eCommerce Landing Pages for Paid Media - Examples & Best Practices

I’ve focused primarily on paid media in this article, as I’m mostly talking about creating landing pages for new net users, with no prior experience or (assumed) knowledge of the brand. This said, the principles are similar for other forms of campaigns, the content and focuses would just be adapted.

Why Landing Pages Are Important in eCommerce

Ultimately, landing pages should ideally be built for specific campaigns - these should be measured, tested, adapted, etc. and the goal is to create something that allows for optimal campaign performance for new users (in the case of this article). Lots of paid traffic is directed to PDPs, PLPs or a brand’s homepage - however, generally, these pages aren’t purpose built to achieve the overall objectives for prospecting campaigns, which are:

• Introduce the brand

• Instill trust / show popularity etc

• Expose key selling points

• Introduce the product catalog

• Channel users to correct area of site / PDP

• Capture data or push users to next stage of site

Obviously this differs for certain types of brands, who could be more CRM-led or may have a single CTA (which does change things), but this is how I see it for an average brand.

With this in mind, it’s really important to empower your team with the right tools to build our best-in-class landing pages - with some examples of products that can help including:

• Built-in Page Builder (Shopify’s new Sections Everywhere offering, Magento’s Page Builder, SFCC Page Builder etc.)

• ShogunCMS (strong offering for Shopify and BigCommerce Stores)

• PageFly

• ZMags

• Vev.design

• WebFlow

• Various others - including headless CMS, Wordpress, Unbounce etc.

Best Practices for eCommerce Landing Pages

Introduction to the brand

If you’re targeting a new customer, you really need to create a succinct, aspirational introduction to the brand / your offering / your story. This doesn’t need to be detailed, but it needs to highlight your value proposition, even if it’s just a message like “the world’s most exclusive backpacks, since 1902”.

Brand / Social Proof

Although the need for this will differ depending on the brand (and this is also getting a bit samey), quotes from high profile publishers or authorities are a good way of instilling trust or elevating the brand / product. GQ and Vogue quotes are examples you see a lot.

Curated Product / Considered Navigation

A lot of brands send users to an “all” or “new in” PLP or the homepage - but I’m very pro creating curated landing pages that break out the catalog and show key product from a number of categories or collections. These would then ideally be introduced with text highlighting some of the key selling points or features. In addition to curating product, it’s also good to provide a clear route to key categories / sections of the website - just so users can very easily navigate to other areas.

UGC / Customer Success Stories

This isn’t relevant to all brands (lots of our clients are premium brands, so would be unlikely to buy into it), but showcasing customer stories in a digestible format can work really well. Ideally you’d pull out key stories and display alongside an image etc. This is essentially just standard social proof, but using specific reviews / quotes to highlight key selling points.

Usability / Structure

One of the key things that I consider important with landing pages is them being bespoke / custom in terms of formatting and structure - so not being squeezed into an existing template. Often, you see really poor looking landing pages as they’re being created using an existing set of components via a blog post or a basic CMS page. Ideally, the landing page would be purpose built and would be custom-designed around the content / purpose.

Examples of Strong eCommerce Landing Pages

Asket - Very clean example of a curated landing page. Doesn’t meet all requirements, but does a great job with curating product and chanelling users through to PLPs from there.

Everlane - Although not solely focused on prospecting customers, a really clean, well-structured landing page that curates their catalog and introduces key selling points etc.

Hims - A clear and simple product catalogue, with product explainer copy and customer success stories.

Bombinate - Another really nice example of a more curated approach, as an alternative to just sending users through to a standard PLP.

Sakara - This is one of the stronger examples, content-wise - introducing the brand, educating the user on the benefits, utilising quotes etc.

Remarkable - probably the strongest example in the list, but also the homepage. Remarkable tick almost all the boxes and use their homepage for the majority of their prospecting campaigns.