Some agencies charge tens of thousands of dollars for 1 landing page.
Uff.
Don’t get me wrong; they’re worth it.
A great landing page will generate millions.
But if you’re just starting out, you should (and can) create landing pages on your own.
That’s why we created this guide.
So you can learn step-by-step what it takes to build high converting pages.
From getting the layout right to ensuring outstanding animation and photography, creating a great landing page is no easy feat. After all, it is your key to capturing attention and converting leads, and yet, the average landing page converts at a rate of 1.84%.
That isn’t going to work for you, though, is it? If you’re keen to get your Shopify store up and running, you’d need to do better than that. A well-crafted landing page can do wonders for your brand, and after generating $1 million from its stellar landing page, Moz happens to be a living testament to just that.
But how do you create a landing page that stands out in front of your visitors? A high-quality landing page consists of various elements that vastly depend on your brand goals, so it’s not like one theme will fit all. However, whichever niche you’re in, make sure you’ve honed the following best practices for creating a high-converting landing page for your Shopify store.
Top 10 Issues of A Page And How To Fix Them
Before diving into how you can create a high-converting landing page, take a look at the top 10 issues of a page to ensure yours doesn’t have any.
1. Text in Images
With dozens of stellar graphic designing tools today, you have every liberty to drag and drop your texts in different parts of your images and create something beautiful. While it looks great, it can be problematic on multiple grounds.
For one, text in images is bad for search engines. Of course, Google is working on its ability to read texts inside images, but it’s still a long way to go.
Secondly, the design you’ve created may look stunning when you’re sitting in front of your computer screen, but all your texts may look poorly compressed on a mobile device. And without alt texts, your image may be a serious deal-breaker for users with visual impairments.
Therefore, maintain a balance between your texts and images, and try not to merge them unless absolutely necessary. eBay takes this advice seriously and thus ensures there’s no such superimposition between the texts and images on its website.
2. Huge Inventory But No Filters
Great, you have a huge inventory with a lot of products. But if your users don’t have the option to narrow down the products they’re looking for, they might as well leave your website annoyed without purchasing anything.
Nobody is interested in scrolling down your page for more than a minute. And that's why it’s increasingly important to add a sorting option by review, size, colors, and type of product.
The e-commerce website Etsy knows it well, which is why it has ensured a wide range of filters for its viewers.
3. Vague Product Descriptions
When customers are visiting your website, they have to know what they’re purchasing. Vague product descriptions will only add to their skepticism and raise questions about your credibility.
Hence, it is crucial you make your product descriptions as clear as possible. If your description is large, use bullet points so that users can scan the whole thing easily. Moreover, do not repeat the same description on multiple products. Make each description unique to the product itself.
Finally, include product dimensions and thorough size guides, if any. Check out this detailed product description by Walmart to get a solid idea.
4. Low-Quality Pictures
Pixelated pictures can be a bane for your website, tarnishing your brand reputation and raising doubts about product quality. To avoid this trouble altogether, make sure users can zoom in on your products and view details. Amazon has maintained this feature for quite some time and gained consumer trust.
5. No Updates
Once your Shopify store is up and running, you never have to touch it again, right? Wrong. Updating your page theme, changing codes, keeping track of new features, etc., are extremely important, especially for a Shopify store.
You may be missing out on a ton of features that Shopify rolls out over time if you fail to upgrade your website properly. Make sure you have a marketing or social media manager who knows what’s going on with your site.
6. Ignoring Mobile Site
Go to Google Analytics and check out how much of your traffic is coming from mobile devices. Rest assured, it will be much higher than what you had imagined. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly user-friendly, and as such, a poor mobile experience of your website will severely damage conversions. Looking at your website merely from your desktop will give you a narrow, one-sided view of customer engagement.
Therefore, monitor your site’s performance on a mobile device by checking it out yourself once a week. Click on a product, add it to your cart, and proceed to check out. If you notice any lag or freeze in the meantime, ask your development team to look into it immediately.
7. No Email List
It’s 2021, and yet, numerous stores still make the mistake of only building a social media community. It’s brilliant if you have an avid social media presence, but not leveraging email marketing means you’re missing out on a world of opportunities to connect with your customers.
Hence, make sure you have a noticeable sign-up option on your website and send out emails to your subscribers about new deals, promotional offers, product launches, etc.
8. Not Having An ‘About’ Page
Why will your customers come to you if you offer the same product as ten other brands in the market? What makes you different and stand out from the rest?
The ‘About’ section of your website is there to answer all these questions. Having a super generic story on the About page is almost as bad as not having an About page itself.
Hence, make sure you write a compelling story about your journey to connect with your consumers directly. How did you come up with your brand? What’s the story behind your brand name? What were the obstacles you faced? What is it that you want to bring to your customers that they haven’t come across yet? Address these questions while crafting your About page.
9. Ignoring Shipping Details
While making an online purchase, one of the primary questions that arise in a customer’s mind is how they’ll receive the product. And that is something many of the stores fail to address properly.
Customers want to rest assured that they’re paying for a product they’ll receive on time. As such, they will prefer a brand that clearly states their shipping details over one that doesn’t.
To avoid this problem altogether, make sure you include every vital information related to your shipping policy. Emphasize how fast your shipping is and clearly state free shipping and refund policies if any.
10. Having No Customer Reviews
While looking for reassurance about a certain product, customers often check for what other people had to say. Unfortunately, brands still make the mistake of not reaching out to customers for feedback, which consequently results in them losing potential buyers. Further down this article, you’ll understand that social proof plays a huge role in shaping customer mindset, especially for your Shopify store.
Hence, make sure to actively connect with your customers and ask them to leave a review of your product. Check out how Best Buy has a separate section for customer reviews alone.
How To Create A High Converting Landing Page In Shopify
1. Know Your Audience Like Really Well
Your entire landing page should be created based on who your target customers are, what they’re looking for, and what you want them to do once they have arrived on your page.
Design and customize the elements in a way that speaks to your intended audience. There’s a broad list of things you need to address in this regard. Let’s break it down one at a time.
First off, start with identifying your lead’s position in the sales funnel. This will help you determine how long your landing page should be and the type of offer and messaging you’ll present in front of your audience.
If your leads are completely unaware of your brand with a low intent to purchase, you need to come up with a relatively large landing page with a number of intriguing copies - both educational and informative - to convert your leads to prospects.
On the flip side, if you’re talking to a pool of people who’re well-aware of your brand and the solution you offer, it’s better to keep your landing page short and simple and only provide your best offers.
Next, conduct customer interviews to know your target market better. Address the following questions:
- Who are your customers?
- What are their wants and needs?
- Which demographics do they belong to?
Next, figure out your customer’s buying behavior.
- How do your customers come to a purchasing decision?
- Do they research a product before its purchase?
- If yes, from where do they research?
- Do they stop their purchase after a while?
- What encourages them to start over?
- What is their trigger point?
- How can you reach out to them?
Finally, identify how your customers can shift to your product from that of a competitor. For this part, you’ll need to know your competitors as much as you need to know your audience.
- How saturated is the market you’re targeting?
- What complaints do your customers have about a competitor’s product?
- How do they weigh your products against that of your competitors?
The next step to knowing your audience is to understand how they resonate with your landing page. Heat maps and A/B testing can be invaluable assets in this regard.
Heat maps, accompanied by scroll maps, can help you determine how users interact with your page, whether your interface is aligning with your business goals from a consumer perspective, and how it affects consumer behavior. On the other hand, A/B testing can help you identify which web page design and website content grabs more attention and drives higher conversion.
Finally, use Google Analytics to monitor the results of all your hard work. It’s an indispensable tool to help you monitor customer behavior and make informed decisions about your brand.
2. Craft Your Content Catering To Your Visitors
Once you know your audience, the next step is to know how you’ll craft your offers and messages. Conversion copywriter Annie Maguire explained this part all the way to the bottom of the sales funnel in one simple diagram.
Understand that your indirect leads have a high chance of bumping into your brand through a sponsored Facebook ad. But they’re not actively looking for your solution and don’t even know you exist. As a result, it wouldn’t make much sense to send them directly to your landing page. Annie explains that you’d rather want to send them free tips or offer to subscribe to your newsletter. The goal here is awareness and not conversion.
Moving forward, the approach will be different for your direct leads, whom you’d want to send to your landing page and convert to active and repeat buyers.
To understand where your leads stand in the sales funnel, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Where are my leads coming from? How will they get to my landing page?
- Is my target audience acquainted with my brand?
- Do my intended customers understand my offerings? Or do I need to explain it to them?
- How likely are my leads to take action?
- How can I differentiate my offerings? What would it take to convert leads into prospects?
Addressing these questions is crucial to building a great landing page. Your visitors are sure to make a purchase when your page caters to them in a language they understand. Craft your content in a way that speaks to their problems, eliminates their doubts and educates them about your solution.
Check out social media posts and customer reviews of brands that are offering similar products. Monitor the copies of their top-performing posts, identify the gaps, and create an eye-catching copy to make your brand stand out.
Notice how JobBoardSheet pulled off the perfect message for its target audience. In a single sentence, they tackled all the objections their customers have. Consumers hate tasks that demand time and energy. With a simple yet straightforward copy, JobBoardSheet assures its customers that it is a one-stop solution for quickly creating a job board website without any hassle.
3. Emphasize On The Value
More often than not, marketers tend to get so distracted by their products and services that they end up annoying their leads with information overload. ‘Okay, if you don’t like those bags, how about these lipsticks? Oh, would you like scented candles?’
Yeah, your leads probably don’t know all the perks, but at this stage, maybe they don’t need to. The point is, you don’t need to elaborate on every single feature your brand can possibly offer. Some people will not opt for your product no matter how detailed your offerings are. You might as well save your breath.
Therefore, keep your content concise and to the point. Create a feature-oriented headline and furnish it with a few pointers about your product benefits. Keeping your content focused on the benefits enables visitors to imagine what it’d be like to own your product. Moreover, make sure you’re critiquing your own work. Encourage questions and constructive feedback within your team about your design and constantly evaluate how you can improve.
With a staggering conversion rate of 52.68%, edX and its landing pages for different courses corroborate our theory. Josh Grossman, former Senior Growth Marketer of edX, states that rather than diving into the details of every course, edX makes it easy for people to understand course benefits through a few simple bullet points.
Another good example from e-commerce from Nik Sharma is to make it visually appealing and a specific CTA.
4. Create A Visually Appealing Page
The average viewer takes 0.05 seconds to form an opinion on your landing page. This means you essentially have less than a second to create your first impression, and 90% of that first impression has everything to do with how visually pleasing your landing page is.
Your leads and prospects will subconsciously associate a visually pleasing landing page with quality and professionalism. Similarly, a poorly designed landing page, no matter how educational and informative, will make your viewers question your professionalism and create doubts about the quality of your service, subsequently decreasing their trust in your brand.
A good example is from Caraway, they’ve made their product in the center and clearly telling what they sell.
For your Shopify store, you could add a variety of visuals, and it could be something as simple as adding an animation to your ‘Add to Cart’ button. This subtle animation on a static page can have quite an impact on your audience, leading to increased sales and decreased cart abandonment.
Thankfully, there’s not much you have to do to make that possible. Using the ‘Animated Add to Cart’ app on Vitals, all you need to do is choose the type of animation you want for your landing page, and we will handle the rest.
5. Create A Specific And Value-Driven CTA
The call-to-action (CTA) button is perhaps the most powerful element of your landing page. And even though it generally consists of no more than 3-4 words, it makes all the difference.
You’d want your CTA to be clear and noticeable, not at the corner of the page where it is impossible to spot. Moreover, make sure you use a copy that actually encourages your viewers to take action. The wording is of utmost importance in this case.
Instead of using generics texts like ‘click here’ or ‘buy’, the copy of your CTA should be much more value-driven. You’d want to tell your prospects what’s in it for them. Phrase your CTA better, such as ‘Get Your Free E-book’, ‘Add To Cart - Save 10%’, ‘Make A Purchase’, etc. An intriguing CTA will thus attract your buyer’s attention and help you increase conversion rates.
Moreover, make sure you only have one CTA on your landing page, be it a newsletter subscription or an add-to-cart option. Any more than that may hurt your chances of conversion. Studies show that when customers are presented with too many options, they tend to make fewer purchases.
Take a look at Simply Business’s landing page, for instance. With a clear and concise CTA at the beginning of the page, Simply Business aims to keep things simple for its visitors. Despite being in the insurance industry, this organization doesn’t hurl its policies at its audience all at once. Simply Business rather ensures a seamless user experience for its visitors with a reassuring headline and an intriguing call to action.
It isn’t until after users click on the CTA that they’re introduced to different insurance policies, but Simply Business makes sure that visitors cross that first mental barrier. No wonder it boasts a conversion rate of 62.6%.
6. Build Credibility And Leverage Testimonials
While making a purchase, credibility is crucial to customers, more so when it’s online. Today’s tech-savvy consumers research both the product and the company before they make up their minds. And that is precisely why your brand needs to build that trust factor with its intended audience.
Encourage your customers to leave positive reviews when they’re satisfied with your offerings. You can also incentivize satisfied customers by providing them a discount code upon leaving honest feedback. This way, you can leverage pre-existing customers to bring in new ones.
The teledentistry company Smile Direct Club followed the same strategy when they backed their page with social proof. With solid reviews from satisfied customers, this business drilled its testimonial game right.
In the case of your Shopify store, you can use customizable trust badges and seals to further gain your client’s trust. Using the ‘Trust Seals and Badges’ app on Vitals, you can craft your own badge for your Shopify store. With 7 different layouts and 27 different messages for you to choose from, you can modify your badges as you please and let your customers know about payment options, money-back guarantee, shipping, refunds, and more.
7. Build A Responsive Page
Your landing page should cater to any query your customers have at any point in time. So, besides adding information related to shipping and guarantee, adding a live chat option makes it simple for customers to reach out to you instead of finding your help center and being redirected there.
Customers get a sense of assurance when you respond to them immediately. According to Forrester, website visitors engaging in live conversations are 2.8 times more likely to convert to customers than those who don’t.
You’ll find a number of different apps on the Shopify App Store to add a live chat option on your landing page. Fortunately, though, you don’t have to look far. With the All-in-One Chat app on Vitals, your visitors can communicate with you through multiple channels, including but not limited to Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter. All you need to do is enable Vitals and add your contact information for the said platform.
You can also customize the appearance of the chat bubbles, include background color, animations, and add a welcome message for your visitors.
Bonus Tip: Integrate Vitals Within Your Shopify Store
If you’re ready to launch your Shopify store at full force, Vitals introduces everything from basic features to apps you didn’t think you’d need. Need to convert to local currency? The Currency Converter is at your disposal. Interested in engaging with your customers in a fun way? Use the Wheel of Fortune and let your customers unlock special discounts.
With more than 40 different apps, Vitals is practically all you need to build credibility, increase conversion, and ensure sales. If you need further proof, simply try it FREE for 30 days, and witness the difference in your Shopify store for yourself.