How to increase your Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Landing Pages
In this series, we explain how retail stores can boost ecommerce conversion rates. In this part, we show how to structure landing pages to deliver a better customer experience.
In 2021, retail ecommerce sales were estimated at $4.9 trillion US dollars worldwide. Over the next four years, that's predicted to grow by 50%, reaching $7.4 trillion by 2025.
For many businesses, this increase will be critical to their growth and expansion into new markets and territories. More and more, companies will need to strengthen their online e-commerce presence and there can be significant commercial benefits from doing so.
In this blog series, we share the best practices that, when implemented, will ensure your company has a successful e-commerce website that results in an immediate increase in sales.
This article details how to effectively use landing pages to drive sales, as this is where your customers will begin their online interaction with you.
Make Navigation Engaging
Many e-commerce sites predominantly consist of only two page templates: a product page and a product collection page. The problem with using this approach, is that grids and lists of products do not deliver the best possible user experience because they are not captivating enough.
Users find it difficult to navigate never-ending grids of product collections, which all look the same. There is nothing to anchor them and they lose their place in the site, which disrupts their shopping journey. The shopper becomes disorientated and quickly loses interest.
So, what can you do to ensure you are offering an engaging customer experience? You can start by using landing pages to attract the customer, rather than presenting them with a mere list, or grid, of products.
Curate Your Product Collections
First, turn your collection pages into comprehensive landing pages that allow customers to easily view closely related products. For example, end of line items or items by the same designer.
When redesigning the website of iconic home furnishing brand, Graham & Brown, we enabled their marketing team to put these collection pages together to create an improved user experience for their customers.
For example, a customer interested in designer Kelly Hoppen is able to clearly find and explore her wall art, or, a parent with a child obsessed with Elsa can search for decor by Disney character.
These pages display a curated set of products to the customer and, as a result, are even more valuable when it comes to promoting seasonal stock additions or coordinating specific marketing initiatives. House of Fraser delivers another example of this. They promote their baking merchandise with a unique landing page, capturing customers through their interest in the BBC’s popular Great British Bake Off.
Mix Content, Products & Lifestyle
To further increase the value of your landing pages, you can combine ‘curated collections’ with relevant and engaging content. Elements such as glossy and captivating images, information about designers and even the inclusion of blogs and articles will all increase the quality of your site. Combining ‘curated collections’ with excellent content makes the landing pages inspirational and engages the shopper. They are taken on a journey and provided with a measurably improved customer experience.
In order to provide the flexibility to create this experience, it is often better to start with a Content Management System (CMS) platform that enables e-commerce, rather than an dedicated e-commerce platform, as these often have limited content management capabilities. Dyson’s engaging site is a clear example of this. Using the Sitecore CMS, they seamlessly blend product information and lifestyle articles with visually engaging multimedia that captures the customer. For Graham & Brown, we used the same Sitecore CMS platform, to give them a flexible platform with adaptable templates to bring product and inspirational content together.
How you can apply these recommendations
If your site receives a healthy amount of visitor traffic, but your number of product page views are low or you find people are not clicking “add to basket”, the best place to start is with your landing pages.
We recommend you use ‘curated collections’ together with wider content on your landing pages to give customers a captivating first impression. This will encourage them to explore further and begin the journey from first time visitor to loyal advocate, which will lead to an increase in your revenue and customer satisfaction.
Next on our priority list is your site’s search function. Using search successfully is another vital component to increase your conversion or revenue rates.
