You have probably heard about the importance of landing pages.
But how are they different from product pages?
And which one should you use?
What is a Product Page?
A product page is a web page that is designed to persuade the potential customer to buy a specific product from the inventory of an e-commerce store.
Typically, product pages include a product description, a list of its most important features, and at least one photo as well as the price and an “Add to Cart” button.
In addition, they tend to also feature customer ratings, customer reviews, and recommendations for related products.
When Should You Use Product Pages?
If you only have a few products in your inventory, then you’d probably be better off creating sales pages for each of them and linking to those sales pages from your website’s navigation bar.
But if your inventory is larger than that, then it’s better to structure your website as an online store with product pages.
Something to keep in mind here is a UX design principle known as Jakob’s Law:
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
In the e-commerce context, this means that users spend most of their time on Amazon and therefore prefer your site to work the same way as Amazon.
Specifically, they will expect product pages to be similar to those of Amazon, with the product photos on the left and the product description to the right of the photos.
They will also expect a customer rating that follows a five-star system, customer reviews, and the option to leave their own review.
And just to be clear, we aren’t saying that you should outright plagiarize Amazon’s product page design.
What we are saying is that you need to meet customers’ expectations instead of throwing curve balls at them with unusual design choices that make your e-commerce store confusing and difficult to use.
And those expectations are largely shaped by Amazon!
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a web page that has a single conversion goal.
In theory, that goal can be anything, but in practice, the vast majority of landing pages fall into one of these two categories:
- Lead generation landing pages are designed to persuade potential customers to provide their contact details.
Typically, when online marketers use the term “landing page”, that’s what they are referring to. - Sales landing pages are designed to persuade the potential customer to buy a specific product or service.
Typically, online marketers use the term “sales page” to refer to sales landing pages.
Other possible conversion goals include persuading the visitor to share a particular piece of content on their social media, filling out a survey, leaving a review, etc. These conversion goals are extremely rare, though.
What’s the Difference Between Product Pages and Sales Pages?
Okay, so given the descriptions that we have provided, you might be confused as to what’s the difference between:
- A product page that is designed to persuade the potential customer to buy a specific product from the inventory of an e-commerce store.
- A sales landing page is designed to persuade the potential customer to buy a specific product or service.
Does that mean that a product page is an e-commerce sales page?
No, because while a product page is designed to persuade the potential customer to buy a specific product from the inventory of that e-commerce store, that is its primary conversion goal as opposed to being its only conversion goal.
For Example:
Go to Amazon’s product page for our co-founder Russell Brunsons’ book “DotCom Secrets” and start scrolling down.
You’ll probably immediately see the “Frequently Bought Together” section that is designed to persuade you to buy three books instead of just one:
As you continue scrolling down, you’ll probably also see:
- “Products related to this item” section.
- “More items to explore” section.
- “Related products with free delivery on eligible orders” section.
- “What do customers buy after viewing this item?” section.
- “Best Sellers in this category” section.
- “Customers who viewed items in your browsing history also viewed” section.
As well as banner ads, customer reviews, and more.
So yes, the primary conversion goal of that product page is to persuade the potential customer to buy “DotCom Secrets”, but there are a whole bunch of competing conversion goals, including promoting books by other authors.
Obviously, if you have your own e-commerce store, you won’t be promoting someone else’s products on your product pages.
But you probably will want to add some of the elements that you see on Amazon’s product pages, such as product recommendations, thus introducing competing conversion goals.
Now, compare this to our own landing page for “DotCom Secrets”, where the only conversion goal is to persuade the potential customer to order Russel’s book.
Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!
Technically, the “DotCom Secrets” landing page is a lead generation landing page because the book itself is free, but since we ask potential customers to cover the shipping costs, we structured it as a long-form sales page.
If we wanted to sell the book instead of giving it away for free, we would use the same landing page, we would just need to rewrite some of the copy.
When Should You Use Landing Pages?
Let’s take a closer look at the two most common use cases for landing pages.
Lead Generation Landing Pages
Here’s the most effective way to generate leads online:
- Create a lead magnet.
- Create a landing page for that lead magnet.
- Drive traffic to that landing page.
This is called a lead generation funnel.
For Example:
Here’s a simple, yet high-converting landing page for our “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” lead magnet:
Get “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” for FREE!
The lead generation funnel is the first stage of the Value Ladder sales funnel:
- Bait. You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend. You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
- Middle. You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service.
- Backend. You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.
Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.
So you should use landing pages to collect the email addresses of your dream customers, then pitch them your products and services via email and drive that email traffic to your sales pages.
Here’s how Russel, who created the Value Ladder sales funnel and used it to grow ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue, explains it:
Sales Landing Pages
Sales pages are the most effective way to persuade your dream customers to buy your products and services.
Outside of the e-commerce context, sales pages can work well no matter how many products you have because you can use email marketing to drive traffic directly to the sales page of a specific product.
Within the e-commerce context, sales pages can work well if you have just one or just a few products, because then you can create a sales page for each product and link to them from your navigation bar.
That being said, the best way to grow an e-commerce business is to create a cart funnel and then drive traffic to it.
That applies to both online stores with a small inventory that have sales pages for each product and to traditional online stores that look similar to Amazon.
Here’s what a cart funnel looks like:
- Sales page
- Upsell
- Cross sell
- Thank you page
As you can see, the first page in this funnel is a sales page, so in order to implement this approach, you will need to create a proper sales page for your most popular product if you don’t have one yet.
Build Landing Pages That CONVERT With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to create landing pages that convert:
- Proven landing page and sales funnel templates.
- Visual editor that you can use to customize those templates.
- A/B testing functionality that you can use to optimize your landing pages.
And we offer a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk!