Cart abandonment is a major problem for online businesses. Luckily, as with any issue in the ecommerce space, there are several solutions that you can implement.
One of the most effective yet sometimes overlooked solutions is landing page optimization. Your landing page directly impacts shoppers’ experiences and, consequently, purchasing decisions.
A well-designed page sets the stage for a smooth experience, effectively guiding buyers through their journeys from the moment they start shopping to when they check out—this could result in higher conversion rates.
In this post, we offer practical design tips and examples to help you create effective landing pages that mitigate abandoned carts in retail.
Note: The brands and examples discussed below were found during our online research for this article.
Why landing page design matters for cart abandonment
What do landing pages have to do with cart abandonment? The answer: quite a lot!
Some business owners rightfully assume that shoppers abandon their carts because of external distractions, unexpected costs, and security fears. But that’s not all. They also leave their carts because of poor site experiences. In fact, 21% of online shoppers abandon their carts because of complex checkout processes, and others leave because of missing photos and content, too many distractions on the ecommerce site, and long load times.
A well-designed landing page can solve all of these issues. An optimized landing page streamlines the customer experience by simplifying checkout, providing pertinent product information, and minimizing distractions. This can reduce cart abandonment.
7 effective landing page designs to help reduce cart abandonment rates
If you’re struggling with high cart abandonment rates, we’ve got you covered. Here are some landing page design types that can encourage shoppers to complete their purchases:
1. Single product-focused design
This design focuses on a single product to ensure visitors’ attention remains entirely on the item. It features full-width product images, minimal text (focusing primarily on the product’s description and benefits), and a prominent call-to-action (CTA) button with compelling action verbs like “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart.” It can also feature some customer testimonials to help build trust with new customers.
This design can reduce shopping cart abandonment by minimizing decision fatigue—since it focuses on a single item, visitors don’t have to choose between multiple products. It can be an ideal design for a pre-order campaign focusing on a new product because it shines the spotlight on that specific item.
The Apple AirPods Pro 2 page is an excellent example of this type of landing page design, as it focuses exclusively on that one product’s visuals, features, and benefits.
2. Video-centric design
A video-centric design incorporates one or multiple high-quality videos, a CTA button positioned just below the video, and a concise copy that reinforces the video content.
This type of design may be ideal if you offer a complex product or service, as it can improve visitor understanding of your offerings. It’s also perfect for capturing potential customers’ attention and keeping them engaged for longer periods, which is vital to reducing cart abandonment.
Slack’s home page (Note: Must be logged out of the web application to see) is an excellent example of a video-centric design. Immediately after opening the page, you’ll be met with a video showcasing the product in action, followed by short descriptions of its features, which provide a better understanding of the platform.
3. Storytelling design
This may be the design for you if you want to build emotional engagement. A storytelling landing page design focuses on connecting emotionally with shoppers to minimize their risk of abandoning carts.
It contains elements such as sections that unfold a story—this could be your product-making journey, your brand’s history, or employees’ stories—engaging visuals (videos or images), a bold headline that connects with customers on an emotional level, and strategic CTAs throughout the page.
The Nike Breaking2 campaign landing page features a storytelling design. It tells the story of Eliud Kipchoge (an elite athlete), the people who worked behind the scenes to prepare him to break the two-hour marathon barrier, and the Nike shoe that helped him achieve his dream.
4. Minimalist design with interactive elements
You can never go wrong with a minimalist design with interactive elements. Its simplicity minimizes distractions and promotes clarity, and its interactive elements enhance visitor engagement, potentially reducing abandonment rates.
For this design, you need to:
- Maintain a clean layout with a lot of white space.
- Use subtle animations.
- Limit your text to only focus on essential product features and benefits.
- Incorporate straightforward CTAs.
This design can reduce visitors’ cognitive load, allowing them to focus more on your offering.
The DSW product landing pages perfectly depicts this design—they’re simple, featuring large, clear images that zoom in with an iteractive hover function for easy visibility.
5. Social proof-centric design
A social proof-centric design can help increase conversion rates from new buyers as it showcases content from real customers rather than your marketing team—83% of customers are more willing to purchase from brands that use authentic user-generated content.
It leverages customer reviews, case studies, testimonials, and user-generated images and videos.
Glossier’s “Milky Jelly Cleanser” landing page is an excellent example of a social-proof-centric design, as it prominently features users’ star ratings and product reviews.
6. Scarcity and urgency-driven design
This design may be the perfect option if you’re running a sale. It uses urgency and scarcity elements like limited-time offers, countdown timers, “limited stock” indicators, and strategically placed CTAs that highlight offers’ time-sensitive nature. For example, you can use “Get X% Off Only Today” or “Buy Now While Supplies Last.”
Creating a sense of urgency minimizes the risk of visitors leaving your online store before completing their orders. After all, nobody wants to miss out on a deal or an exclusive experience.
Amazon’s “Today’s Deals” page is an excellent example of this landing page design. It displays available offers, each accompanied by a prominent “limited time deal” text to show customers that they must act quickly to get what they want at the displayed price.
7. Mobile-first design
A mobile-first design focuses on creating a great experience for mobile visitors. With 45% of customers saying that they shop from their mobile devices at least once daily, this is one of the most important designs for ecommerce stores. It facilitates seamless shopping on smartphones, potentially reducing customers’ frustration and, consequently, online shopping cart abandonment.
This design features compressed images and videos (to increase load speeds), tappable CTAs, thumb-friendly navigation, and responsive product images and forms. It also contains a concise page copy, typically divided into sections or bullet points, to promote easy mobile reading.
What makes all these landing page designs work?
While each landing page design is unique, they all feature some common elements that you need to incorporate to reduce cart abandonment. These include:
- Trust signals: Include customer reviews, testimonials, and ratings to build trust.
- Fast load times: Ideally, your page load time should be between one and three seconds. To ensure this, compress your images, reduce HTTP requests, and minimize redirects.
- Clear CTAs: Create action-oriented CTAs that let visitors know exactly what to do, such as “Buy Now.”
- Emotional drivers: Build a connection with your audience by telling a story, using language that speaks to their pain points in your headline and copy, and leveraging real-life visuals that showcase your product’s value.
- Exit-intent pop-ups: Include attention-grabbing pop-ups that appear when visitors are about to leave your page. Make sure these pop-ups offer compelling incentives, such as free content downloads, discount codes, and coupon codes, to encourage engagement.
- Consistent branding: Reinforce your brand identity by using the same tone of voice, colors, fonts, and visual style across all your landing pages and marketing materials.
- Visual hierarchy: Use positioning, color, font, and white space to draw shoppers’ attention to vital elements like your headline or CTA. If you want to direct customers to your CTA, for example, place it above the fold and make sure it sticks out by using a different color, font, and white space.
- Simple navigation: To create landing pages that convert, maintain a straightforward layout with few to no navigation menus. This promotes seamless navigation.
Important considerations to make when designing your product and checkout pages
As mentioned earlier, some customers abandon their carts because of too-complex checkout pages. So, as you improve your product pages, optimize your checkout process as well to create a positive overall experience. Here are some tips to help you improve both:
- Use concise but detailed product descriptions to make sure customers fully understand your product before checkout.
- Use high-quality images and videos to provide an even more in-depth product understanding.
- Include a guest checkout option to let customers complete transactions without creating accounts.
- Provide a clear cart summary detailing what shoppers have in their carts and their order value (including shipping costs) to prevent last-minute abandonment due to unexpected extra costs.
- Offer multiple payment options—credit card, PayPal, and direct transfers—to streamline customers’ transactions.
- Create an FAQ section to answer any last-minute questions customers may have.
- Provide real-time customer support to answer questions that may not have been addressed in your FAQ.
How the Bitly Connections Platform can help reduce shopping cart abandonment rates
The Bitly Connections Platform can help reduce your cart abandonment rates in various ways, one of which is through Bitly Pages.
Bitly Pages is a great landing page optimization tool—thanks to Bitly Pages templates, you can build customized, mobile-friendly landing pages without extensive design or coding knowledge. Since these templates are already designed and optimized, you only need to enter your brand or product information and tweak a few elements to align them with your identity.
When you use Bitly Pages, you also have access to an analytics dashboard that gives you insights into customer engagement metrics like link clicks, views over time, and views by referrer, device, and location (city- and country-level). This information can help you better understand your customers’ interests and gauge your landing page’s performance.
If you’re still working on getting your audience’s preferences right and want to A/B test different elements, these analytics are sure to help. For instance, you can create two similar landing pages, tweak an element, such as the CTA, and monitor the pages’ clicks to determine which type of CTA encourages the most engagement and minimizes cart abandonment.
Here are other ways the Bitly Connections Platform can help you reduce your abandonment rates:
Bitly Links
When incorporated on your landing page, branded Bitly Links can promote brand recognition, increasing shoppers’ likelihood of remaining on your page and completing their purchases. This is because they carry your custom domain name.
Further, you can use Bitly’s short links in retargeting strategies, such as follow-up emails and SMS, to direct customers who abandon their carts back to your optimized landing pages. Since they carry fewer characters than standard links, they’re sure to fit seamlessly into your messages.
As with Bitly Pages, Bitly Links also provide valuable analytics, such as total engagements, data that can help your A/B testing efforts. For example, you can create two links, one for your SMS campaign and another for your email marketing, and check your click totals to identify the best marketing channel.
Bitly Codes
Bitly Codes can be valuable in cross-channel promotion. To leverage these tools, incorporate codes that link directly to your landing pages on channels like print media, digital displays, and social media. This way, customers only need to scan designated codes to access your checkout page and complete their purchases.
Bitly Codes are trackable, and as such, they can also facilitate A/B testing. Compare your scan totals to your click totals to determine whether your target audience resonates more with QR Codes or links.
Bitly Analytics
Bitly Analytics offers real-time scan and click tracking, allowing you to monitor customer interactions on your landing page:
- Clicks and scans over time
- Clicks and scans by referrer
- Top performing by clicks and scans
- Clicks and scans by location
This data can help identify which elements engage users, facilitating well-informed page improvements.
Reduce cart abandonment with more effective Bitly landing pages
A landing page can minimize cart abandonment by limiting distractions and drawing shoppers to key elements like your CTA. For optimal results, choose a design that aligns with your product. For example, a video-centric landing page may be ideal if you sell a complex product that requires detailed information.
With Bitly, you can quickly create landing pages that convert. Use Bitly Pages to streamline page creation, branded links to enhance brand recognition on your landing pages, and Bitly Codes to bridge the gap between physical promotional materials and your landing page. Best of all, you can keep track of performance and engagement across all of our solutions with Bitly Analytics, giving you real-time insights for each product to facilitate page optimization.
Sign up for Bitly today to reduce cart abandonment rates with high-converting landing pages and trackable links and codes!
