Optimising Christmas landing pages

Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year, and many businesses find themselves vying for sales. An essential element of any successful e-commerce marketing campaign is to have an optimised landing page for both web and mobile. This post looks at best practices to make sure your website converts traffic to sales.

You have the stock ready to go, mailing lists for festive emails set up, PPC adverts prepared and social media ads and posts created all to direct traffic, but is your Christmas landing page optimised for users to be easily able to find what they are looking for and, most importantly, to convert into sales?

The path to a sale

The best way to funnel customers for big events is to a specific optimised page rather than the homepage. Customers will automatically choose the path of least resistance so to increase conversions, you need to have clearly defined subcategories to keep customer focus and to make sure the creatives and content used in marketing activities (PPC, email and social media), which is what brought them to your website, are easily identifiable on your pages so they don’t lose interest.

The Christmas category landing page

There is much information needed on the Christmas category page: your subcategories which feature your products, promotions, calls to action, social media and blog content. Meta descriptions (300 characters or less) are your first sale messages and need to be informative, descriptive and representative of what is on the page. Adding to this, page content, utilising keywords and internal linking while avoiding duplicate content will help Google identify the relevance. Page Title tags are a strong indicator to Google and help your page rank. A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page, make sure its relevant to the page content and you follow consistency with other pages on your website.

Tips:

• Keep the content on your page consistent to the content used in your marketing campaigns.
• Avoid mixed messages to customers to keep bounce rates down.
• Use relevant product images, banners and features which are shot clearly.
• Make sure all creatives are in keeping with the theme of Christmas.
• Designs should attract the eye of the customer.

Design

The design of your landing page needs to not only work on large desktop screens but across a range of devices, most importantly mobile which accounts for an ever-growing percentage of web traffic. The user interface should be clear, easy to follow and with strong calls to action (CTA).

Creating layouts that work across screen sizes with responsive design is important so that you ensure that the layout adjusts suitably to the user’s device. It’s a missed opportunity if you don’t check whether resized elements have become too small or hidden and that the information remains in a logical order that promotes conversion.

Tips:

Add banners which create a sense of urgency to carry conversions and reduce bounce rate such as:

• Product and site promotions.
• A countdown calendar.
• Free delivery offer.
• Notice of when to order for delivery before Christmas.

Display these prominently and use this to keep customers on site and convert their items in basket or wishlist to sales.

Speed

Keeping customers engaged and returning to your business is the ultimate goal. With Christmas being a busy time of year, you want to tick all the boxes for your online presence to ensure the highest impact.

Your websites site speed is a huge factor for customers visiting and browsing through your website. If your webpages are slow to load or poorly performing, then this will drive your users away instantly.

Poor site speed can often result in lower search engine rankings, lower overall site traffic, and negatively affect a users experience. Which will eventually lead people to not wanting to return back. It’s said, conversion rates are significantly higher when users are on fast loading websites.

With all the content on your Christmas category landing page, site speed is an important factor in gaining conversions. Traffic will be coming from various marketing activities to this page and if it’s slow to load, you could see customers drop off before they even get to your website and lose sales. Test your pages using Google PageSpeed Insight and make any adjustments before starting your marketing activities.

Great examples

Getting Personal

I Want One of Those

Firebox

Christmas is the time of year where many businesses look to leverage their e-commerce websites to bring in as many customers as possible and drive sales first and foremost. However, once the sales have been processed, there is no reason why you shouldn’t look at building up brand loyalty. These seasonal customers may then, in turn, become repeat customers, especially if they get the service they are wanting. Keep this in mind while you’re optimising your eCommerce site and working on your marketing activities for the festive season.