Imagine going to a store full of products without any sales representatives or other employees. There’s no one to help you with your purchase or answer your questions. You can just pick up whatever you like, pay for it and leave. But are you going to buy anything, especially if you’ve never tried the products before or if it’s your first time visiting the store? Most likely not.
Ecommerce landing pages are like the sales representatives of your online store. They introduce your website to the visitor, show them what you have to offer, convince them to buy relevant products, and leave them with a positive impression that persuades them to come back the next time. Landing pages add a human element to an online store. The more of the human element that’s present, the better. In fact, if your website has fewer than 10 landing pages, you are likely to get seven times fewer leads than websites with over 30 landing pages. Shocker, right?
Landing pages are an ecommerce platform must-have. Get to know them in more detail, discover the benefits of landing pages for your business, and figure out how to use them.
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What Are Ecommerce Landing Pages?
When a visitor clicks on a hyperlink or types a URL into the browser, the webpage they arrive at is called the landing page. From your homepage to your product or service-specific pages, a visitor may potentially arrive at any page depending on what they are searching for. Any standalone page on your website, created specifically for marketing purposes, is a landing page.
An ecommerce landing page has two clear objectives: enticing the visitor to take action, such as buying a product or service or signing up for a newsletter, and creating an impact. Being able to create an impact is what makes the difference between visitors staying on your page and bouncing.
What’s the Difference Between Product Pages and Ecommerce Landing Pages?
The major difference between product pages and ecommerce landing pages lies in how each type of page goes about selling a product or service. The techniques and end goals of product pages and landing pages are very different, even though they may seem similar on the surface. A product page tries to educate the visitor while an ecommerce landing page tries to convert them.
The above image shows a landing page. It contains a clear goal or CTA (call to action) and all the content is written around that goal, without any additional pathways such as site navigation. Landing pages are tailored for a target audience. It appeals to a specific buyer persona and is optimized for marketing campaigns. Landing pages use social proof and make an offer the visitor can’t refuse.
While roughly 72% of visitors who land on a product page bounce, those who land on an ecommerce landing page tend to remain on the page longer. This is because a landing page is designed to retain visitors and meet conversion goals. The main benefit of landing pages is that they intrigue the visitor, which then leads them to visit product pages to know more about the website’s product and service offerings.
The image above shows a product page. As you can see, the page entirely focuses on the minute details of the product being sold. It is aimed at educating whoever reaches the product page and is not targeted toward a specific buyer persona. It can contain additional pathways such as site navigation, product categories, and multiple CTAs, to help visitors navigate the rest of the website.
The information on the product page has to be detailed enough to answer the prospective buyer’s queries. If the product details seem satisfactory, the buyer makes the purchase and if it doesn’t, they either look for other products on the website or leave.
Benefits of Landing Pages for Your Ecommerce Business
Creating an ecommerce landing page offers a lot of benefits that other pages, such as a product page or homepage, do not offer. Here’s everything you stand to gain from creating a landing page for your business:
1. More ROI
ROI (return on investment) involves not only the money you invest in creating your website but also the time and effort you put in. Your ROI is going to be low if your web pages are not targeted to a specific audience. With landing pages, you can create multiple offerings that target different sections of your audience instead of bombarding the visitor with everything you have to offer. This way, ecommerce landing pages can massively improve your ROI.
Studies show that you can increase ROI by 223% if you use CRO (conversion rate optimization) tools. You can also use certain marketing pairings that boost ROI.
2. Lead Generation
Lead generation is the generation of consumer interest for a product or service. The goal is to turn that interest into a sale. This typically involves collecting a visitor’s contact information or a “lead” via a web form on an ecommerce landing page.
Most ecommerce web design companies use personalized content and tailored offers by matching the landing page to the specific interest of the visitor. Introducing intuitive and clear-cut navigation through landing pages can have a positive impact on lead generation. You can use online lead generation services to get similar results for your business.
3. Higher Conversions
When you get someone to take a desired action, such as clicking on your ad, subscribing to your email list, or buying your product, it counts as a conversion. Landing pages are great at converting visitors for the same reason they can generate more leads and increase your ROI. They’re personalized!
With a targeted landing page, every visitor finds something of interest when they land, which motivates them to take the action you want them to take. When you shorten the customer’s buying process through an effective ecommerce landing page, you provide value upfront. Add in an immediate, tangible reward such as discount codes or a free trial, and you’ve got the visitor on the hook.
4. A/B Testing Opportunities
A/B testing or split testing is a marketing experiment that splits the audience to test several variations of a campaign and determine which one performs better. As a standalone page, the major benefit of landing pages is that they are testable.
You can tweak the copy, design, images, CTA, and other page elements as many times as you like without the risk of making major design changes to your entire blog or website infrastructure. It lets you eliminate any digital grinches that will impact your eCommerce sales. In fact, 44% of companies use a split-testing tool because it is regarded as the best method for improving conversions.
5. Customer Response and Engagement
Customer response refers to your reaction to the activities of the customer. Through a customized ecommerce landing page, you can respond to a common theme of customer search queries or demands. When customers feel seen, heard, and understood by you as a brand, it incentivizes them to stay on your website and purchase your products or services.
Customer response and engagement is a two-way street—you show the customer you care, and they respond by willingly interacting with your website. For instance, if you use middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead-management strategies on your landing pages, you will get a 4-10% higher response rate than a generic approach to reaching out to customers.
6. Marketing Insights
Marketing insights refer to information that helps you develop a deep understanding of leads, customers, competitors, and the industry. By testing out various types of ecommerce landing pages with segmented offers, over time, you can easily gauge what works and what does not.
You can track preferred lead generation channels, promotions that result in conversions, topics that convert at the highest rate, content that retains customer attention, and CTAs that get the most clicks. All this valuable information can tell you a lot about your audience’s interest and help you develop a more targeted, personalized marketing strategy.
7. Grow Your Email List
An email list is a collection of email addresses of potential and existing customers who have consented to receiving alerts and promotions from your business. An overarching benefit of landing pages is that it lets you exchange your site visitor’s name and email address for the content or promotion offered. Email lists can be further segmented to provide more personalized follow-ups.
Creating a subscriber list through an ecommerce landing page has the major benefit of curating high-quality leads. This limits your email list to people who have interacted with your landing page and engaged with it deeply enough to provide their contact details. Chances are, with the right email marketing strategies, they will be interested in buying your products or services as well.
Types of Landing Pages
Ecommerce landing pages come in various styles, each serving a unique purpose. Here are the five most commonly used landing pages:
1. Click-Through Landing Page
As the name implies, click-through landing pages are made to get a click from the visitor. It is a simple page in between your ad and your shopping cart. It provides just enough context and details about an offer to warm up the leads to a transaction and directs them to the purchase page. The sole benefit of this type of landing page is to make an instant sale.
2. Lead Generation or Squeeze Page
A lead-capturing landing page collects email addresses through incentives. Lead generation web design focuses on creating a page with no exit path, links, or navigation, but only a button to submit the visitor’s details. In exchange, the visitor is given an incentive such as an eBook download, discount codes, registration to a webinar, free trials, newsletter sign-up, or some gated content. This type of ecommerce landing page is useful for building audience lists and sending them targeted information and ads later on.
3. Infomercial/Long-Form Landing Page
A long-form landing page, also known as a sales letter, sucks the user in with a lot of information. Every aspect of the features and benefits of a product is discussed in detail. As the user keeps reading, they are enticed to read more and become committed to reading the rest of it until they reach either the end of the page or the CTA. This is an ecommerce landing page specifically targeting people at the bottom of the sales funnel who are ready to purchase and only need the final push.
4. Video Landing Page
A video landing page uses a video to sell a product or service to the customer. This type of landing page uses any complimentary copy or images sparsely as the attention is supposed to be on the video. The video is usually a few minutes long and contains an offer that the viewer can access only after watching all or at least a sufficient portion of the video. A video ecommerce landing page can be a part of marketing campaigns for expensive products or gated content.
5. Microsites
A microsite is a small supplementary website that can be more than one page, published either as part of the parent site or on its own. It has its own URL and uses high-budget designs. It is part of a fairly large campaign, such as a car model or movie trailer release. Creating a microsite is a potent way to increase web traffic and revenue for a brand launch or a popular product launch.
Tips for Creating the Best Ecommerce Landing Page
If you understand the benefits of landing pages and are willing to leverage them on your website, here are some tips for creating successful SEO landing pages:
- Go for a simple design. Use an easily scannable layout with section breaks, headers, and bullet points that break down the information into smaller chunks. You do not want to distract or confuse the visitor. The aim is to catch their attention and impress them within seconds.
- Ensure that there is no site navigation. There shouldn’t be any navigation bars present on an ecommerce landing page. Site navigation buttons allow people to click away from your offer without converting first. Your CTA should be the only button they can click on the page.
- Use high-quality videos and images. Visuals draw visitors; attention and copy compel them to convert. Without attractive visuals, your copy strategy won’t work. Visual elements also help convey ideas that cannot be properly articulated through words, create powerful associations with your brand, and establish your media presence.
- Be consistent with paid ad campaigning efforts. If the visitor has reached the landing page through paid advertisement, the copy on the landing page should match the message on the paid ad. This assures the visitor that they’ve found what they’re looking for.
- Use your brand voice. All of your ecommerce landing pages should use a consistent brand voice so that when a visitor lands on your page, they can easily identify your brand. Creating familiarity is the first step in fostering trust and recognition.
- Tailor it to the intended sales funnel. Modify the landing page according to the type of visitor you are hoping to engage. For top-of-the-funnel visitors, emphasizing your brand value and providing social proof is important. Long-form landing pages with elaborate product details and discount codes work for bottom-of-the-funnel visitors.
- Include only one CTA. Ensure that the message is clear and specific. It should evoke enthusiasm and urgency. Test your CTA button multiple times to figure out what works best.
- Take care of the mobile optimization aspect. Most ecommerce transactions happen on mobile (as much as 53.3%). Therefore, it is essential that your ecommerce landing page is optimized for mobile to enhance user experience. This includes creating vertically aligned pages, images, and videos, minimizing copy, optimizing the page load speed, and including tappable buttons.
- Use social proof. These are positive reviews or testimonials of previous buyers which can easily influence the actions of potential customers. Seeing that other people had a good experience with your brand encourages new visitors to take a leap of faith and make the purchase.
- Perform A/B tests. Test each aspect of your landing page, from headline and body copy to images and page design. Use this ultimate benefit of landing pages to your advantage and figure out what works best for a particular audience.
Need Help?
If your online business needs ecommerce landing pages but you don’t know where to start, you don’t have to go it alone. We are here to help and guide you every step of the way. We are a top-rated ecommerce SEO company that can assist with all of your online marketing needs, whether that means creating landing pages or anything else. Just check out our case studies and discover how Coalition Technologies can unlock the potential of your ecommerce business!
