Building a Landing Page

A common strategy when announcing a new product or service is to create a landing page for that product. These can be used to educate potential customers about the new product or to get sales. They’re usually quite in-depth with images, text, headlines, quotes, and user-generated content (also called UGC). These all help a potential customer to understand what the product is, and why they would want it.

Landing pages are also designed so that all of the information is on one page. That way, users don’t get lost, and they hopefully sign up with their email or make a purchase. Once you know how to build a landing page, you can build one quickly to gauge interest in a potential product before launching, and once you have a product, you can secure sales.

We’re going to build a landing page to capture pre-orders for a new product that we’re launching. Then, we are going to start by building a regular landing page, after which, we...

Building a long-form landing page

Landing pages are typically a special type of page that is typically used to sell a product or service, and they come in all sorts of formats. Sometimes, they’re very short with just an email, a sign-up form, and a photo. We’re going to build a long-form landing page for a new product that we’re offering.

This longer landing page gives us plenty of space to explain the product, see customer feedback, and see photos and videos.

Let’s start by creating a page, then we’ll structure our page so that we know where to add the content, and finally, we’ll add the content to our landing page.

Creating a new page

Before we can build a landing page to sell someone a product, we must start with the basics by creating a page in WordPress. Let’s build a solid foundation before we get into the more technical part.

Create a new page by following these steps:

1. In your WordPress admin center, go...

Adding e-commerce to a landing page

Our landing page is looking pretty good. Now that we’ve done a good job of showing off our awesome product with different types of content, we just need to give viewers a way to purchase the product. There are a couple of ways to do this: we can use the Featured Product block, we can add an Add to cart button to the page, or we could also use the One Page Checkout extension.

Let’s start with the easiest method, which is adding a featured product block. Then we’ll look into adding an Add to cart button directly to the page.

Adding a featured product

Before we can let users add a product to their cart, we have to add the product to our store. We don’t have to add every single field, but we need to add enough to display useful information on the landing page.

Let’s add the product first. Follow these steps:

1. Under Products, navigate to Add New as in the following screenshot:

...

Measure and test everything

Now that we have everything set up, it’s worth measuring and testing if it works. Oftentimes, when you launch a new product, you don’t know what resonates the most with your audience. It’s common to have a few guesses and you want to test them.

To collect the best data you can set up an A/B test, where certain users see one version of the landing page and other users see the second version. We can then compare which group had a higher conversion rate, and figure out which marketing message resonates with our audience. However, not everyone has enough traffic to realistically A/B test their pages or their site.

How much traffic do you need to A/B test?

If you want to run actual A/B tests you need quite a bit of data to prove that one variation is better than the other. In e-commerce, the two most common conversion events are add-to-carts and checkouts. You’ll need thousands of these events to prove one way or the other...

Summary

Landing pages are an incredibly important tool for marketing campaigns. Now that you’ve finished this chapter, you should know how you can build landing pages, how to add e-commerce functionality to landing pages, and how to monitor and experiment with landing pages in order to determine the layout that works best for your audience.

Now that you know how to do this, you can promote and effectively sell your products.

In the next chapter, we’ll look into creating and customizing WooCommerce plugins.