How to Effectively Sell in eCommerce Using a Landing Page?

One of the most effective tools that help increase sales in eCommerce stores is a landing page. Let’s take a closer look at it and see what features it must have to be effective.

What Is a Landing Page?

A landing page, also known as a one pager or a product page, is the first page that the customer sees after interacting (i.e. clicking) with an online ad (banner, newsletter, Google search result). If you compare a website or online store to a printed catalog or advertising folder, consisting of many pages and containing a lot of information about the entire range of products in a given eStore, the landing page would be a separate, one-page leaflet. The information presented on it is very condensed and usually concerns a specific offer or a specific product.

Unlike a traditional website, equipped with an extensive menu and additional options / distractions, a landing page is designed to carry a simple message and calls for a single, strictly defined action – e.g. purchase of a given product. The message is therefore limited to the necessary minimum, and the recipient’s possibilities are limited only to taking the opportunity or closing the page. Practice shows that customers who are not bombarded with a multitude of information about a product are less stressed by their options, and therefore more willing to make a purchase decision.

How Do You Build an Effective Landing Page?

The most basic landing page consists of the following elements:

Header

This is the first thing that visitors to your landing page will notice and read, so it must be visible and speak directly about the benefits associated with the purchase of a given product. Here you should communicate the value for the client and thus encourage him/her to read the entire landing page.

Content

…meaning the necessary details of the offer in form of benefits for the buyer, i.e. how his or her life will change thanks to the purchase of the product. Here we refer to his or her emotional needs, using marketing personas.

Illustration

In other words: product visualization. Its purpose is not to show a standard catalog photo of the product, but to present it in use. Thanks to this customers will be able to image how it feels to have a given product – remember that we sell emotions!

Video

People love watching videos, so adding a video to your landing page to present your product greatly increases the chances that people will click on your call-to-action button.

Call-to-action (CTA)

It should be simple and legible. After clicking it, the user goes to the transaction finalization page (Buy now!) or to the form (Download). Upon comleting the latter (s)he will receive a report via email or a link to a video recording of a webinar. In this way, we sell products or acquire leads (potential clients), which we will eventually also turn into clients.

Optionally, you can also add:

Social proof

Or statements of people who have already used your product or service and are satisfied. It is much more convincing than a typical marketing message. In the case of an eCommerce store, these are opinions or reviews of products with scoring. We can also place the logo of customers who have benefited from our offer (in B2B situations).

More Details

Additional explanation of the offer, necessary in the case of more complex products or services.

Countdown Timer

A countdown timer counting down the time remaining until the end of the offer will encourage some recipients to act – time pressure motivates them to make decisions faster.

Key Things to Remember

A landing page should be shorter rather than longer. People are reluctant to scroll the pages, so you need to fit your key message in the first section (screen). You must remember to include the key elements above this line to encourage recipients to continue reading and scrolling the landing page. Nevertheless, the amount of content on the landing page should be adjusted to the context of the offer and the information recipients actually need.

Make your landing page readable and attractive on all resolutions and devices, especially on mobile devices.

Make sure your website loads quickly – patience is an unknown word on the Internet! Half of the customers will close your landing page if it doesn’t load within 2 (!) seconds. The weight of the images is especially important – they need to be compressed to speed up the page loading.

Examples of Effective Landing Pages

Measuring the Effectiveness and Optimization of the Landing Page

You should measure the effectiveness of your landing pages at each stage of the marketing / sales funnel, i.e. count how many people entered the landing page, clicked the CTA button and actually signed up via the form or finalized the transaction.

These numbers should be improved by A/B testing, i.e. testing different versions of individual elements that the user sees and that can affect his or her behavior. You can test different versions of the header, illustration, landing page layout, colors, call-to-action content, etc.

Summary

• Using a landing page may increase the effectiveness of your marketing and sales activities several times.
• Your customers are not interested in your products or services – instead they prefer to find out how their lives will change thanks to them.
• Take care of the technical aspects of your sales funnel – it must work efficiently, and you need to quickly catch the customer’s attention.
• A landing page is not a shop, but using it will increase your eCommerce turnover.
• Test different versions of the elements that make up the landing page, optimize the content – and achieve great results!

Good luck!

This article was written in cooperation with Andrzej Bieda, CMO at Landingi.