In sales, everyone knows it’s a lot easier to call a potential client from a pre-qualified lead, rather than making a cold call.
With landing pages, the only people viewing your page are pre-qualified leads. That mom who searched for a “life sized stuffed green moose” for her son’s birthday ended up on your stuffed animal landing page.
The toy company that paid for the landing page is crossing its fingers, hoping that this mom will click the “buy now” button to graciously add a life-sized moose to the shopping cart.
It’s not green, but it will do. She clicks buy now, and oh wait, the landing page doesn’t go to the shopping cart, it goes to the homepage. Oops.
This actually happened to me. Not the buying of a large stuffed moose, but ending up on a homepage after clicking through a landing page.
Being in the landing page design bizzz myself, I’ve been much more observant of landing page usability issues out there and to be honest I’ve been disappointed – a lot.
I’ve endured landing pages that have all of their site’s normal navigation, others that link to the homepage instead of directing me to what I want, and still others that inundate me with multiple products.
These left me confused, and more importantly, kind of sad. There are a lot of people out there who are spending a lot of time and money to create landing pages, and some simple changes could make them more effective.
People! Have we forgotten about what we are here to do? We cannot expect people to stay focused and click the “Buy Now” button when the design distracts them with navigation links.
Even worse, why lead them astray with actual pictures of other products and eventually off the landing page.
Keep it simple. The purpose of the landing page is to keep the person on a direct path, a direct path to the shopping cart, or whatever gauges your conversion.
You don’t need to show all of your products on a landing page, just the one they want to buy. You can show them that later. And save the navigation bar for your actual website.
These are some quick changes that will help you sell more life-sized moose – green or otherwise.
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Oneupweb is the only two-time winner of the ClickZ award for “Best Search Engine Engine Marketing Firm”. StraightUpSearchs blog authors include experts from Oneupwebs natural SEO, pay-per-click campaign management, research, marketing, design, and sales departments.
