Website optimization

What is the purpose of a landing page? Recently, you customized a landing page to boost sales for a product. Can you tell us more about that? 

The purpose of the landing page was to sell our flagship product, the Israel Bible. It was already being sold through other platforms, but we wanted to highlight this product in particular without other distractions like other products and content. The aim was to see how many sales we could make without having users browsing a page or the site. This page provided a streamlined process in making this purchase. 

Any common mistakes that people make?

1- Firstly, companies sometimes build the page as if they are the ones using it. They use jargon or insider language which is confusing to other users. In terms of the language, content and design you want to think about your end user who needs to be educated. You want your website to be user friendly in terms of navigation and content. 

2- Sometimes people hand off a website to a graphic designer. It may turn out beautiful, but the purpose of a website is not to serve as artwork that you will hang on your wall. The goal is to engage people. It is about conversions and producing sales. The design needs to be primarily focused and built for the user experience. 

3- Often websites spend a fair amount of space on describing their product. While this may make sense to you, your user cares less about the product itself and more about how the product can improve their life, business or organization. For example, if you were considering purchasing a new vacuum cleaner, you would probably care less about the wattage and more about how this particular product will be effective in easily cleaning your home.

What worked? What didn’t? How did you know? 

Way too often people come up with good ideas, and they throw them out there and wait to see what happens. What we did in the case of this landing page was setting up a strategic plan including tracking and measuring results. There is no secret sauce here- we used Google analytics, an additional tool for heat maps and screen recording, and we set up a funnel. We kept track of how many people came to the page? Did they make it to check out? Did they fill out their email? What elements of the form did they complete? We were able to see right away that many were clicking on the form and filling it out, but they were not completing the purchase. We viewed the screen recordings and realized that the PayPal process was confusing. We improved that checkout process and in doing so, increased sales by 33%. 

Any other pro tips to share?

View each product on its own. What is special and unique about one product may not be relevant to other products of yours. As a result of this, while you may have success with one landing page, you might have an inclination to say that you have found the secret sauce and want to simply swap photos etc, you will not be successful. You need to make sure that you are explaining and expressing the value of each particular product. One size does not fit all when it comes to internet marketing.