Landing Pages For Jewelers Part 1: Landing Pages vs. Websites
February 08, 2018 (0 comments)
Using landing pages the right way is a very important part of digital marketing. Its often easy to spot the web designers who have a lot of experience - they have a strong understanding of landing pages.
Any jeweler who runs promotional campaigns (all of you) needs to understand landing pages if they want to excel online and make more people take advantage of their offers. This month, I'll be doing a weekly article on landing pages. By the end of series, you should have a strong understanding of what landing pages are, why you use them, and how to make your marketing campaigns more effective.
Landing Pages vs. Websites
The homepage of your website is designed to welcome organic traffic. People searching for your business on Google, visitors browsing for new jewelry ideas, etc. So your homepage should be a "catch all" type of experience - showing little pieces of everything. For example, the menu bar, news articles, product highlights, etc.
This is to make sure the visitor can find what they want, and also to give them a feel for your brand. After all, they came to their website on their own. You don't know why they're there.
With your marketing campaigns, however, you DO know why they're there. If you start a new promotion for a specific piece of jewelry, and people click the ad to go to your site, you know they're there for that ring.
This is precisely why you should not bring them to your site's standard homepage. All the graphics, news articles, and other elements on your homepage are helpful to general visitors. But for specific marketing campaigns, all those things on your home page are distractions that can prevent the visitor from taking advantage of the offer you sent.
The general rule of thumb for your website:
Your homepage is for accepting general website traffic.
Specific landing pages should be used for each and every marketing campaign you run to your site. Marketing campaigns should never be run without a landing page.
What Is A Landing Page?
A landing page is a single page on your website, made specifically for a marketing campaign. Its dedicated to one goal. By
dedicated, we mean that the page has (virtually) no ties to your website, and serves only one purpose: getting your visitors to convert through a single call to action.
The only thing on this page should be information and graphics specifically referencing the marketing campaign you're running.
The easiest way to remember it is this: If you're running a special, bring your website visitors to a page thats only talking about the special. Nothing else. The header, headline, graphics, wording, and call to action should all speak about the marketing objective. Drop everything else on the page. Many landing pages don't even have a menu at the top. We want the visitor to be focused on only completing the offer. Nothing else.
Understanding Attention Ratio
As I mentioned, the key is eliminating distractions on your page that could deter visitors from taking advantage of your offer. Take a look at this screenshot of our homepage.
Each red circle is around something that competes with our attention ratio. We always want our attention ratio to be as low as possible. In this example, there are 16 different things the visitor can click.
So our attention ratio is 16:1. 16 representing the actions someone can take on the page, and 1 representing the goal of converting a customer (the goal is always 1, because we should always only have a singular goal for each marketing campaign and landing page).
This is fine for a homepage. Homepages are designed to encourage exploration and let visitors browse the site. However, if this were a landing page, there would be 16 things competing with our visitor's attention. This is why when we run marketing campaigns promoting Jewelry Ecomm, we have dedicated landing pages designed to sign people up. Nothing else.
Next week we'll review what makes a good landing page. Enjoy!
