eCommerce product landing pages and why they should play a key role in promoting your online shop

As someone with a proud background in retail shop management, I recall with much fondness the spare time between rush periods where I would delight in tearing apart last month’s window display and filling it up again with new and exciting products or products I admired so much that I felt every passing customer needed to know about them! I had a habit of taking photos of my displays, and I still have those pics tucked away somewhere! I was really proud of what I put together; some of the props looked great, and to see people standing there staring at the displays before walking down the stairs into the shop made all the effort worth it. Happy days indeed.

An early lesson I learned, however, was to remove emotional attachment to those displays and to monitor which products generated interest and which products were ignored (often my personal faves were the ones being ignored!). Over time I got better at choosing a good balance of products that would not only look amazing in the display but would translate across to direct enquiries or sales.

A website product landing page is your opportunity to showcase your favourite or best selling products and to give the product some finer attention. These specialist pages are opportunities to spread your creative wings a little and to provide information that would otherwise crowd the product’s actual shop page with too much information. Specifically, you could place an additional set of photos that further demonstrate the product’s application in a real world situation (think of a power drill being used to build a fence, or similar; a standout piece of apparel being worn at the Melbourne Cup - you get the picture).

Landing pages can also serve as places where video can be positioned, or how-to guides that discuss the product’s best, or not as well known, attributes. A video series could demonstrate to customers 30-60 second slots of using the product, similar products with relevance to the product in question, and so on. Video promotion is another subject entirely.

Blogs are also a perfect vehicle for product landing pages, and if your website CMS allows dynamic control of content, then try embedding every blog relevant to the product onto its landing page, or at least providing links to a blog that further discuss the product in a different light. The possibilities for the product’s promotion are limitless.

Live polls can also feature on a landing page, with the poll campaign promoted via your Twitter account inviting followers to vote, and offering a promotion discount code on the page as a reward for contributing. The awesomeness of your "display" should work towards drawing in an audience, and from there you encourage that audience to become active participants. Great for the page, great for Google and good fun for your visitors.

A word of warning about text styling: don't go nuts with the coloured crayons. Break your page sections up by using your website's pre-defined styles (i.e. p, h1, h2, h3 and so on). A carefully thought out page that uses your website's CSS file to control styles will present far more professionally than a cocophony of silly fonts, colours and jumbo size text.

Above all, don't forget your call to action - the whole idea here is to make sales!

Finally, landing pages also serve pay-per-click campaigns well because the landing page can be optimised specifically for the PPC ad, with optimised page title, META description and so on. In fact, PPC experts highly recommend it.

So if your online shop sales are quiet, why not take advantage of the lull between the next rush period and spend a few hours building a dynamic and exciting landing page that showcases your favourite product! Then drop an easily seen link to the page on your Home page or any other prominent area on your website. The sky's the limit!

Do you have a special showcase page that you'd like to share with a wide audience? Post a comment and let's take a look.

Happy eRetailing!