5 Best Practices for E-Commerce Landing Page Optimization
5 Best Practices for Optimizing E-Commerce Landing Pages
When it comes to optimizing e-commerce email campaigns, much effort is typically focused on improving open rates. Although open rates certainly are pivotal to a campaign’s success, marketers often ignore one of the most critical areas of optimization: an email’s dedicated landing page. Yet that’s where the deal is sealed and conversion happens.
How to Quantify the Impact of Landing Page Optimization
To demonstrate how a small improvement in landing page conversion can have a huge impact on your email-marketing return on investment (ROI), we turn to FulcrumTech’s email-modeling tool, ROI Goalsetter. The following example shows what a 20% improvement (e.g., from 2% to 2.4%) in your landing page conversion rate can do for your email campaign results. In this scenario, we use a list size of 150,000, an open rate of 12%, and a click-through rate of 2%.
By slightly improving the landing page conversion rate, the base revenue in this case study increased from $127, 726 to an impressive $153,271. In addition, the ROI jumped from about 474% to nearly 589%.
What kind of improvement can you expect in email ROI by optimizing your e-commerce landing pages and improving conversion rates? Find out by creating a free ROI Goalsetter account and plugging in your own email-marketing information.
How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Landing Pages and Drive Up Conversion Rates
As you look for ways to optimize your landing pages, here are five key best practices to consider:
- Keep the design clean and simple. Landing pages with too much information — heavy in text and graphic elements — can overwhelm users. The more people have to work to complete the landing page’s goal, the higher the risk that they’ll give up before converting. Some specific examples of how to create an effective design include:
- Make the copy easy to scan and read
- Keep paragraphs short and succinct
- Use bullets and informative subheads to highlight major product benefits
- Create an eye path that directs users’ attention to the conversion goal
- Provide links with more-detailed product information, other product shots, and/or videos, rather than listing it all on the landing page.
- Be sure the landing page design and copy is consistent with the email that generated the visit. Users should feel as though they are continuing from the email on which they clicked. From the headline to the call to action, be sure the branding on the landing page is similar to that found in the email. This includes having a strategically placed and prominent logo.
- Use benefit-driven headlines to grab users’ attention from the start. What’s your brand’s value proposition? Hit prospects with it right away in your landing page’s headline. The headline should also be congruent with the subject line and headline of the email that brought users there. Plus, keep in mind that, similar to subject lines, clear beats clever when it comes to headlines.
- Create compelling, persuasive, and well-designed calls to action. This is an essential ingredient for getting users to complete the goal of your landing page and convert. Here are a few top tips for creating effective calls to action:
- Be sure the call to action is above the fold and offers multiple calls to action for longer landing pages
- Use white space and contrasting colors to help the call to action stand out
- Consider incorporating directional cues, such as arrows, to direct attention to your call to action
- Use power verbs and “my” versus “your” in the call-to-action copy
- Create a sense of urgency.
- Build trust in your landing page. You may find that using techniques to increase the credibility for your brand and products featured on a landing page will greatly improve your conversion rates. Here are a few things you can include to do just that:
- Customer reviews
- Product recommendations
- Awards
- Guarantee seals
- Third-party security certifications.
Primary Takeaways for E-Commerce Landing Pages
The most important takeaway for e-commerce landing pages is to be sure they are consistent with the associated email campaign’s content and creative. For example, if a subscriber clicks through from an email that promotes a specific product, or category of products, make sure that’s what he or she finds on the landing page. The harder people have to work to achieve the conversion goal, the more likely they will abandon the landing page before converting.
How do you know for sure that your landing page strategy is successful? Testing and optimizing the various copy and design elements of your landing pages is the best way to gauge success and continually improve performance results.
Click here for a great set of WhichTestWon’s award-winning case studies of landing page tests that show landing page optimization that works and doesn’t work. Plus, you can sign up for WhichTestWon’s weekly emails that allow you to test your skills at predicting the winners of landing page tests.
Are the landing page conversion rates for your email campaigns meeting your marketing goals? FulcrumTech can help design, test, and optimize your e-commerce landing pages for top performance results. Contact us and get started today!
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