How to Craft the Ultimate Ecommerce Landing Page Strategy

First impressions are huge, and a landing page is often the first impression potential customers have of your brand. This makes it critical to develop a landing page strategy that blends creativity, data, and a deep understanding of your target audience.

Additionally, well-crafted landing pages shouldn’t rely only on appealing visuals but also on emotional, human connections. Emotion has a powerful impact on our reactions and perceptions. For example, we reciprocate emotions when we see others express them, such as with the models in your hero images or the tone of voice in your copy. We also develop sentiments such as affection or feelings of closeness to match those emotions.

Thankfully, getting your landing page strategy right doesn’t require a degree in psychology. We’ll show you how to build landing pages that resonate with your audience and deliver results through data-driven A/B testing.

How to craft an ecommerce landing page strategy that works

Ready to craft your strategy? Follow these five steps:

1. Define goals for your landing pages

Starting with clearly defined goals informs the entirety of your landing page strategy. Consider what you want visitors to do when they land on the page and develop your goals from there.

Some common landing page goals include:

Generating new leads
Growing your email list
Gathering webinar signups
Driving traffic to your website
Increasing sales of a specific product

Your landing page may instead act as the primary conversion point for an email marketing strategy or other marketing campaign. You may also use landing pages to drive organic traffic from search engine results. Be sure to take any relevant campaigns or strategies into consideration while deciding on goals.

2. Identify the buyer’s journey stage

Once you set your goals, it’s critical to consider where in the buyer’s journey your target audience is. By matching your landing page’s content to the buyer’s journey stage, you serve your customers the information they need at the appropriate time and encourage them to take further action.

For example, to get a customer who is only aware of a need to make a purchase, you have to help them through the Need Awareness, Solution Awareness, and Product Awareness stages. Here are some landing page strategies geared toward each of the five stages of the buyer’s journey:

1. Unaware

Customers in this stage don’t yet know they have a problem, meaning they also aren’t aware of what solutions exist.

To target customers in this stage, you can create story-driven landing page content. This content shouldn’t talk about the problem or solutions yet.

2. Need Awareness

Once you draw customers in with story-driven content, they become aware of a need. However, they still aren’t aware of any solutions at this time.

To target customers in this stage, you want to define the problem in a way that resonates with them and exposes the downsides if they don’t solve the problem. This should further define the problem rather than introduce your product or competitor comparisons, but you can cultivate curiosity through creative headlines and copy.

3. Solution Awareness

At this point, customers become aware of potential solutions to their problem—which likely include your product. They might search for product reviews and comparisons, but they don’t yet know everything about your product or your competitors’ products.

To create landing pages that resonate with customers in this stage, you should explain why your product is the best possible solution to their problem.

4. Consideration

In the Consideration stage, customers are aware of your brand. They understand what your product does, and at this point, they’re strongly considering choosing your product.

At this stage, you should explain why your product is better than alternative options. Back this up with proof, explain why your product is unique, and demonstrate how your product and its features can solve the customer’s problem better than your competitors’ products.

Additionally, target customers’ objections and reassure them that your product works and that it’s the right option for them. Sales and marketing keynote speaker Marcus Sheridan shared that addressing buyers’ fears and reservations on landing pages increased conversion rates by up to 80%.

Your landing page should answer your target audience’s questions and resolve their objections. (Source: SplitBase)

For example, SplitBase recently redesigned a landing page for beauty brand Laura Geller. After conducting extensive qualitative and quantitative research, we discovered that the target audience had many unanswered questions that would likely prevent them from making a purchase.

Using this information, we A/B tested two landing page designs. The winning design provided detailed information and answered the most commonly asked questions, resulting in a 43% increase in conversions.

5. Purchase

When your customers are ready to make a purchase, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to take action. Remove any possible friction, such as unclear shipping policies or a lengthy checkout process.

At this stage, your landing page may take the form of a product page or simple hero-style page that pitches your product. Instead of further educating customers in this stage, take a distraction-free approach. Give them reasons to buy your product now. This can involve offering a deal, free shipping, or another incentive.

3. Segment your audience for targeted messaging

Segmenting your audience allows you to create targeted messaging that resonates with each group. For example, your landing page strategy can include different optimized landing pages for new visitors, returning visitors, and customers who abandoned their carts.

Here are some factors to consider when segmenting your audience:

Interests
Purchase history
Actions taken on your website
Demographics such as age, gender, location, and more

You can also use these customer segments in your email marketing, paid ad strategy, and more.

4. Make sure landing page messaging matches your ads

When segmenting your audience and crafting targeted messaging, it’s essential to continue the train of thought you sparked with your ad. This includes creating consistent messaging and imagery that focuses on the same product, pain points, and set of benefits you initially presented in the ad.

5. Design for clarity and ease of use

Don’t be fooled into thinking that a beautiful landing page design is the be-all, end-all of your strategy. Instead, functionality and clarity are more important than aesthetics.

Along with visuals, a high-converting landing page design should:

Add a clear call to action (CTA) or lead form above the fold: Visitors shouldn’t have to scroll to find out what you want them to do. Include a CTA button or form to fill out in your hero section.
Ensure that your landing page is responsive: Responsive page design improves the user experience for those on mobile devices. And with half of all internet traffic attributed to cell phones, you risk losing up to half of your target audience if you don’t optimize your landing pages for mobile.
Remove or reduce distractions: You should keep visitors focused on your product’s benefits and your CTA. Remove landing page navigation and links to other web pages on your site—or A/B test removing the navigation completely versus reducing it to only a few key links.
Use concise, compelling copy: Your landing page copy should be clear, concise, and persuasive. Test variations with strong headlines, bullet point benefits, and short paragraphs to determine what quickly gets your message across to your target audience.
Add social proof: Social proof, such as customer testimonials and reviews, builds trust and credibility. In fact, 72% of people find customer reviews and testimonials more credible than what a brand says about its products.

Get inspired by good landing page examples in our breakdown of three DTC ecommerce landing pages.

Use data to refine your landing page strategy

To optimize landing page conversion rates, you need to consistently examine how customers react to your campaigns, promotions, and pages, advises Nielsen. Alongside analytics, two-way dialogues with your customers will help you tailor your strategy for your audience.

This is why our Testing Trifecta method focuses equally on quantitative data (analytics) and qualitative data (customer feedback and surveys).

In essence, analytics can tell you what needs improvement when it comes to your landing page strategy, and customer feedback tells you why it needs improvement.

Here are some key landing page metrics to inform your strategy:

Scroll rate
Unique sessions and sources
Click-through rate
Average session duration
Bounce rate
Conversion rate

Remember that numbers and metrics only tell half the story. You also need qualitative data to understand the why.

How to gather qualitative feedback

SplitBase used a customer survey to identify and test improvements to SNOW’s landing page. (Source: SplitBase)

As we mentioned previously, qualitative data is important to help you find areas of improvement for your landing page strategy. Ways to gather this data include:

Exit intent surveys
Live chat
User testing
Social media comments
Reviews
Customer service call transcripts

For example, SplitBase sent a conversion research survey to existing customers and website visitors to gain feedback on SNOW’s listicle landing page. The survey provided insights into visitors’ concerns and questions and allowed us to optimize the landing page to address them.

Continuously test and update your landing pages

A/B testing is essential for optimizing your landing page strategy. Without testing, you’re building your pages blindly and hoping they convert visitors.

Testing allows you to base your strategy on data by comparing the results of different variations of landing page elements. For example, you could A/B test two variations of a headline to see which keeps visitors on the page longer, or you could test two different CTA placements to see which converts better.

Continuous testing allows you to maintain an effective landing page strategy. However, it’s important to develop hypotheses and test small variations—unless fully redesigning your ecommerce site makes more sense.

Master your landing page strategy with SplitBase

By starting with clear goals, an understanding of your audience, and a functional design, you can build a foundation for a landing page strategy that resonates with your target audience.

But crafting an effective ecommerce landing page strategy isn’t a one-and-done deal. It requires consistent data analysis and ongoing testing and optimization to create landing pages that connect with your audience on a human level.

Collaborating with a knowledgeable agency like SplitBase ensures that you base your landing page strategy on qualitative and quantitative data, as well as A/B test results.

Ready to develop a landing page strategy that boosts your ecommerce success? Contact SplitBase for a free proposal.

‍