do so. Most of these tactics rightly focus on optimizing and improving landing page design and content. This article's goal is to get you thinking about your landing pages' make up and to give you a few ideas that might help improve sales.
What's a Landing Page?
To define terms, the landing page is the initial page on a merchant's site that a shopper sees when arriving from a pay-per-click ad, search engine results page, or similar link.
This is a store's first and best hope of selling.
1. Continuity First
Many online marketers are masters at driving site traffic. These marketers create amazing PPC ad copy. But if the landing page on the other side of the link does not deliver what the ad promised or what the customer expected, there will almost certainly be an immediate disconnect.
In fact, a lack of continuity will almost certainly mean the loss of a sale. Consider a recent search for “men's jeans” on Google, which resulted in an ad leading to a site featuring women's jeans. Someone shopping for a male is not likely to convert from this landing page.
In contrast, a merchant who had been advertising a particular style of ladies' jeans saw a significant boost in conversions by repeating the offer from the ad on the landing page.
Consider testing a few options for both ad and landing page messaging.
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