Creating landing pages with your Shopify theme

Digital marketing is typically a key part of any online store’s strategy — and many campaigns require a landing page.

By definition, a landing page is the page that is displayed when a user clicks on an advertisement — whether it’s a sponsored social media post, search ad, video ad, or native advertising effort.

One common misconception is that a landing page needs to be a unique, separate page.

In fact, almost any well designed, engaging page can be a landing page.

• Use Shopify’s page tool to build a landing page — with sections, optionally
• Use a product or collection page
• Your Shopify store homepage
• A blog post
• Create a fully custom landing page

Building landing pages with a Shopify theme

Creating landing pages (or any other type of page), using premium Shopify themes can be easy to do thanks to templates with Shopify sections enabled.

In Out of the Sandbox themes, the page.details template is a great foundation to build a landing page.

When building out a landing page using Shopify page sections, keep these points in mind:

• Focus on providing eye catching, high quality imagery and text along with engaging content.
• In most cases, you’ll want to include a “featured collection” section with at least one of the products.
• If you’re creating a landing page for a campaign that mentions specific products or product types, this should match what’s shown in this section. Keep in mind that you can simply include a single product on a landing page by creating a unique collection with a lone product in it.
• Alternatively, a strong call to action section with headline and button that links to the product page itself can be another good strategy.
• Another good element to include is an email signup form — so that even if a visitor doesn’t buy, they might sign up for your list and convert later on down the road.

When building a landing page with sections, one of the most common dilemmas is what order your sections should be in.

• In general, putting a featured collection section right away can seem a bit too “abrupt” for some shoppers. That said, including a button or link to the product page near the top can be a good strategy.
• A good rule of thumb is to introduce your company and products, and then ease visitors into the featured collection section or call to action.
• Different types of sections can be used to include links to the product page or other content throughout the page.
• You can also repeat sections. For example, you might create a page with an eye-catching image with text overlay followed by a featured collection or call to action. Next you could include a variety of sections that help tell your story — and then include another featured collection or link to the product page farther down to help give engaged shoppers an easy way to convert. 

If you’re already using the page.details template for another page layout, no fear — there’s a few custom code changes you can make to take advantage of to build a landing page.

In addition, Out of the Sandbox themes also feature the product.details templatethat can be used to add sections of content below the standard product page layout — which can come in handy when using a product page as a landing page.

This approach can be a great way if you want to send visitors directly to a “buy now” product page but still make sure that there’s additional information to engage shoppers.

Here again, if you need to create multiple product.details templates, that’s possible.

Testing landing pages in Shopify

It’s worth noting that most social and paid search advertising platforms let you experiment with different landing pages (along with different ad copy and imagery), which can be an effective way to test which landing page converts best.

However, one potential downside for many Shopify store owners is that it can be more challenging to get significant, actionable data with the limited traffic that your niche might be able to generate from these advertising sources.

Your marketing budget may also not be able to handle sending large volumes of traffic to your site only to see them bounce from an experiential landing page.

Landing pages for remarketing

Don’t forget that you can always remarket to shoppers who came to your original landing page — and either send them back to the same landing page or experiment with sending them to a different one.

In some cases, it may not make sense to bring the user back to the same page they visited previously — especially if the argument could be made that since it didn’t get them to buy then, it might not work the second time around.

Navigation or no navigation?

One of the biggest debates in digital marketing is whether or not landing pages should have your site’s main navigation or not — or whether clicking the logo should take the user to the homepage.

The argument against including these elements typically centers around the idea that landing pages are meant to give users all the information they need to convert (at least in theory) and therefore, why distract them with other parts of your site?

On the other hand, some users who are “forced” in a page and can’t go to the site’s main page to learn more about the company, see what other products are available and engage more in the site can get frustrated and simply bail.

By default, removing your navigation from certain pages requires code customizations, so it’s definitely a more advanced tactic.

However, leaving the navigation visible typically isn’t a “bad” idea — especially if your site has a well designed navigation.

In many cases, a good alternative to removing navigation menus from marketing landing pages is to focus on building quality navigation menus that, if a shopper does start interacting with it, they will be able to quickly and efficiently navigate your site and, hopefully, engage and convert.

Advanced landing pages

It’s also possible, in Shopify, to create page templates that forgo the use of your site’s header, footer, navigation bars, and other standing elements.

The advantage of this is that you can get very creative with unique layouts — but they do typically require a significant investment in design, coding and testing, which is a good reason to start with your Shopify theme’s built-in features to create your landing pages.