The Importance Of Safe Landings During The Festive Season

As you create or build your online store, it’s important to consider how visitors will arrive there – and it’s mainly all about their landing. Landings are especially important around the busy festive season, and we're not talking about a jolly fat man in a red coat landing safely on your roof!

So let's explore why creating the right landing page can make everyone a winner this Christmas.

Create A Smooth Landing

Smooth landings are vital for the success as you sell online through your ecommerce platform. Imagine someone is conducting a search for a specific gift they wish to buy, an item of clothing they are keen to own, or a service that might be needed during the holiday season. This person has entered specific search terms to deliver the answers they wish. At the other end of the web is your online store. There is a match between their search and your carefully created SEO content. Therefore, they click through to visit your website.

Fashion retail store Urban Outfitters cover specific gift search terms by creating a variety of gift collections. A great way to really get found on Google when shoppers are searching online for the ultimate gift this Christmas.

Don't Crash Land!

So far their journey has been smooth and successful. Sadly, the equivalent of a crash landing and bounce-off is about to take place. Your click-through visitor arrives at what they expect to be an information page on a specific product or service – let’s use a specific model of handbag as an example. At worst, they would accept a page that is a general introduction to the range of such products that you stock, with an immediate chance to click onto the model of their choice.

Sadly, where they actually touchdown is simply your general welcome homepage. In our example, you may be running a general ecommerce fashion store. You have now ticked your visitor off, because they haven’t spotted exactly what they are searching for. They’re probably hassled as well, having umpteen things to do to prepare for all the upcoming festivities. Yet, at this moment, you are asking them to do the work that should have been done for them and locate a specific page and product somewhere on your site.

Author Douglas Adams once said that

...I like the whooshing sounds of deadlines as they passed him by

The whooshing sound you hear is from visitors simply lifting off back to the search engine to find another source – and that's likely to be one of your competitors. This is because you have missed their deadline of only a few seconds to interest and engage them. That's why it’s so important to include key landing pages for individual products or ranges within your site to optimise returns from visitors. On arriving, they quickly find the item they are looking for, are given the information they need, expressed in their terms – and are then asked to take action, such as clicking through to the shopping cart.

Online fashion retail store Boohoo, show us a great example with a christmas sale landing page. You too can create the same look by adding beautifully designed banners, video and crisp HD images to your collections.

One Last Thing...

This is the final important key in the construction of effective landing pages. These are not final destinations, merely platforms to progress your customer’s visit to where you truly want them to be – the place where they make a purchase. When CEO of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts noted that:

"Store windows are like landing pages on the website".

Achieving this allows your visitor to reach their goal and you to achieve the sale – and both everyone's a winner.

Happy Holidays!