How are you doing at reviewing your landing pages?  Do you dig into your Analytics frequently?  Are you obsessive over finding the best practices that will lead to the most conversions?  Or do you just let it slide and “take what you can get” from your traffic.  Hopefully not!  How would a 2% conversion rate vs. a 1% rate affect your sales?  We’re talking double the revenue!  So, we should always look at how we can be converting better.

Many ecommerce owners have spent tons of time and energy on their home page, but remember, we live in a long tail world.  Your home page is not the only welcome mat to your website.  In fact, one of MPE’s top strategies are to target long tail keyword phrases.  So, are your deeper landing pages a nice greeting for your visitors?  If not, here are a few tips:

  1. Reassuring Policies – Trust is key.  If you have privacy assurances, guarantees, rebates, returns, or whatever else, tell your first time visitors about them.  Don’t keep them to the home page only, and don’t sink them to the bottom of your page.  Reassure your visitors when they first enter.
  2. Testimonials – Do you have reviews on your site?  Again, a customer testimonial goes a long way in earning a visitor’s trust.  Don’t hoard these on your home page only.  Amazon does a great job at this.
  3. No Credit Card Forms – Think of your first time visitor as a first date.  Are you really going to try to round third and head for home the first time you go out?  Yes, we want the sale.  Yes, lead them to the next step.  But, let’s not get too pushy here.
  4. Email Collection – Invite them to come back. If you have a newsletter, blog, or another way that you maintain an ongoing conversation with customers, you should offer a field for people to subscribe via e-mail and RSS.
  5. Look at Bounce Rate by URL – Dig into your Analytics.  Don’t only look at your home page.  Look at all of your landing pages.  Try to identify what’s working and what isn’t.  Then, make changes that will impact accordingly.

So there you go.  Break the myth that visitors are coming to your site only through your homepage.  Realize that your landing pages are just as critical to driving sales and work at upping your conversion rate.