10 Elements for a High-Converting Pre-Sell Landing Page

By Emily Rose Patz

KEY TAKEAWAY

From headlines to content placement, every aspect of your pre-sell landing page presents an opportunity to perfect your strategy. By opting for a standalone page dedicated to a specific purpose, your campaign has the space it needs to develop, grow, and shine.

More and more, D2C ecommerce brands are looking to the convenience and slimmed-down stylings of pre-sell landing pages to leverage their hottest products, limited drops, and special sales. While ecommerce websites are the heart of any D2C operation, businesses can leverage pre-sell landing pages to bolster campaigns and target particular personas.

When Should You Opt for a Pre-Sell Landing Page?

While it may be tempting to link to your website for every campaign, your website is a vast digital playground of every product you sell, dotted with all kinds of rabbit holes that can lead a prospect astray from doing the single thing you want them to do.

For daily sale emails to your list subscribers or a product callout on social media, your website is the perfect destination for driving conversion because it aligns with your day-to-day messaging and generic advertising campaigns.

Pre-sell landing pages are a better choice when your brand has something specific to say because they empower your business to highlight specific products, pain points, benefits, and offers to appeal to a specific target. For example, a pre-sell landing page would best suit:

A pre-launch campaign

Generate buzz before a product’s big debut by empowering interested buyers to learn more, shop the line, and reserve items via pre-order.

A new product launch

Cut away from the clutter of your website by directing your launch campaign to a dedicated landing page that showcases your fresh product’s features and benefits.

A product line promotion

Give your line space to shine with a landing page packed with product shots and testimonials. A dedicated page can hyper-target those most likely to buy and engage.

A dedicated sale for exclusive items (AKA “Flash sale” or “Drop”)

A landing page harnesses the hype of flash sales and drops by placing limited items on display, honing in on time and quantities left, and driving sales through urgency.

A special sale day

Ramp up success on days like Black Friday with a landing page that exclusively curates top deals, shows off one-day steals, and answers holiday FAQs.

10 Essentials for a Successful D2C Pre-Sell Landing Page

Your pre-sell landing page is valuable real estate, and it pays to treat it that way. Consider some of these conversion-oriented page elements inspired by Caraway cookware’s stunning pre-sell page as you map out what will become the crux of your next hit campaign.

📰 A Show-Stopping Headline

🤑 A Compelling Offer

✅ A Clear CTA

👛 A Strategic Curation of Products

📈 Pain Points, Resolved + Value-Boosting Benefits

🖼 Scroll-Stopping Imagery

🎞 Bite-Sized Videos

👍🏻 Social Proof

🎭 Convincing Comparisons

💬 Non-Commital Ways to Connect

A Show-Stopping Headline

No matter how big and bold your headline may be, your landing page has mere seconds to make a winning first impression.

The best headlines instantly tell the what while communicating a benefit that solves a pain point. The tried and true formula for a winning headline is all about putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Then ask yourself, What is the problem they’re trying to solve? or What do they want? If your headline solves that problem or achieves their goals in an impressively short number of characters, you’re golden.

A Compelling Offer

When you construct your pre-sell landing page, ask yourself, What about this page will motivate visitors to buy or engage now?

Limited quantities complemented by a countdown create an instant sense of urgency, especially when added to the header section. Alternatively, discounts with a deadline can achieve that same effect.

Example from Caraway

If you’re not inclined to promote a limited-quantity item or provide a discount, consider leveraging a content offer. This provides you the opportunity to grow your email list and cultivate relationships with visitors beyond this initial engagement.

A Clear CTA

As a D2C business, your pre-sell landing page CTA is the vehicle that transports your prospects to your desired destination: their shopping cart. Your CTA should be crystal clear and strikingly bold. In a single word, unmissable.

Here’s where your CTA can really drive conversions:

Header

Place a prominent CTA button in your header that visitors will see the moment they land on your page.

Product Spotlight

Pair each product listing with a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” CTA.

Sticky Navigation

Add urgency with a sticky nav that includes a sale or quantity countdown along with a “Checkout Now” button.

Footer

Use the final portion of your landing page to convey your CTA one last time. You can also offer ways to connect beyond their page visit like a social media invitation.

A Page Exit Pop-Up

Add urgency with a sticky nav that includes a sale or quantity countdown along with a “Checkout Now” button.

A Strategic Curation of Products

A landing page has limited space, so it’s important to ensure that the products it features align with the goal of your page. For example, your product launch page should only include that product. Your product line page should solely focus on a single line. Rather than burying them among the hundreds of items on your site, your landing page makes them the star of the show. Now, what to do with all that extra space? Consider adding some or all of the options below.

Example from Caraway

Pain Points, Resolved + Value-Boosting Benefits

It’s only natural for us to gravitate to solutions that solve our challenges and help us achieve our goals. By weaving in content throughout your landing page that addresses pain points, your product becomes instantly more valuable to prospects.

In the same way addressing pain points provides your product with a must-have status in a prospect’s mind, benefits convey value by adding an aspect of shine. Benefits should always answer the question that instantly pops into a prospect’s mind: “What’s in it for me? Why should I care about this?”

Speak to pain points and benefits through the following critical pieces of content:

Your headline
Subheadlines
Customer testimonials
Product descriptions
Video
Photos
Comparison chart

Example from Caraway

Consider your pain points and benefits a dynamic duo. Together, they tell the story of just how game-changing your products are to your target consumer. And when done right, serve as the stocking point for every successful pre-sell landing page.

Scroll-Stopping Imagery

Visitors are 80 percent more likely to read content when it’s paired with colorful visuals, so high-quality, professional photos, imagery, and design are critical to creating a pre-sell landing page that converts.

The practice of show and tell for your products should always have a strong focus on the show, as many D2C brands credit their growth to their investments in posting on hyper-visual social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

Example from Caraway

Bite-Sized Videos

As if the growing influence of TikTok isn’t proof enough, your D2C customers love engaging with videos. And that crosses over to your landing page as well, as you can achieve up to 34 percent higher conversion rates.

You can leverage the power of video in:

Lightning-fast product demos
Customer testimonials
Backgrounds on your page

Your landing page video doesn’t need to be more than 30-60 seconds long. If you’d like to try a more in-depth demo, consider an A/B test to see if keeping it quick is a better bet.

Social Proof

Considering that 92 percent of customers read online reviews before they make a purchase, adding testimonials and reviews to your pre-sell landing page can give them the information they need without them having to leave.

Selling a premium product? Pairing it with a testimonial can increase conversion rates by an incredible 380 percent.

Example from Caraway

Convincing Comparisons

Example from Caraway

Another way to keep visitors on the page is to line up their pain points and greatest wishes related to your product and compare how yours stacks up against your competitors. This way, they won’t dare go to the other guy’s site because the information you provided upfront – from social proof to the comparison chart – lets them know there’s only one way to go, and that’s with you.

Non-Committal Ways to Connect

Your landing page should accommodate visitors who prefer to keep it casual. You don’t need to achieve a sales conversion on the first go with everyone. Instead, provide options like those below that enable you to stay in touch and make the sale later.

Email capture

Obtaining visitors’ email addresses provides you with the opportunity to re-engage with fresh product offerings, compelling discounts, and content that brings customers closer to your brand. Convince casual visitors to provide their email address with a newsletter sign-up offer (Score 10% off your purchase when you join our email list!) or a compelling content offer (Download our just-released 2021 Holiday Treats Recipe Sheet!).

No matter what type of email capture opportunity you provide, be sure to have follow-up nurture emails tailored to new email subscribers and/or the content they decide to download. Of course, no one has the time to reply to dozens of prospects per day or more, so many teams rely on marketing automation to manage their nurture campaigns for them. And this tactic is more than just convenience. Leveraging marketing automation to nurture your landing page leads results in a 451 percent increase in qualified leads.

Social media

There’s lots to like about the social media invite, or “Let’s be friends” invitation. For landing page visitors, the effort involves nothing more than tapping “Follow,” something they already do with lots of brands that catch their eye.

For your D2C business, once they’re your friend, you’re in! Think about it: What better way to stay top-of-mind for your landing page visitors than to pop up in their Instagram feed each day? But getting the connection won’t necessarily earn you the conversion. From the moment they tap “Follow,” your social media strategy will either make or break your relationship. This is where eye-catching imagery, hyper-branded content, and user-generated posts come into play.

Example from Caraway

Test, Tweak & Test Again

One of the greatest benefits of a pre-sell landing page is the ability to experiment. While websites require a certain amount of consistency from page to page, landing pages live on their own. This means that the wild idea you just can’t shake can easily be tested without fear of creating a sizable negative impact if it doesn’t happen to pan out.

Better yet, pre-sell landing pages are built to be tested, tweaked, and continuously improved. Heat mapping and measuring key metrics empower your team to rapidly iterate and optimize your pre-sell landing page for conversion. Plus, you have the added benefit of not having to stress about breaking elements on your website when making these changes.

Supercharge Your Next Campaign

From headline options to content placement, every aspect of your pre-sell landing page presents an opportunity to perfect your strategy. By opting for a standalone page dedicated to a specific purpose, your campaign has the space it needs to develop, grow, and shine.

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