If you have an e-commerce store, chances are that you are looking to optimize it for conversions, grow sales, and make more money.
You might even be considering running Facebook ads to advertise your products or maybe even consider Google Shopping ads, or both.
If you don’t use landing pages and funnels for your e-commerce store, however, all of those efforts (along with time and money) are going to go down the drain.
We are willing to bet on it. Beer or a $15 bill? You pick.
Landing pages and funnels help build a sales machine for your e-commerce store.
Instead of spraying and praying, launching campaigns and wondering why they don’t work, and worrying if your ad spend is ever going to be worth it for you, just don’t launch campaigns or do any kind of marketing without landing pages & funnels.
Here are a few reasons why your e-commerce store needs landing pages:
Your customers won’t buy (not right away, at least!)
“I ain’t buying if I don’t know you”
“How do I trust you?
“What you got that others don’t?”
“How do I make an informed decision?”
“Oh, nice! Now, I’ll take my sweet time to think about this”
It’s only human that we think in those lines, and your prospects are thinking the exact same thing when they reach your store.
So, the first time they come visiting? They aren’t buying just as yet.
According to Marketo, approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy — but they may be willing to provide contact information in exchange for valuable content.
That said, you have no more than eight seconds to persuade your website visitors to stick around.
Given that statistic above, what’s the point spending thousands of dollars to drive potential customers to your e-commerce store knowing that more than 90% won’t buy?
However, most visitors don’t mind:
- Grabbing a chance to save money (who does?)
- Providing an email address (in exchange for something valuable, like saving money with a coupon)
- Considering buying, given then you give them the time to do so
- Waiting it out, until they are ready to buy
You can give them just that.
How, you might ask…
- Use landing pages to generate leads first. People show implicit interest in your business when they sign up as leads. Your results are sustainable and predictable when you try to sell to these warm and hot leads instead of a cold audience (which your first-time visitors are).
- Use an exit-intent pop-up with a discount offer (use a coupon that’s provided to each person who signs up using email)
- Nurture your leads with email marketing, messenger bots, or SMS until they are ready to buy from you.
To get those email addresses or other information, however, you need landing pages. There are just no two ways about it.
Distractions are expensive
A typical e-commerce store is a prime example of clutter in digital form. And no, Amazon, Best Buy, and J.C Penny can pull it off, but it won’t work for anyone else.
See the image below. See how distractions are sabotaging your conversion rate? All those distractions, buttons, images, copy, links, and social buttons will only make your visitors go numb.
Source: Unbounce
The typical result: They come, they see, they leave.
Maybe you didn’t think about it this way but the fact that they come, leave, and do nothing is ridiculously expensive for your business. You just don’t think about it that way since you didn’t actually lose cash (in physical form).
Yet, you did lose opportunities. Several thousands of them (depending on how many visitors you get).
Singularity & focus
If you were hungry and you have at least 16 different plates on the table, what will you pick? Say, you wanted to buy a car but for your given budget, there are at least 23 different models (each with 4 to 5 variants), how are you going to zero down on the car you want to buy?
Say hello to the Paradox of choice. If you are presented with too many options, you are most likely to “not pick anything at all” or maybe just procrastinate.
Given that online users have astonishingly low attention spans and the fact that you are spending cash to bring in these visitors to your e-commerce store, you need to present your products with singularity & focus.
Now, your e-commerce store with a full catalog of anywhere from 2 to 200 products is not going to help your potential visitors focus.
Here’s your typical e-commerce product category page:
Now, compare that with this:
What kind of page is likely to give you better results?
No prize for guessing.
Your e-commerce store is the bottleneck
Whether you had your e-commerce store custom-built or used Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress (with WooCommerce) or Magento to build your store, there’s only so much customization that you can afford to do.
Given how most clients build their e-commerce stores, they rely on developers, designers, and experts to customize stores depending on their needs.
Now, here’s the thing with marketing your e-commerce store the right away:
Extraordinarily awesome results come when landing pages with a single product on a landing page.
One product, a single product description, and a big button that says “buy now”. If you have 18 products, how many custom pages will you be able to build on your existing e-commerce store platform? Also, how quickly can you come up with those individual pages?
Developers or experts will charge you by the hour or a fixed price for a single page.
Getting all those different pages developed would mean dependence, wasted time (which is money lost), and God knows how many iterations per page.
Landing pages can be hosted separately. Further, you have various tools available such as our Page builder which helps you create as many high-converting pages as you need, in the time it takes for you to drink coffee.
Landing pages are proven, battle-tested and awesome
Heard of Shopify?
It’s an e-commerce platform that allows you to build e-commerce stores without worrying about technology, hosting, security, upkeep, updates, and any serious ninja-like server management.
With more than 600,000 merchants use across 175 countries, as of 2018, Shopify processed around $63 billion dollars (and counting).
How did Shopify grow like that?
The answer: dedicated, laser-targeted landing pages for everything they do online (including content marketing, content curation, SEO-driven inbound traffic, affiliate networks, and social media).
Apart from running dedicated campaigns for one of the several 3000+ apps in the Shopify App Marketplace, special physical events or meet ups, and conferences, Shopify invests in landing pages.
Here’s what Shopify does:
- Use content marketing and paid ads to drive traffic to dedicated landing pages (as shown below)
- Let potential customers sign up for a 14-day trial.
- Nurture leads with several goodies such as blog posts, exclusive perks, invites to special webinars or courses, and more.
That’s simplicity at its best, helping Shopify make around 245 million in revenue (last quarter of 2018).
You don’t need more proof than that, do you?
Need help with crafting a professional and complete marketing strategy for your e-commerce store? Need help with ads, landing pages, and funnels?
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