How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

With five years of marketing experience under her belt, she launched her store on Shopify as a side hustle. It’s blown up since then, allowing Georgia to turn peppery products into her full-time gig.

To manage growing demand, she relied on an ecomm agency that promised her 7X ROAS. But the $3,000 monthly retainer didn’t make sense, especially since she wasn’t even close to matching that in ad spend.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Georgia knows you don’t need to be a spice savant to creating marketing campaigns that bring the heat—you just need to know what converts. Read on to learn how Shopify landing pages can help you transform your ecomm sales from mild to five-alarm hot.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

Tons of companies that sell on Shopify send traffic from their paid campaigns directly to product pages on their website. And, sure, that works well enough for some of ’em. After all, your site gives people a high-level overview of your product offering that landing pages usually don’t.

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Let’s say you’re running a seasonal campaign around Black Friday. You’ve got all your Facebook ads set up and ready to go. You hit the red launch button, and… oh no. Your relevance score is crying for help because you’re sending people who clicked a Black Friday ad to a generic product page.

Not only that, but you’re creating an awful experience for visitors. The place they wound up doesn’t match the ad that they clicked. They’re confused, maybe even frustrated. You can kiss that conversion goodbye.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Pushing shoppers to a run-of-the-mill product page isn’t ideal since the page probably wasn’t designed to address their needs specifically. The best way to drive ecommerce sales is by pairing custom landing pages with highly targeted ads or emails to help you reach a specific audience at a specific time with a specific offer, encouraging them to take a specific action.

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

Landing pages let you perform A/B testing at a level of granularity that most ecomm platforms don’t allow, helping you validate their effectiveness and optimize as you go. By tweaking your messaging and tinkering with design elements, you can squeeze even more conversions outta your campaigns.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

The product pages that come pre-packaged with themes on ecommerce platforms are meant to be modified to suit your brand, but most businesses just add their content and start sending traffic. That means lots of ecomm brands show up the same, with product pages that lack distinguishing features or meaningful detail.

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

We’ll be the first to admit there are plenty of head-turning product pages out there. The trouble is that most of these pages have been custom-built by specialized teams who speak Liquid code—and that’s reflected in their cost.

Then there’s the time commitment. Say you’ve decided not to run a Valentine’s Day campaign, but then you have a last-minute change of heart. Your dev won’t appreciate your call at 3 am, asking ’em to put together a product page. (And your designer, copywriter, and other team members won’t be throwing you a party, either.)

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

Most product pages come with tons of distractions: site navigation, links out to reviews, multiple calls to action. There are plenty of ways for visitors to wander off in the midst of making a purchase.

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Best practices for Shopify landing pages are a lot like any other landing page best practices: message match, context of use, that sorta thing. Still, there are some specific things you can do on your Shopify pages that’ll give them that extra oomph.

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

• Sell the benefits, not the features. Converting in ecomm is all about the benefits of the product. How does it improve your target customer’s life? Think through all of the potential benefits of your product (even the obscure, less tangible ones) and make sure you’re highlighting them on your landing page.
• Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.
• Stun ’em with a video. If it makes sense for your brand, also consider using video on your landing page. Marketers who include videos in their campaigns often see conversion rate bumps of 34%—and with loads of other benefits, it’s a wonder more brands aren’t getting out their camcorders.
• Use psychic triggers. Familiarize yourself with concepts like social proof and scarcity. For example, you might wanna include messaging around time-based (“only for the next 24 hours”) or product-based (“only 10 left”) scarcity to drive landing page conversions.
• Stay relevant by launching fast. The timing of your ecomm campaigns is huge. No one wants to hear about your New Year’s sale in February, so get crackin’ on those landing pages and launch your next campaign yesterday.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

One quick look at their website is all it takes to understand why this landing page is vital to their marketing. The homepage does a lot of things—explains who the company is, where they’re located—but there’s no obvious way to find and purchase their products.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

Even the individual product pages bury lots of key information within collapsing bullet points, making it tough for visitors to find out what the products do or how to use them. And while these pages look pretty slick, most ecomm marketers could spot ’em as Shopify templates.

Imagine you get a promotional email from The Lee Clinic advertising a site-wide discount. You click the link and find yourself on the page with their list of products, or even one of the specific product pages. What do you think would do a better job of getting you to buy—that, or this landing page?

The Lee Clinic’s landing page (built by Webistry) does a fantastic job of summarizing the product benefits in a super attractive way. The design isn’t just gorgeous—it’s congruent. Clean. Simple. Professional and eye-catching. Really, it’s just a treat to look at.

And check this out:

This clever section asks visitors what their main skincare concern is, then presents them with a product designed to address that very issue. The Lee Clinic is tying the customer problem directly to their solution. (And this technique can work like magic when you’re retargeting visitors later on down the funnel.)

Also, notice the add-to-cart slide-in on the right-hand side of the page. This minimizes the steps to checkout, making the buyer journey faster, simpler, and smoother. There’s no redirecting to the website, so the entire checkout process can be completed within the landing page. Sweet.

Ready to run email marketing campaigns that’ll blow your subscribers’ socks off? It’s easy—just add landing pages to the mix. Check out how you can drive more email sales by sending your shoppers to dedicated post-click landing pages.

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

They’ve got an awesome landing page (another from Webistry) that does a great job of showing off their product in an attractive way. It’s sexy. Slick. Simple. An alluring invitation, if I were so inclined.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

Yes, it’s gorgeous and jam-packed with persuasion elements, but that’s only half of it. It sustains the shopper’s experience. It lets them remain on the page, adding items to their cart without ever having to leave. Compare that with the online store on their site, where the user would need to click out and navigate through multiple pages to achieve the same objective. 

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

Visually, there’s not a huge difference between the two pages. The real change is in the copy: the general landing page highlights a product feature (they’re “long-lasting”) while the Mother’s Day page speaks to the benefit customers can derive from that feature (making your partner feel special with an awesome gift).

The Mother’s Day page has some other things working in its favor. There’s a site-wide discount with an established deadline, plus messaging that indicates there might not be enough of these candles to go around (“while supplies last”). It does a good job of establishing scarcity.

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

The brand has a great-looking website, but like lots of storefronts, it has a ton of elements that distract visitors from making a purchase. There are all those menu items. Multiple calls to action. Different features and incentives like blue light lenses, buy-one-get-one, and philanthropy.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Can you see the difference? Here, DIFF tilts its messaging on its head. The main site really focuses on their humanitarianism, and that’s great—it’s what their brand is all about. But here, the copy is all about the value to the customer. There’s no mention of charity. It’s all about making the sale based on the benefits of the product.

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

Whether you’re putting together a business-as-usual campaign or creating something special for an upcoming promotion, you’ve got urgent deadlines that you’ve absolutely gotta hit. That means you need to be able to get slick, super targeted pages up fast.

Forget custom coding. Armed with a powerful landing page builder (like Unbounce), you can adjust everything like Neo in The Matrix—drag, drop, and publish. And with more than a hundred quick-start templates, you can get going right this minute.

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