When most new ecommerce marketers hear the word landing page, it brings to mind a mountain of work and it can sometimes feel exhausting. If your working on a site that is constantly promoting or releasing new products, this may seem like a large portion of your valuable marketing time and energy could be consumed by creating the graphics, copy, and code needed for a landing page. You may think that you cannot afford to create landing pages, but if you are looking to measure success and improve your sales you simply cannot afford to not create effective landing pages.
Why should you include landing pages in your marketing strategy?
The reason is landing pages can be one of the most important components of your ecommerce website. The reasons are many, but we are going to break down many of them here for you.
Clear Message and Accurate Reports
After you first create your Google Adwords, or Facebook Ad campaigns, you'' need to put a great deal of time coming up with the copy, choosing your keywords, and crafting amazing graphic designs. All you need at that point is a link to your website, and the work is finished, right?
Wrong, you couldn't be further from the truth. If you are simply looking to advertise your company as a whole, you may be able to get away with a link to your company's homepage, but you won't be able to get much value out of a strategy like that. Without having a clear call-to-action on your page, your buyers won't know what to do once they get there. Even with a CTA on the main page of your site, it could create more confusion for your customers than being helpful, especially if you're running multiple campaigns at the same time.
If you are looking to promote a specific product, promotion, or sale then you need to have a landing page. Just having a general purpose link to your home page is not enough to track results or direct your customers where to proceed to next. If your customers have to search once they arrive on your site, you will lose the sale.
Generating Opportunities
With a landing page, you get the opportunity to gather more information about your customers and visitors. You can use this opportunity to present exclusive offers in exchange for some contact information from the visitor. This will let you stay on top of where they are in your sales funnel, and allows you to compare the number of times a potential customer has provided you their information versus the number of purchases they have made. Also, this lets you see your bounce rate for campaigns more clearly and could help you adjust your product offerings, design, or message.
Another benefit of having a landing page is that once they do provide your contact information, you can then keep your customers up to date about your latest product offerings and sales. In addition, this could allow you to develop a program to provide discounts or other rewards programs for your loyal customers. You can start focusing on building and developing long-term relationships with your leads.
Search Engine Friendly
One of the top benefits we note for having specific landing pages for your various marketing campaigns is it allows your site to be more effective with its SEO efforts. Having targeted pages to specific topics always is better for rankings then having all of your content on a single page or cluttered together. By creating a landing page for every paid advertisement and internal call-to-action, you are adding more pages to your website. More pages mean Google has more to look at when it is indexing your site. Each page will allow you to provide fresh content and even more opportunities to include your most important search terms. All of which is good news for SEO.
Additionally, with your marketing efforts, you will want to keep your Google AdWords Quality Score in mind. If the keywords in your paid advertisement through Google are also included in your landing pages, then your quality score gets better. Having a higher quality score means you will pay less per click. If you just want to link to your homepage, you won't see any quality score benefits, and your cost per click will increase as a result.
If you are already advertising your ecommerce site's offers and discounts without using landing pages, don't worry it is not too late. We can help you learn how to make landing pages that convert visitors into leads and customers, then show you how to nurture those relationships into long-term loyal repeat customers. Talk to one of our Landing Page experts today about how we can help make your Landing Pages effective and easy to manage.