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Welcome back to season 12 of limited.
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Supply, the only commerce podcast with unfiltered and refreshingly hot takes.
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I'm your host Nick Sharma and when I'm not recording, I'm behind the scenes.
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Scaling your favorite celebrity and consumer brands. Let's start talking all things direct to consumer I'm going to tell you about a software that my agency, Sharma Brands, uses. With our fastest scaling brands historically last click advertising channels. Think Facebook, Google or TikTok. They take too much credit for what they do. As a result, it's reduced confidence for brands to effectively scale their upper funnel structure strategies, which puts them in a pickle of higher CPAs. A few years ago without Prescient, I would have said there's no real way to track what channels like YouTube TV or even newcomers like Applovin are doing. But with Prescient you can now look at daily multi channel forecasting and optimize your paid media without any bias. Prescient allows you to see the halo effect that is usually unrecognized with top funnel channels and allows you to measure those down to the campaign level. See the impact your upper funnel media really has on E Commerce, Amazon and even retail stores. Plus, once you go live, since it's not a pixel based platform, you'll have data and results populating within a week. Try it out and go to prescientai.com Limited to learn more.
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Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. You know I was going through a lot of the emails that I get and there was a lot of feedback on a very specific episode recently in season 11 and it dove deep into something tactical. And lately I've been getting a lot of questions about landing pages. I think there's always this pendulum swing on both creative and the post click experience. On the creative, it's swings between stuff that's really nicely done, studio shot, professionally done, beautiful cinemagraph type stuff or UGC crushes. And a lot of times it just swings back and forth and you just have to be testing enough to where you see that you know one is working better than the other and and that you're making those changes on the post click experience. I feel like this happens too where there's some points in the year where your homepage outperforms a product page or a landing page or your product page outperforms your homepage or a landing page. And then there's other times where your landing page outperforms everything. It also depends, you know, like who are you targeting? Are you targeting somebody who knows about the brand or knows about the question or the problem that you' trying to solve for, or are you targeting somebody who has to first be educated on why they even need an infrared, you know, sauna blanket? So all of that said, today's episode, I actually want to go pretty tactical and go super deep into landing pages. This might end up becoming a two parter, just depending on how much we get through. But this is about it. This is from a 13 page newsletter that I wrote and I wanted to create this episode because everybody always wants extra commentary and extra color. So while I'm still gonna follow this format of the document that I wrote, I wanna add some just extra color. So the reason that I really wanted to focus on this is I think that a lot of times we talk about growth marketing or just growing a brand, growth hacking, whatever it may be. And a lot of it tends to just really focus on Facebook ads or media buying, kinda these things that are really just siloed and those are mostly just one function. But one of the things that we don't focus on is growth marketing being this kind of full funnel approach to marketing. Right? Like when I think of growth marketing, I'm not just thinking that you're optimizing Facebook ads. I think part of growth marketing is making sure that your Facebook ads are as efficient as possible. You're testing as many things, you know, you're testing whitelisting and advertorials and landing pages and different bid and cost cap structures and all of that good stuff. But I also think that growth marketing applies to, you know, your bio on your Instagram page, the highlights that are featured, what posts are pinned to the top, you know, what's the URL behind the Instagram profile? When you work with an influencer, what's the URL you're giving them? Is a coupon code automatically applied when they click the link? Are they being tracked or segmented differently based on the UTM that they have when they first hit the site? You know, like, I think growth marketing applies to everything the email pop up, making sure that your pop up is capturing as many emails as possible, which is why I like to use Alia or even making sure that your welcome flow is constantly being optimized. If you're doing pr, you know, are you making sure that you're maximizing that relationship by using an affiliate platform to incentivize these publishers to post as much as possible or include you in more things? So I think like this concept of growth marketing is much greater than just media buying, which is usually how it's talked about in, in our kind of like bubble or in our community, in our world. But, you know, one of the biggest levers within that is landing pages. If there, if you were to ask me, you know, what's one of the bigger levers you can test and play with that. Most brands don't. It's landing pages. It's basically everything that happens after somebody clicks an ad, right? Regardless of how good your media buying is or how good your creative is, if whatever happens after the click is not just as good or better or is not doing the job that it's supposed to, which is, you know, your ad is supposed to get a click, your ad's not supposed to sell somebody right away. Once they get to your site or your landing page, that's where you have to sell them. So if you're landing page or your website, your product page or collections page, wherever you're sending traffic to, if that's not doing an active job of focusing on bringing that customer down the funnel, you know, you're screwed. Like, you're just wasting dollars on the paid side. And at the same time, most brands, this is where they fuck up. They, they run a ton. You know, they have agencies, they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on media and on creative and agencies to support that. And then people click and it's like you end up on a site built in 90, 90, it looks like shit. And it's Shopify template. You know, the cart's not optimized. There's no upsells, there's no bundling, there's no merchandising of bundles, there's no new customer offer. So anyways, this got me pretty frustrated and it was Easter Sunday, so I thought, why not let's do a little Easter scavenger hunt on landing pages and just go super deep. So the first thing I want to talk about is the difference between the problem versus product funnel. Now these, these are two funnels that mostly everybody plays within. I think there's a third 1 which is funnel 0, which comes before the first funnel. And that's just making sure that you're able to grasp through relatability to your audience you're trying to go to. So let me give you an example. Let's say you're selling a infrared sauna blanket from Higher Dose, right? Typically I say there's two funnels. Funnel one is you have to educate them on why there is even a need for the product you're selling. So if you're selling this higher dose blanket, maybe it's that your sleep is really bad. So you need to educate them why infrared light and why this sauna product is actually going to help you lead to better sleep. The second funnel is now distinguishing somebody, distinguishing to somebody why your product is the best option. So, you know, take Jolie. Jolie's a really easy example here. Funnel 1 talks about why Jolie makes a difference in your water quality. What is. And funnel zero to that could even just be the Jolie water report, which is like, hey, did you realize how fucked up the water is that you're showering in? It's your biggest organ on your body. You know, you're giving it the worst water yet. You consume purified water, but you're showering in tap water. Why is that? Right? That's funnel zero. Funnel one is now educating them on the need of clean water and what that does for them, benefits wise, you know, that's really making it about them. How do you take something that's a problem that they may or may not understand and make it about them so that they actually care enough to get to funnel two, which is now you've under. You've got somebody who understands what the problem is, right? They understand that showering and water filled with wash off prescriptions and chlorine and all these chemicals is probably not good for your hair, for your nails, for your skin. You know, you're probably drinking some of that as you're showering. And so now the funnel 2 is really just around, okay, why is Jolie the best option for this product that's currently on the market? And so I think a big part of even deciding when you're running ad traffic is you have to understand who are, you know, what is your objective here? Is your objective to sell somebody on the individual product you're selling or is it to actually first educate them and get them to understand what the need is? Some landing pages and if you've got a product that's maybe a bigger impulse buy, you can actually do this in one and we'll talk about the different types of pages you can run in a second. But other brands, you know, take eight Sleep, for example, or higher dose or you know, cookware, right? Like you have to actually break these out. These are generally run as two separate things. Your upper funnel kind of cold prospecting. These are people who you're educating on why, right? It's literally just why. Brand name question mark. That's the answer for what funnel one is. Funnel two is why. This one question Mark and that's what you have to answer there. So hopefully that's clear. But I wanted to establish that before we get into the types of landing pages. So there's a few different types of landing pages. There's obviously way more than what I'm about to say because a landing page is essentially any specialized page where you're sending traffic. But I want to focus on the few that I think are the most important, most helpful, the ones that I've seen drive the biggest impact. So the first one is a Hero bundle or a Hero product landing page. This is essentially focusing on a very specific bundle that you're merchandising for net new customers or a new product. Or if you're, I've talked about the supplement brands on here, who they create this like net new customer offer. You know, you get half off your first month subscription, you get a free mixer, a free, you know, carrying case, maybe three months to the Calm Meditation app, whatever it may be. But you can essentially use these landing pages and we'll talk about all the sections in a second, but you can use these landing pages to create that entire experience. You've got a merchandise bundle. It's like you walk into Costco and they've got these pre made bundles. When you buy a video game, right, it comes with an Xbox, an extra controller, two free games, you know, maybe something else. But the idea with these Hero bundle pages is the same thing. It's like put somebody on a red carpet, help them understand what the product is, why it exists, you know, who's it for, how's it going to benefit them, when does it arrive, you know, all these kind of main things, you're just answering over and over again and make a really good offer and they should scroll this page without having to realize or without having to leave and go ask a question to Google, to ChatGPT to go look something up. You know, everything from social proof to a comparison chart to why should somebody trust this brand to, you know, the deal, everything like that should be on this Hero bundle page. These are, I found these to be the highest leverage pages. Like if you can get one of these cranking to a point where it's converting very well, you can easily triple, quadruple your conversion rate you're normally used to. Now the second one that I like, that I love to pair with actually. And a lot of times I'll pair this page. You know, you have a Facebook ad, you go to this page, which is a listicle and then you can send them to a Hero bundle page or a hero product landing page. Or you could even go to a product page, depending on where all you want to go. But it's a listicle and you know, listicles, I'm pretty sure. Well, I don't know for sure, but in my world, listicles were made by Buzzfeed. You know, 21 pictures that'll restore your faith in humanity. You've actually probably seen if you've ever heard of like the native ad networks, Taboola, Outbrain, Zergnet, all these companies. The top spenders on these ad networks are publishers that run traffic to essentially slideshow listicles, which again, just shows you how popular the concept of listicles are and how much people love listicles. But all that to say listicle landing pages do phenomenal and they're so easy to build. I used to do this manually where I would basically go through, let's say your Caraway cookware, right? You can go to the Caraway actually has a page publicly on their site that has all the reviews. You can literally go through them and just make a tally. A trait or a benefit and a tally, right? So if I go to Caraway's reviews, I might see that, well, it's non stick and non toxic. Boom, put a check there. Somebody else writes, oh, they're very easy to clean. Boom, put a check there. One person writes, oh, I don't have to use as much oil because it's non toxic or sorry, it's nonstick. I'll probably put that under the first one and just add a tally to less oil. I would basically do this until I've got 15 things with a good amount of tallies next to them. And then I would just reverse them. So I would sort them by most tallies to least tallies and take the top seven, top five, top nine. I'm a fan of the odd numbers. I think it looks more real and make a listicle. 7 reasons why home chefs can't get enough of Caraway cookware. And you start with the most talked about benefit, then the second most talked, then the third, and you go to five, nine, whatever you want to go to throughout that, every two or three benefits, you've got a CTA that says choose my color. Explore the cookware set, whatever it may be something to get you to the next stage of the page. But the idea is that you've basically taken reviews and things that people are actually talking about and reversing it to match what consumers probably one, if they're talking about that and raving about that in the reviews that's clearly something they were probably looking for prior to being a customer. The other thing I'll say there too is looking at TikTok and Reddit. And customer service questions are also good because it helps you understand what are the things that people are confused about that you can get ahead of in a listicle and just allows you to display it better. These do really well for upper funnel channels as well. And the last thing I'll say is you've now got ChatGPT so you can actually just download all your reviews and give the prompt of sort the top 5, 7, 9 most talked about benefits, give them to me, give me supporting reviews as evidence. I would even incorporate some of these reviews into the actual listicle page itself. And what you want to do is basically to figure out success on this page you have to judge it from its click through rate to the next page. If you have anything under 30%, you're probably missing the mark heavily. You want to aim to 40 to 60% click through rate. That means about half the people who read the listicle end up going to the landing page. And then your conversion rate on the landing page should obviously be higher from traffic coming from the listicle. This is also a good, you know, going back to that growth mindset, right? If you think about analytics and measurement, it's a good reason to have individually built out landing pages so you can understand conversion rate per page. If you can't just track conversion rate by the UTM source, which a lot of times you can, but it's not as clean or that piece of it can get messy. So yeah, just another random thought.
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A few years ago without Prescient, I would have said there's no real way to track what channels like YouTube TV or even newcomers like Applovin are doing. But with Prescient you can now look at daily omnichannel forecasting and optimize your paid media without any bias. Today, brands like Port and Leather, Saatva, Jones Road, Hexclad and so many more of our clients use Prescient to understand what these top of funnel channels actually do to impact their sales in retail. Amazon and their DTC site Last click channels have taken too much credit for far too long and reduced confidence in upper funnel channels. Prescient allows you to see the halo effect that is usually unrecognized with top of funnel channels and allows you to measure those down to the campaign level. See the impact of upper funnel on your revenue roas and new customers. Today by going to prescientai.com limited to learn more. That's prescientai.com limited.
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Okay, the next one I see work really well with apparel with high SKU categories with online or I guess you could call them like marketplaces, e retailers, you know, companies like pet Meds or Chewy or places like that. But it's collection style landing pages. And essentially what a collection style landing page is is it's combining a landing page. You know, the concept of a landing page, which is how do we educate people, teach them, show them, give them social proof, give them reasons to believe, answer any sort of questions they have as they're on the fence of whether or not they should buy and make it easy for them to view a larger number of SKUs in kind of a collections page format. People, I don't know if you've ever done this. I love just like out in the wild, seeing what people are doing on their phones, whether I'm on the subway or the airport or walking around or waiting in line for coffee. You know, it's always fascinating to me as a marketer to watch how people use their phone. And one of the things I always notice is collections pages get so much engagement because people can just scroll through it. You know, if a collections page is done nicely, like you can swipe through it, you can look at different colors or variants in the collections page without having to click through those obviously perform well. But you know, collections pages do really well. So what does this mean? This means you add kind of a lot of the key elements that you would normally have in a landing page. The social proof, a nice hero section that explains the product and its benefit and why it works and why people believe in it and why you should believe in it. Some sort of a social proof component. Maybe it's a comparison chart, you know, maybe it's even just breaking up products every, I don't know, 8 to 12 SKUs and reiterating social proof or reiterating a comparison chart or reiterating, you know, an unboxing video that shows, you know, how the product looks or how what sets this brand's experience apart from something else. But it's essentially just taking a collections page and supercharging it. Me personally, I'm a fan of actually then taking this concept of a landing page as your for your collections page and making it your active collections page. Some brands are averse to that. They think it feels too like marketer y. But in this day and age of, you know, advertising and how ads are served and what is decided to be served to people. I actually don't think it's a big issue at all. Okay, another one, this one I see work really well in the when we go back to funnel one and Funnel two, Funnel one being the why brand question mark and funnel two being why this product question mark. Going back to Funnel one, a page that I think works really well is a social proof landing page. So this works super well for high AOV products, brands that have something expensive to sell or expensive for their category. So again, caraway is probably a good fit here. An eight sleep is probably a good fit here. If you're selling furniture, outdoor furniture, really, if you tend to be one of those yassified brands, you're probably selling something more expensive for the category. Which is why the social proof page, as long as your product delivers on everything it says it'll do, this is why these types of pages do really well. Anyways, this means embedding TikTok clips, Instagram stories, other posts that people have put up. I'm even a fan of taking screenshots of Facebook ad comments or screenshots of text conversations. The perception is that those are much harder to fake, which in turn has a higher trust with the person who's actually viewing it. I've also seen TikTok comments be a very like incremental way to add social proof in terms of helping with click through rate or conversion rate. And also TikTok shop reviews, that's another one that I think not many brands are using that right now in their direct to consumer funnel because they're probably trying to isolate traffic to TikTok shop. But I don't see any reason why you wouldn't take those screenshots or somehow figure out a way to integrate those. The reason it does well is because the framing is that it's from TikTok shop reviews, which consumers know you just absolutely cannot fake. Whereas press articles, blog articles, influencers, customer reviews, those are all like. I think consumers kind of know those can be faked, which is why I love the concept of screenshotting ad comments or text or, or TikTok shop reviews. I think those are just much harder to fake. Next type of page is more of like a lead gen style page and you can use this page, you know, pre launch, you can use it post launch, you can use it in advance of launching a new product. But it's essentially a, you know, form collection landing page. So we launched a beauty brand for a beauty influencer recently called POV Beauty and we actually Use this type of a page pre launch. So as soon as the brand was announced, there was a really beautiful landing page that you could go to and just basically enter your email and phone number post launch. We sold out the inventory in a matter of a couple hours. So we switched our site over to a sold out version of the website. And so we had two versions of that. I think one might be up right now at the time of this recording and the other one was basically a full site takeover saying like, you know, we're fully out of stock. Enter your email here in the hero of the homepage. And one, it just does a phenomenal job, conversion rates really high. But two, if you're, if you're using this for like a prelaunch of a new product or you're about to launch a new product, this is your opportunity to reiterate why do people love the brand. You know, the social proof, the reasons to believe in the new product, maybe tease the new product and, and just give some more excitement or kind of hype, right? If you're, if you're launching a product and you're not going through the effort of kind of making it a big deal and that doesn't just mean this prelaunch page, but also like really good organic social content or you know, kind of like teasing what it is, good email content, whatever it is, you know, you're just missing out on revenue. Like it doesn't, there's no negative impact to building an additional list out of the one out of the list you already have. Sure, you can email, you're going to email your whole list. But wouldn't you also rather have a group of people that you know are ready to go and ready to buy this product? I think you should. And I know that there's two, there's two brands that I know do a really good job of. This one I've mentioned before is Lemmy. They crush every single product launch. They treat it like a whole brand launch and I think everybody should be following that playbook. And the other one is Sniff S N I F co. They do a really good job of collecting SMS launch lists for products prior to launching, which obviously boosts their sales the second the product drops or even, you know, the night before the product drops to the public. One other example that I haven't brought up in a while is the concept of using SMS collection in exchange for digital product. There's this, there's a clothing brand called New York or Nowhere that a friend of mine runs and what she used to do is she would run, she would build these really beautiful wallpaper packs. You know, it's basically like a 10 image zip file, right? You put that as a digital product for sale on Shopify for free. You run traffic there and you basically tell people, grab this wallpaper pack for free. They still check out on Shopify. So they become a customer, they're opted into emails, they're opted into text messages. And then when they have a product drop or a clothing drop, then they have this massive addressable list to go after because they did all this work collecting phone numbers up front. So slightly different than pre launch or the SMS landing page, but similar concept in the sense that, you know, you want to be able to just keep building these more targeted or more segmented lists so that you've got opportunity to continue running as you continue to launch new stuff. Okay, next one is the byob. So the build your own bundle. Now this is a page that I've been using for probably eight or nine years at this point. It's a very simple concept. You know, you go to Costco and you see a beverage you like. You know, you mix and match your flavors and that's what you buy. This is essentially the same concept, right? You go online, you see poo pourri or some electrolyte powder. You just quickly choose the flavors you want, build your pack, get your discount and you're out. And we find that this does really, really well for net new customers. Again, in that second funnel, right? If you're in the first funnel, you can't just be like, yo, this is our brand buy get three and get 10% off or whatever. This works really well once somebody's educated and is now ready to make a purchase. So in this case you've still got the build your own bundle functionality on top. And then as you scroll, you've still got some components of education. You know, depending on how what your AOV is, what you're selling, what stage of the funnel these people are in, you can decide how many sections or how few sections you want to add into that. But the BYOB page is if you sell any sort of a consumable product, you should 100% have BYOB. I would test it too. If you think it's not going to work because you sell hair care products and you know that's just kind of weird. Or you sell sweatpants and you think that's kind of weird, I would just try it. I bet it would work. The engagement rates are insanely high and you know, we can usually like 3x conversion rate of the site conversion rate just by driving traffic here, especially from prospecting qualified traffic. Okay. And the last type of landing page that I want to talk about here, I didn't realize we're taking so long here, is the article and blog style landing pages. So you know, if you scroll on Facebook or Instagram, you're going to be, you're absolutely going to see examples of this. This is where you have publishers or. Yeah, publishers are basically advertising on behalf of the brand. So you know, you don't see Barkbox running the ad. You see one of the publishers that I own is running the Facebook ad and it looks like it's coming from a publisher when you're in the feed because there's no learn more or Shop now cta, right. It goes to an article that may talk about being a new pet parent or trying to figure out what products my new puppy needs or my dog's getting old. What kind of things do I need to be aware about? It leads you in with either something of value. The value can be something funny, it can be something insightful or educational. Like in this bark example, it can be something relatable like, you know, I just. Let's say it's for caraway again, right? Maybe it's an article about moving into a new apartment, not knowing what all to buy. Boom. Amazing place to tell this story about, to find somebody and connect and relate with them, right? And then they click, they start reading, you get their buy in and then you can sell them the caraway. This concept of the advertorials, which you know just comes from the name ad editorial is one of the biggest, most underrated tactic I think that exists right now. You can expect CPAs to be 30% lower and as a result you're able to educate people significantly more. If you sell in retail, this is a no brainer because people may not buy right away, which is fine, but you will have a higher conversion rate from traffic coming here, but then they'll go buy that in retail. I remember at Hint we ran an incrementality study on advertorials and we've even done this with other brands recently. That was, you know, seven, eight years ago looking at target sales. But we did this recently with another brand and realized that their new audience, like the people they reach who are net new audience to the brand, shot up significantly as a result of advertorials. Because advertorials are just a much nicer way to finesse your way into a net new customer audience. Right. Imagine you're like walking on the beach in Mexico and somebody just comes up to you and starts trying to sell you something. You know, you're like, get the away from me. You don't want to hear from them. Whereas, let's say you're walking on the beach and, you know, somebody starts asking you about your watch or compliments you on your shorts, whatever it is, they're kind of just smoothing their way in. That's basically what an advertorial does. It kind of like smooth. Smooths the entrance into right where the ad is placed in the article. Okay, I think we gotta stop there because the next section I wanted to talk through are all the actual modules that I recommend building out for the landing page, including what kind of questions you have to keep answering over and over again. And then from there I wanted to go into a bunch of tactical tips. You know, I wrote out 40 or 50 things that I think are absolute must for landing pages. And then the last piece is my actual process. Like me, I still build landing pages myself. So what is my process to do that? And you know, instead of it taking eight hours for me to build a page, I can now get it done in about an hour or two. So I want to go through that whole process. That way you guys can just copy it. Anyways, I hope this episode was helpful. Hopefully it validated some thoughts. Hopefully got you to decide, like, yeah, we should be fucking testing all these different pages or types of pages or, you know, maybe we sell leather bags. I know Ben's listening. And we haven't tried a collection style landing page, so maybe we should try that and that'll increase conversion. I firmly believe if you spend a couple, you know, put a timer on. Put a timer on this process, but like, spend two hours and try to build a landing page. See where you get. And if you want, for the, for like the five people that are actually going to do this, if you send me your figma file of a landing page or an outline on a Google Doc, I will help you critique it. I'll go to your site, I'll help you think about the best strategy, the best offer. And yeah, use me as a resource. I want to see which five people actually do this, but do that, I'll be helpful. Next week's episode, we're going to dive right into the modules and then the tactical tips and then exactly how I build landing pages. All right, well, that's all we've got for today. I hope today's episode was helpful. And I'll see you next week. Same time, same place. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg Retail and E Commerce. Commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.