Nail the Landing

Direct catalog-driven traffic to specific pages on your site. Almost all catalogers break the first rule listed above; they print a single URL in their catalogs that dumps everyone onto the homepage.

Why make someone browsing a specific page in your catalog go to your homepage and search for the item? Instead, print destination URLs on pages in your catalog, such as www.touchstonecatalog.com/rooster. Then, populate those pages with the appropriate catalog products.

If your platform lets you add new products and categories, you can easily execute this strategy. With about half of catalog sales occuring via the Web, it's a huge opportunity to increase conversion.

Use your on-site search to “create” appropriate pages. E-mail consultancy Blue Moon Works produced an e-mail offering products in different price ranges for its client, Positive Promotions. Blue Moon used Positive Promotions’ site search to create landing pages for each link in the e-mail that featured only products in the named price range. If you have more advanced search capabilities and use a company like SLI Systems, Mercado or Nextopia Software, you can make your site search into a landing page generator.

Split Testing
Split test different paid-search landing pages. Regardless of which e-commerce platform you’re using, you can split test a Google paid-search ad. In Google, simply create two ads with the same creative, but with links to different pages on your site.

If you’ve applied conversion tracking, Google will even report on the results for you. From your AdWords account, navigate through the campaign management tab to the ad group you’re testing. The ad variation tab will show you the results of your split test.

Split test different e-mail landing pages. Most catalogers test different e-mail creative, but they rarely test the same creative with different landing pages. Try split testing a product page vs. a category page on your site, or two different category pages, or two different product pages, or two different search-results pages.