If you are in the business of ecommerce, then you’re also in the business of top website design. One cannot exist without the other – simply because ecommerce is carried out on webpages.
Once you start thinking like this, the key challenges to overcome become apparent. Bounce rate is an important concept in web design, and it refers to the rate of visitors to your website who click away without exploring any further or taking any action. You want to get this number down.
Furthermore, where web design is concerned, this is all down to the quality of the landing page. Or, more accurately, we should say landing “pages” – plural.
A landing page is any visitor’s point of entry to your website – or the first page they see. This is most commonly the homepage, but visitor could also click onto a product category page, a blog post, or some other page on the site. For getting that bounce rate down, it’s easy to see how important the landing page is. If it’s not up to scratch, the visitor will bounce.
This means that even if your website contains lots of excellent content, and the type of products that are perfect the visitors who discover the site, the landing page could still be spoiling things. This is where that infamous “bounce” happens, and so it follows that the landing page should instantly encourage the visitor to engage further with the website. Above everything else, this is the most important thing to keep in mind.
A Powerful Tool
Another reason the landing page is so important to get right is that it is such a powerful tool – both for your website’s success and the success of your marketing. Landing pages are a part of marketing campaigns because marketing material will always (or should always) link to a landing page. You wouldn’t post an ad on Facebook that didn’t include a link back to the website where the products or services can actually be purchased.
This might hint to you that the landing page should be aesthetically unified with the marketing campaign. That is absolutely the case. A sure way to see a higher bounce rate is if visitors reach your landing page and are greeted with something totally different from any of the marketing material that led them there. Your brand, for example, should be well and consistently represented in both the marketing material and the landing page.
This is the reason landing pages are so important. Website design company Azola Creative say that calling in professionals is the only way to truly optimize your landing pages. Nevertheless, learning what makes a good one is still essential knowledge for anybody running an ecommerce business.
Tips for Landing Pages
So, here follows a few aspects of a great landing page:
Clear Headings and Subheadings
An instant impression is what you want to make. And you want to ensure every visitor (immediately) that they have come to the right place. Clear and informative headings are a must.
Your Brand
This should be clearly visible on any landing page. It announces your company and reinforces brand identification. This is especially effective if the visitor has clicked through marketing material which also reinforces the brand.
Calls-to-Action
A call-to-action (CTA) is anything that prompts and allows a visitor to interact with page. They include things like subscription buttons, feedback boxes, email mailing list fields, and so on. Including these on the landing page is a terrific way to prevent the visitor from clicking away.
Ultimately, you can think of the landing page as your website’s front door – and your site might have several front doors.
