Want a perfect landing for your holiday merchandising? Look no further than your landing pages. We’re bringing back this blog post from October 11, 2021, to help you navigate smooth taxiing and landing page prep, and gain you Tom-Cruise-Top-Gun-Maverick-Super-Hornet-8-Gs-Force sales takeoff. Strap in and read on!
What has a rectangular shape, is two-dimensional (no thickness or depth), follows a pattern like the letter F, and has been around since 2003? If you answered the bass clef in a musical measure, well, you are, wait for it . . . absolutely wrong!
But hey, we give you huge bonus points for being an “out-of-the-rectangle” thinker.
Nope. What we are thinking of is that all-powerful rectangle you will be “serving” your online customers this coming holiday season.
Yeppers, the correct answer is . . . landing page!
And we’re here to tell you to get cracking!
As we shared with you in our July (2021) blog post, Holiday Trimmings to Start Hanging Now!, there are a lot of things you can prepare ahead of time so they don’t get forgotten or squeezed out by the time pressure of the holiday selling season.
You can start building Category and Collection pages in Shopify (now), and publish them when the time comes.
Want some idea starters for your pages? How about:
- Mix & Match
- Tops & Bottoms
- Personalized Gift Cards (with a send-date option)
- All Items of a Single Color (“Color Me Yellow”)
- For the Tech Guy or Gal
- For Sister
- For Brother
- Bring-to-the-Party Gift Ideas
- For Rover
- Mother-in-Law Favorites
Here’s where things get interesting. These are the types of pages where cool features such as image hotspots can be used.
Creating a “Me Time” collection with a luxurious robe, oh-so-comfy slippers, bath bombs that are da bomb, and several sensual scented candles? (Ooh, that does sound nice!) Make your page shoppable with simple image hotspots so your buyer can mix and match on their own and put items right into their shopping cart. Cha-ching!
While there are many Shopify apps (and plug-ins for WordPress) to help with image hotspots, many themes, paid and free, have this capability out of the box.
Shopify Themes that Support Image Hotspots:
- Prestige
- Empire
- Boost
- Broadcast
- Icon
- Envy
- Capital
By the way, some history before you start cranking on your landing pages. According to legend, the concept was developed by Microsoft in 2003 when they saw sales of their Office Suite sliding. (Say that five times fast.)
That shape of the letter F? If you look at early landing pages all the way to today’s more “modern” approach, you’ll see an “F” reading pattern, important stuff in the upper left, with additional “convincing” going down the page with call outs, buttons, and other supporting players on the right rail. Eye-tracking studies have proven it works.
Not quite true for the typical merchandise page, but you’ll see that F pattern all over the interwebs.
Need more of a motivator to get started? As this is being written, there are only 72 (make that 30!) days until Thanksgiving. Yikers!