This is a guest post by RealVNC, a leading provider of remote access software for desktop and mobile devices. Learn more on their website.
ECommerce landing pages are an important part of many digital marketing campaigns, leading potential customers from emails or ads directly to your website. As such, it’s crucial that your landing page is attractive, stands out, and directly conveys the value of your product or service.
Otherwise, you may lose customers – fast.
Crafting a spot-on eCommerce landing page, though, is easier said than done – and that’s why we put together this hands-on guide to building a successful eCommerce landing page. So, without further ado, let’s jump right in!
What is an eCommerce Landing Page?
An eCommerce landing page is a single web page that visitors are led to via a specific marketing campaign – such as a Black Friday marketing email, a social media post, or a Google ad. You can think of them as a welcome mat that leads users along the buyer’s journey.
Compared with a home page, which offers a multitude of visitor journeys, a landing page will have one single purpose. Most often, that purpose is to convert prospects into buyers, but this is dependent on the type of marketing campaign that the page is connected to. For instance, the goal may be to build an email list by enticing people to take a quiz or sign up for a newsletter.
Due to their singularity of purpose, landing pages usually have a simpler design than other pages on your website. A standout headline, a clear description of the product or service, stark, eye-catching visuals, and a powerful call-to-action (CTA) are non-negotiables here.
You may even want to select a memorable domain name that has some relevance to your company – such as an AI domain name if your company’s name ends in ‘ai’ or if you are a tech startup.
Speaking of tech startups, it’s important to mention that landing pages aren’t a tool that’s used exclusively by online stores selling fashion, food, or furniture. They can just as easily be incorporated into the broader marketing strategy of tech companies.
Image sourced from expressvpn.com
Consider the landing page of ExpressVPN, as seen above. By removing the navigation bar, this page stands out with colorful imagery, a plain background and a strong CTA that uses snappy copy to highlight the benefits of their service. The company sells VPN services, not tangible products, yet this landing page works great at enticing interested people to find out more.
Imagine you offer a remote digital service, such as a remote desktop for Android software. Your landing page should aim to convey the same sense of ease and comfort as depicted in the image above. With images speaking a thousand words, strong visuals can do a surprising amount of work in lifting the benefits of your product.
Of course, there’s lots more involved in creating a successful eCommerce landing page. Let’s take a look!
How to Create a Successful eCommerce Landing Page
The beauty of a landing page lies in its simplicity – it does not require many ingredients. And yet, it’s not always easy to pull off well.
In fact, before you embark on this journey, you may need to ensure your backend tech is all up-to-date if you’re the one hosting the landing page. In that case, a mainframe modernization solution is your friend here and will deliver your website at lightning speed. Nothing could be more important for such a crucial sales asset!
Before we begin, we should also note that this list of best practices is hardly the gospel. Use it as a jumping-off point and blend it with insights about your target audience and its specific needs. This, truly, is the secret to creating a unique, high-performing landing page.
1. Do Your Research
More so than using this season’s trendiest color palette or exceptional visuals, doing your research is critical. Why? Because no matter how optimized and high-tech your landing page is, none of it matters if it’s irrelevant to your target audience.
Image sourced from sunbasket.com
Remember that your landing page is part of a greater buyer’s journey. Consider the ad source, the type of device used. as well as your audience’s awareness levels and motivation to buy your product. Consider the Sunbasket image above – presumably, they did their research and found out that users would be more tempted to try their product if they were able to sample the service over a period of time.
All of these metrics are crucial in determining the type of information your landing page contains. You may even consider using customer service data through call tracking software offered by companies like Vonage, to further extend your research and build comprehensive buyer personas to inform your campaigns.
Sites like Google Analytics are also invaluable, providing you with insights like visitor behavior, conversion rates, and bounce rates. All of these are worth their weight in gold when it comes to understanding your user.
You can even go into high-tech detective mode and use a remote desktop manager tool to browse metrics with teams in other countries, giving those of you with international businesses an edge over the competition.
2. Optimize Your Landing Page
Having done this research to inform your landing page, it’s now time to optimize your digital content.
“Conversion asset stacking” is a phrase coined by the founder of Smart Marketer Ezra Firestone and it refers to the optimum digital assets you should use for your landing page design. It includes:
- A buy box that is optimized for conversion
- Clear, attractive product images (make sure to use image compression software, to prevent website lag!)
- Trustworthy customer testimonials (video is preferable, but text also works)
- Sales copy that underlines the benefits of your product
- Social proof and any media coverage.
Using and tweaking the above digital assets is the first step in optimizing your landing page. Beyond this, be aware of information hierarchy – information must always be easy to find and immediately comprehensible.
In other words? Don’t cram a lot of information into one space – and make sure the most important information grabs the user’s eye immediately. Using generous amounts of white or blank space is the best way to make your information stand out.
Let’s look at the RealVNC landing page to explore a real-world example. First, you’ll see two strong CTAs in an eye-catching yellow. Beyond this, the benefits are clearly stated – that the company offers the world’s safest remote access software – while the 5-star awards by industry leaders frame the text.
Image sourced from realvnc.com
Once you’ve arranged your digital assets in an eye-catching and attractive way, you may be tempted to simply fire away and let your live landing page do all the hard work. However, it’s important to test your landing page to see if it clicks with your target audience.
This means conducting user testing, copy testing, and surveys to see what resonates most with your audience. Remember that what works best is highly individual, so don’t get led astray by trends that don’t align with your vision.
3. Create Immediate Value
Remember that visitors to your landing page are coming there from a specific marketing campaign. This means that they are arriving with expectations – so make sure to confirm these quickly. Whatever your campaign promises, deliver on it immediately, whether it’s a deal, a survey, a free trial, or something else. This is probably where your CTA button comes into play, so make sure it stands out with contrasting colors and inviting copy. Using direct language that states exactly what the visitor will do or the monetary value that they’ll receive will help here.
It’s also a good idea to create a sense of urgency around this CTA, such as making a deal time-limited. When combined with the simplicity of the landing page and the lack of distractions, this greatly encourages user interaction at that moment.
Lastly, it’s crucial that your landing page loads quickly enough to grab users’ attention immediately, especially if you’re using high-quality photography or visuals. By improving website speed, you can reduce the risk of losing potential purchasers.
4. Offer Full Transparency
Finally, a word on testimonials. With transparency an increasingly important quality for consumers, publishing authentic customer reviews can be a great way of building trust between yourself and users. Be sure to publish the not-so-good and distinctly-average reviews, too, in order to underline your trustworthiness as a brand.
A need for transparency is also leading to new developments within eCommerce, such as the increasing use of web3 technology which is based on blockchain technology and aims to return control to the individual user. If you’re keen to look to the future and hop on this trend, just make sure you’re up-to-date with web3 security concerns before you dive in.
ECommerce Landing Pages: The Secret to Conversions
Promoting your latest product or service through a well-thought-out landing page may seem daunting, but hopefully our guide gave you enough tips and inspiration on how to achieve this. By using compelling CTAs and powerful visuals, implementing extensive customer research and utilizing information hierarchy, you can create powerful landing pages that do the hard work for you.
Try to implement all this, and you’ll be well on your way to seeing a soar in leads and purchases from your landing page!