Where, When, & Why Your eCommerce Store Needs A Well-Designed Landing Page
Landing pages are an important yet underused element of ecommerce.
A well crafted landing page for your ecommerce store is like product packaging for your website in the sense that leaves a great initial impression and makes the buying process more memorable.
You spend money on paid advertising and probably aren’t happy with your conversion rates.
A rough user experience is probably to blame.
A well made landing page is your solution.
An exceptional landing page builds trust and shows that your ecommerce brand is a tried and tested business.
In this article, we’re going to show you how and why a custom landing page is an important tool for your ecommerce store – regardless of what you’re selling. We’ve also sprinkled in a few of the best landing pages for ecommerce.
There are 2 kinds of landing pages
- Click through landing pages for ecommerce are the most widely used. Their goal is to persuade and usher users to click on a certain button and go to a certain page. ‘Shop now’, ‘Add to cart’ for example.
- Lead Generation landing pages are designed to capture an email address or other data. Most often used with lead magnets.
Fantastic example of a click through landing page by Shoesofprey
So what situations should you use a landing page for your ecommerce store?’ Here are a few situations where it makes sense.
- New/Discounted range – Rather than sending people to your category page, create a landing page that shows off the range of products you’re promoting. Make them want the product, THEN take them to the product page.
- Email marketing – Trying to get someone to sign up to your email? Take them to a landing page that shows off previous email newsletters you’ve sent out and what they can expect by signing up.
- Competitions – Submit your email to win X product. Perfect situation for a landing page!
- Discount code – Create an ad on Facebook where one has to visit a landing page to get a discount code. Bonus points here, because you then get their Facebook Pixel for retargeting purposes!
This Lovisorganic landing page directs you to their store and their story.
Ok, I want to be clear –
Landing pages are important for ecommerce, but they are not everything.
People are still going to land on every page of your website, with or without a landing page. Therefore, it’s a good habit to make sure that every page has elements of a well crafted ecommerce landing page.
So what are the elements of a good landing page?
- Convincing
- User focused design
- Clear CTAs (Call to actions)
- Concise
- Builds trust
Let’s explore.
Convincing
It’s the job of an ecommerce landing page to remove a buyer’s hesitations and answer questions they may have. This is the art of actually selling your product.
The copy on your page should show how your product can solve a problem opposed to showing off how fantastic your product is.
The classic example is Apple’s copy writing for the iPod. They didn’t sell 1gb of portable storage, but instead sold 10,000 songs in your pocket.
This builds an emotional rapport and trust with the reader and makes them slide on through your funnel easier.
Bonus Tip: When writing your copy, solve a pain point.
User focused design
User focused design is a tricky way of nudging your shoppers in a specific direction using colors, textures, layouts and other psychological tricks. You make it impossible for a user to look anywhere other than where you want them.
Color palettes play a big role in your landing page design. Use colors and contrast to make the important parts of your landing page stand out – call to actions, for example. Just remember to keep the colors consistent with your branding.
Another example of user focused design is the use of people and faces to draw attention and build trust. Once your landing page has gotten some traffic use Heatmaps to see how your page is performing.
Image courtesy of spotstudio
Clear CTAs
People get distracted and have short attention spans. That’s the exact reason this blog is written for you to scan and not like an Agatha Christie book.
The overall goal of an ecommerce landing page is to get someone to click somewhere, so you need to make that place stand out.
Locabikes make it easy for you to see where to click with a button that follows you as you scroll down the page.
Making your CTA stand out is one half of the puzzle. The other half is removing distractions.
Your customer has landed on your landing page. Great. Now that they’ve read what’s there, they want to continue down your path. Perfect!
Don’t distract them with another deal or links to social media.
Concise
Landing pages for ecommerce are not the place to put huge amounts of writing, infographics or other complicated data. You’re not writing a product description– remember, 3 seconds.
The quicker a user follows through your ecommerce landing page, the more likely they are to give you your money. Don’t waste their precious time.
No wasted space on the simplygum landing page.
Builds trust
Consumer trust is the one thing that you must have for someone to spend their money with you. A disjointed and inconsistent user experience will send people running from even the most beautiful website. Your whole web site should build trust, but on your landing page:
- Continue your branding, themes and moods onto your landing page.
- Include social proof in the form of testimonials and Instagram or User Generated Content.
- Don’t exaggerate. Claiming to be the ‘world’s best’ is too much.
- Be transparent by mentioning return policies
Ritual doing landing pages right.
Wrapping up.
These are some of the most important elements to building an ecommerce landing page that converts. Some other little things to take into consideration about landing pages:
- Create urgency. by making it time-based. A countdown to the end of the limited offer. This will work for products in limited numbers or counting down to the end of a sale. Use sparingly!
- A/B test between different elements. Change an image or a CTA button colour for a week then see which one converts more. Don’t change more than one thing at a time.
- Know the medium. Are they repeat visitors to your page or first timers?
- Know the buying cycle. Are they ready to spend today (purchase mode) or are they still browsing around (research mode)?