Tom Simpkins
Reading Time: 8 minutes
They say that you only have one chance at a first impression, which is why nailing your landing page is critical for ecommerce success.
A landing page can serve many different purposes. Whether it’s to generate sales, increase email sign-ups, or register for something, the quality of your page will make or break your efforts. You can create the most enticing deal, offer, or engaging content, but without a solid way for your audience to interact with them, your efforts will be all for naught.
Even if you have your campaign goal in mind, creating a landing page can be difficult—but it doesn’t need to be. Combining landing page best practices with a platform that makes creating landing pages easy is all you need to succeed.
So what do online merchants need to know to stick the landing with their landing pages and increase conversions? Let’s explore some of the most common questions surrounding how to create effective landing pages that convert.
A landing page is a dedicated page where your visitors will ‘land,’ which has a clear and defined purpose. They can arrive here by following a link from a website, an email, social media post, or a search engine and are designed to drive visitors towards a specific action.
For example, this could be a sign-up landing page for an email or SMS program, a contest or a giveaway, or some other special offer where you want a streamlined action to be taken.
A good landing page convinces people to proceed with the journey you want them to take. It brings their attention to where you want it and encourages them to take action. A poorly designed one will cause your audience to leave—possibly never to return.
Here’s an example.
To grow their SMS marketing program, they included a signup call-to-action (CTA) inside their email marketing campaigns. Clicking on the image directs the email subscriber to a landing page where they can opt into Kombustion’s SMS program—providing Kombustion Motorsports increased omnichannel marketing opportunities.
Some may confuse a website’s homepage with a landing page, but they are different. A home page is more of a primary functioning page. Because of the additional information needed on a homepage, it will be far less streamlined than a traditional landing page. With the above example in mind, the landing page is more of a temporary addition to a website intended to serve a specific purpose while the rest of the website performs business as usual.
Above all else, a landing page guides visitors to a specific page for a specific purpose. The landing page is often the first page your customers interact with, regardless of how they found it.
Understanding how a landing page works and its function helps, but some may not be sold on the boons they can provide. Along with helping your visitors more easily navigate your website, they allow you to generate more traffic and increase conversions for campaigns.
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Your website may already feature sign-up forms or pop-ups to help visitors, yet landing pages with sign-up forms have some distinct advantages, including:
1.They remove distractions: Since landing pages can be isolated from your website, customers won’t face the same distractions your website may present, such as pop-ups.
Consistently having visitors leave or quickly divert from a page on your website can hurt your bounce rate and overall campaign metrics. By using a landing page, you can funnel this traffic to a specific, distraction-free page.
2. They are easily shareable: Landing pages can be shared in promotional emails, on blog pages, and on social media. This means you have the potential to reach a much larger audience, even before they know about your website.
For example, you can launch a campaign and have the landing page advertised on Facebook. By directing users to the landing page, you can provide the user a more customized experience while collecting specific campaign metrics.
3. Help keep the campaign’s focus: Consumers are accustomed to website elements such as helpful links and sign-up fields in a website’s footer. However, campaign landing pages don’t need this information, and because of this, they can be more alluring.
As opposed to a website’s conventional marketing attempts, landing pages can be more experimental and eye-catching. This makes it easier to make obligatory and mandatory requirements interesting, such as capturing visitors’ consent or contact information—keeping you in compliance with GDPR and other laws.
4. Easy customization: Above everything else, a landing page provides a unique benefit that makes it a special part of any website—customization. While you can also alter, edit, and change any part of your website, a landing page lends itself exceptionally well to stand out with custom, easy-to-create eye-catching differences.
We’ll discuss this further when considering the design of a landing page. In a nutshell, since landing pages are temporary additions to a website, you have more freedom in their appearance, layout, and copy. This opens up plenty of possibilities for experimentation, allowing you to see how visitors react and interact with them.
In some cases, the success of a landing page can help you to learn more about how your visitors interact with your website as a whole. With enough data and the odd trial and error approach, you may find ways to improve your website overall.
With these improvements, you can work on both your website and your landing page by:
Creating and setting up good landing pages can be incredibly rewarding. When well-executed, a single landing page can achieve what an entire professional website aims for.
A good landing page makes a conversion journey simple to understand and simple to follow. A great landing page makes this journey alluring for visitors.
When considering landing page best practices, you should consider fulfilling three separate objectives:
To achieve these, you can use a page structure with headers and an appealing design with images and buttons. Some platforms will feature landing page templates, which can make creating free landing pages incredibly simple.
The process for creating a landing page usually follows these steps:
Those trying to find free landing page services can find professional-grade landing pages at Omnisend. It isn’t difficult to find free landing page services, whether you’re looking for an easy-to-use or those with in-depth functions.
Omnisend is complete with new improvements to landing page tools, complete with advanced settings. Omnisend’s landing page tools are available to all accounts, including free ones, and are a great way to get started quickly.
Omnisend has a wealth of features that help both novice and expert merchants alike. This includes, but certainly isn’t limited to, A/B testing, professionally-designed templates, and an intuitive method of easily editing landing pages.
Like Omnisend, LaunchRock is available as a free landing page service. It’s a great choice for those with no coding experience. It also helps those seeking analytic features, with integrated tools for checking how landing pages are performing.
However, LaunchRock isn’t made for those seeking a lot of wiggle room. There aren’t many customization options and don’t feature vital marketing tools like the A /B testing.
Shortstack knows its two prime audiences; businesses who are spearheading their own brand and agencies looking to cater to different clients. It’s particularly useful for those who have basic coding knowledge, making it a good choice for those who wish to personalize pages with HTML, yet not the best solution for more novice users.
Despite this, Shortstack certainly has its charm, combining a great visual interface and a fairly intuitive workflow. Shortstack’s templates can serve well for both agencies and brands.
With the right tools and strategy, you can create engaging landing pages that drive traffic, boost conversions, and make your website easier to navigate for customers, both old and new. Consider how to use landing pages properly, and you can create campaigns that start to generate results. Landing Page Templates serve as invaluable resources in this process. Many types of templates, like product landing page and accounting landing page templates, provide a structured and efficient framework, allowing you to implement the recommended tools and strategies quickly.
