E-commerce landing page optimization
Landing page optimization is a huge topic and best practices exist for various fields, but what should a landing page look like for an e-commerce Shopify store? Let's have a look at common landing page optimizations and how they apply to shops.
Landing Pages are a huge topic, often discussed when it comes to websites of services or SaaS companies. All this attention happens for very good reason. On a landing page a customer first comes into contact with your offering. If you do not effectively communicate to your customers that you have something valuable to offer, they will leave almost immediately.
Let's see what we can learn from general landing page optimization and how we can apply it to e-commerce stores.
Common landing page optimization tips
- Remove the main navigation
- Include rich media
- Less is MORE
- Add "escape actions"
- Focus on value based messages, not features
- Use social proof
Applied to e-commerce
- Remove the main navigation
The reason for this advice on other landing pages is, that you don't want your visitors getting distracted from your main call-to-action (CTA) and it makes perfect sense for other types of websites. But what is the actual goal in an online store? Here our primary objective is to get the customer to start shopping on the store. Browsing through our products is actually exactly what we want them to do and could even be considered to be our CTA. Therefore, removing the main navigation would not be a great idea for an e-commerce landing page.
However, it's important that our navigation is optimized. A topic I will cover in another article.
- Include rich media
Instead of overwhelming visitors with a wall of text, it's helpful to show images and videos to easily get points across.
It's of no surprise that this is especially true for e-commerce landing pages. We are selling products and customers need to see what the products look like. Additionally, imagery and videos play a huge role in communicating our brand and the general feel we want to go for with our shop.
- Less is MORE
Typically, a landing page should not contain too much content. New visitors to a website need and want to get an overview of your offering. Overwhelming them with too much information and details could easily lead to a bouncing visitor.
In the case of e-commerce this means for us that we don't want to drill too deep into specific categories of our offering. We don't want to show 30 men's products and 30 women's products, when a visitor is most likely only interested in one of those two categories. What we want to do instead is to display a few selected items for each category to give a taster for specific collections and grab the interested customer's attention.
- Add escape actions
Escape actions are an interesting concept I just learned about recently. The idea behind them is to put a less-prominent action next to your CTA, to give potential customers who are not yet sure about your offering a way to stay engaged.
While I don't see how we could apply escape actions on an e-commerce shop's landing page, this trick is commonly found on product pages, where our CTA is the Add To Cart button. Some customers might not yet be sure whether they really want to buy an item. For them, an escape action like a favorite button for the product might be ideal.
- Focus on value based messaging, not features
This tip is especially common in the software industry, where builders of a product often think about their product as features. The thing is, customers don't care about features. They care about the value they get out of the product.
In the case of e-commerce and physical products, we need to focus on how the customer can use the product and the advantages of possessing the product. These might not always be purely practical, as marketing and branding come into play.
Your products and brand can just as well represent a certain lifestyle or feeling, which are the actual value.
- Use social proof
I'm sure you've seen them already. Testimonials, they're everywhere! But why? Testimonials are used to create social proof, by showing that others already bought your services or products and are happy with what they got.
Testimonials are also a great tool to get common customer worries out of the way. Did you realize that FAQs are often not really frequently asked questions, but rather Additional information to convince you of our product? Testimonials can be an even more powerful way to achieve this. If you ever stumble upon a customer saying something like "Initially I was worried about ... but then ..." or the likes, put it on your landing page!
Another, extremely powerful, form of testimonial is social media. If you have a physical product and your customer base uses Instagram, encourage them to share and tag pictures of them with your products.
Summary
As we have seen, many of the general tips for landing pages also apply to e-commerce stores. It's surprising that only few people give the topic much thought.
Sources
Advanced Tips to Master every Type of Ecommerce Landing Page
50 point landing page checklist
