What Makes a Great Landing Page? E-commerce Retailer Divulges Secrets

A “Landing Page” on your website. What is a landing page? A landing page is the first page a potential customer or client comes to when they “land” on your website or blog. What makes a good landing page? It depends on what your mission is. Do you sell products to the public? Do you sell business to business? Do you want people to participate in the discussion on your blog or forum? You have to decide what you want a person’s first impression to be and what you want to convey very quickly to a potential client or customer. You need a “call to action”.

Our two websites agathaandlouise.com and aandlhome.com are retail websites selling products to the public. Most of the “landing” pages on our website are either individual product pages or category pages. No matter what page you land on when you visit our websites you will see:

• Name of Our Business with Description of what we sell
• Our toll free 800 phone number (method of contacting us) is always visible in the upper right hand corner. So are the badges for the credit cards we accept and our SSL certificate signifying that our websites are secure.
• Our Navigation Bar is prominently displayed high on our website and provides very visible links to the: Home Page, Sale Page, About Us, What’s New, Customer Service, Blog, Contact.
• And (with the exception of a few non-shopping pages) you will see all the different categories of products clearly displayed on the left hand side of the website.

When we started our business we decided that our mission was to have a retail business where we sell products that we love and that we wanted to get to know our customers and in turn we wanted our customers to have the opportunity to know who we are and to be able to contact us. We have attempted to make every landing page on our website reflect this.

Here is an example of a landing page for a product on our website. If you google “Irish Terrier Charm” we are the number one organic result in google (as of October 24, 2009). If you click on our google result this is what you see:

A clear image of the charm, an accurate product description, the price of the charm, images of related Irish Terrier products (which are actually links to those products), the ability to type in the engraving of your dogs name on the back of the charm with price (call to action), buttons to click to share on your social network (call to action), email a friend button (call to action) an add to cart button (call to action) and (on the left side of page) a list of all the different product categories.

This landing page provides multiple opportunities to make a customer or potential customer happy and satisfied. It allows them to purchase the charm, to have the charm engraved (what a nice personal touch and an unexpected surprise), to buy similar products, the ability to share the charm with their friends (via social network and email), and by seeing all the product categories they realize that we have much more to offer them than just a handful of Irish Terrier products.

Since the launching of our websites, I have consulted with Bartlett Interactive multiple times to adjust and change the look of our website to enhance our landing pages and to improve the first impression of our website makes on potential customers. Here are some of the things I do to get the most out of my website:

• I listen to what our customers ask for.
• I google our products a lot to see where search results lead people to on our websites.
• I shop on our websites everyday to try to find errors or potential questions from customers.
• I read my blog everyday and I check links to make sure the links from our blog to our website work and are still live and work properly. *This is very important if you write a blog that links back to your website.

A good landing page is a “work” in progress. It can always be updated and adjusted. Don’t forget that. Remember your mission and provide a “call to action”. You’ll end up with more happy customers. Isn’t that every business owner’s “mission”?

Above all, we wish to avoid having a dissatisfied customer.
-Leon Leonwood Bean (founder of LL Bean)