The Art of The Landing Page

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Set Up Your Initial Landing Page

The initial landing page you set up your campaign with should be the landing page where you’re seeing the most traffic internally. This can often be the standard product page of your main e-commerce site or a custom landing page built for the hero product of this campaign.

Once you’ve launched your campaign, you can build conversion-driven landing pages so that affiliates can test them against your main landing page to see which page performs best for their specific audiences.

What are Conversion-Driven Landing Pages?

These are websites that sell your products using differentiated promotional tactics.

As customer acquisition costs continue to rise, brands have a limited number of strategies they can use to offset this paradigm.

One of those strategies is to build different types of landing pages that maximize conversion rates across a multitude of channels. These strategies can range from bundling products to offering free trials.

Landing Page Flows

Your partners will be motivated to test out differentiated landing page flows to see which types of pages and formats convert best for their traffic source.

In this context, ‘landing page flows’ are defined as a customer's steps to purchase your product. It uses slightly different terminology than talking about ‘funnels’. Funnels have set event types that can be mixed and matched to create the path to purchase. Their events are driven by the actions of your customers; often navigation clicks. This is why creating a funnel will not include the customer seeing the ad and may group landing page flow events into one semantic funnel event if they all occur on the same page.

For example, let’s say you have 100 prospects clicking on your ads out of interest for your products. Instead of sending every one of those prospects down the same standardized funnel path (AD->Landing Page->Product Page->Checkout Page), you could test a multitude of path variations that may result in a higher conversion rate based on the channel, targeting or creative strategy the affiliate is using.

Examples of Funnel Paths

There isn’t one standard flow that works for every type of product. Every campaign is different due to the nature of the product type, customer cohort, ad creative or channel. The objective here is to provide optionality so affiliates can discover which flow performs best for their audience.

Additionally, learning and developing these strategies isn’t isolated to growing your affiliate channel, as many of these insights can be leveraged to improve the performance of your adjacent paid media efforts, too.

6 Types of Conversion-Focused Landing Pages

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View or Download a copy of this playbook here.

Most brands use standardized e-commerce stores like Shopify to sell their products.

But in a world where media costs are consistently increasing, there is an emerging trend where brands are beginning to build custom, or what we refer to as, conversion-focused landing pages that increase their conversion rates to offset these rising costs. Conversion-focused landing pages are websites that sell your products using differentiated promotional tactics. One of those tactics is to build different types of landing pages that maximize conversion rates across different online channels. Unsurprisingly, prospective customers demonstrate different buying behaviours across different platforms. So offering a variety of landing experiences that support the buying behaviours of the platform in question, can increase their likelihood to buy.

Some examples include: building landing pages that bundle products, offering free trials, quizzes, or even driving customers to an entire website that only sells their hero product. The objective here is to incentivize customers to purchase vs. shop.

In this article, you will learn about the 6 types of landing pages:

1. Hero Product

If you sell a lot of products in your store, it can help to simplify the shopping experience for customers by directing them to a unique landing page that better educates and sells your top-selling product. This aims to change the consumer from a ‘shopping’ mindset to a ‘buying’ mindset by keeping them from feeling overwhelmed by too many choices. As a result, building unique landing pages for specific products can help lift conversion rates and shorten attribution windows.

To help their affiliate partners promote their campaign for their hero product, Alpha BRAIN, they eliminated distractions by working with Squaredance to create a page dedicated to selling that product.

2. The Angle

People appreciate good storytelling. A great way to sell a story is by using a unique angle, also known as a “hook,” that effectively positions your product as a solution to a problem. Or, it could be aligning your product with a popular trend that is emerging. Angles can be a great tactic to engage consumers, appeal to their emotions, and get them enrolled into a narrative that positively impacts their purchasing decision.

When most people think about angles they think about top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) initiatives such as ad strategies. However, they can be used in landing pages as well to reinforce the ToFu strategies throughout the entire path to purchase.

In the example below, we follow the flow from an ad to a presell page to a landing page with a common angle: How this product helps to lower blood sugar.

3. The Promotion

At various times of the year, promotions are an effective strategy to capitalize on consumer demand. Promotions could include discounts, contests, free gifts with purchase, BOGO deals, and so on. Typically these promotions are teased in ads, landing page header banners, or pop-ups. In some cases, these promotional methods may be enough to entice consumers to buy. But another very effective tactic is to build unique landing pages that are entirely dedicated to selling the value of the promotion.

Meal delivery kit companies such as HelloFresh are experts in promotion pages. An example is this one for their sign-up and receives 10 free meals offer. Instead of a traditional e-commerce layout, they opt for a design that reflects traditional print flyers to place more emphasis on the value of the promotion.

4. Bundles

Bundles are used to offer several products or services for sale as one combined package. Their impact comes from giving consumers the perception of a deal while encouraging them to buy more, thus increasing the average order value (AOV). Oftentimes, they also attach an incentive (discount or free gift) which only strengthens the proposition for the customer and motivates a purchase.

Below are three key types of bundles:

>Hero Product Quantity Discount Bundles

This bundle intends to increase purchase intent by giving customers progressively higher pricing discounts and incentives with the more products they buy.

Bundle strategy from Goli on their hero product, apple cider vinegar gummies. They also include a variety bundle to introduce their other products to new and existing Goli customers. Click Here to visit this page.

Bundle strategy combined with a Subscribe & Save strategy by SkinnyFit on their hero product, Super Youth.

>Mix & Match Bundles

If you sell products that are complementary in nature or that can be grouped together to help customers achieve the desired result, mix and match bundles can be really useful. Typically there are 3-4 bundle options presented with varying quantities of similar products offered in each.

Meridian groups together male grooming products that often go hand-in-hand while providing each bundle with its own theme such as "on-the-go" for traveling and "classic maintenance" for anti-aging.

>One-Time Purchase vs. Subscription

Subscriptions are a surefire way to increase the LTV of your customers. However, data suggests subscription offerings are often not desired or trusted by many customers, especially if they aren’t familiar with your product. Therefore, another effective strategy is to offer both options to either subscribe or purchase one time. Typically brands will add more compelling value drivers in the subscription package to persuade customers to subscribe rather than purchase one time.

Livia offers two types of subscription plans and displays the price as a per month cost compared to the one-time payment which looks much more expensive compared to the per-month options.

5. Pricing Model Testing

Building unique landing pages isn’t only a great tactic to improve conversion rates, but it can also improve profitability per customer metrics too. Historically, it would have been next to impossible to test different price points or billing models in retail stores for your products. Thankfully, that’s not the case in e-commerce because it isn’t subject to the same bureaucracies that come with big retail agreements or tangible marketing collateral - which would need to be reprinted every time you wanted to make changes or test new business models, customer incentives or pricing. Instead, e-commerce brands have the flexibility and ease to change a few lines of code and split a/b test (in real-time) any models/pricing they believe will result in higher conversion rates and healthier unit economics for their business.

Some examples of different pages you could build to improve profitability include:

Free Trials or ‘try before you buy’ sampling programs
One-Time Purchase vs. Subscriptions
One-Time Purchase
Quiz
Straight Subscription
Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Curology requires a monthly prescription to purchase their products but breaks the barrier to entry for first-time buyers through their free trial program.

Athletic Greens displays its products in a bundling format by offering the smallest bundle as a one-time purchase and the "most popular" and "best value" packages as subscriptions.

Miracle Brand offers various types of their product (varied by colour, size, and quantity) as one-time purchases. Customers can purchase whenever they want, however often they want.

Picnic provides customers with the exact allergy solution they need by taking them through a quiz funnel to learn about their needs and wants before presenting a solution.

Proper Sleep offers a "subscribe and save" option by providing a 10% discount on subscriptions of their hero product, Core Sleep.

Freshly captures customer emails and zip codes by offering an incentive ($40 off). This allows them to nurture these leads through activities such as sending promotional emails and encouraging them to make a purchase or complete an action.

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Want more examples? Check out this Library of Top Converting Funnels made by the best DTC Brands!

6. The Ambassador

Having a well-known ambassador endorse your product is not only a great way to market your product, but it’s an opportunity to turn that into a landing page itself. Ambassadors can help differentiate your campaign by improving brand recall, building credibility, and attracting new audiences.

Tim Ferriss, American Entrepreneur, is known for his self-help books around lifestyle optimization, which makes him the perfect ambassador for a coffee brand, Four Sigmatic. They position their product as Ferris’s morning coffee, which indirectly associates his productivity with the product.

If you don’t have a celebrity on the payroll yet, that’s okay- consumers respond well to success stories or experiences of people they relate to or lifestyles they aspire to achieve. When selecting ambassadors, whether they are big celebrities or regular customers, take care to select someone whose likeness aligns with your brand and target audience.