the-7-principles-of-conversion-centered-design-29-638

How Ecommerce Company Packlane Delivers On-Brand, Targeted Campaigns with Custom Landing Pages

Step inside the marketer’s brain and you’re likely to find some healthy skepticism. Does this $50 Airbnb come with a three-digit cleaning charge? Will “free shipping” require my firstborn to clear customs? Why does this anonymous benefactor need a credit card number to give me my millions? (And how did he get my email?) Do “fully customized” landing pages secretly mean slower launches, a bulkier building process, or not-totally-customizable-but-hey-close-enough?

Not so—at least when it comes to landing pages. Just look to the customization masters at ecomm packaging company Packlane. They make retail-ready, custom corrugated mailer boxes, shipping boxes, and folding cartons for subscriptions, ecommerce, and gifts that can be as simple or fancy as your heart desires. And they get real meta when it comes to their customization. Not only is it a pillar of their service, it’s also instilled in their marketing with oodles of customized landing pages.

But do oodles of customized landing pages equal oodles of time? Oodles of effort? Oodles of conversions? We pulled the lid off a few of Packlane’s landing pages to find out how they use them to create speedy, beautiful, super-targeted campaigns.

Are you an ecommerce marketer? Learn how Unbounce can help you turn more browsers into buyers.

When you need to publish fast

It’s no secret that ecommerce is a highly competitive and fast-paced world—one with so many options, you can buy your chicken a leash for both casual and formal occasions.

No matter which ecommerce niche you’re in, keeping up often requires working fast to get new promotions to market. But the catch-22 is that your landing pages can’t look like they were created quickly. When they do, they undermine your campaign thanks to inconsistent branding, rushed copy, or poor-quality images.

Full disclosure, one of the reasons we approached Packlane is because we have serious :heart-eyes: for their gorgeous branding—and how seamlessly it’s woven into each of their landing pages. We asked Remy Tennant, Packlane’s Director of Growth, about getting pages published fast while running a tight design ship.

One launch comes to mind. We had to get a page up really fast to get this campaign out the door. We often work with an agency, but this was a complete DIY job for our marketing team with no development or design resources.

The page—where customers can apply to be featured as part of Packlane’s Custom Packaging Inspiration Gallery—is relatively minimal and, says Remy, “admittedly not our most beautiful.” But at an 18% conversion rate and climbing, it’s a rush job that’s more than delivering on its investment.

Image courtesy of Packlane (Click to see the whole thing.)

It’s also easy to duplicate and rework, opening the floor for testing and expansion within the campaign. “Word on the Lane” is a video series featuring Packlane customer stories, with a similar submission landing page (converting at a cool 23%) to add a multimedia element to their customer showcase.

Image courtesy of Packlane (Click to see the whole thing.)

Being able to build and customize landing pages quickly creates more breathing room for experimentation, lower-stakes launching, and higher margins of ROI. Says Remy:

On our own, the entire process of launching a page—from initial content creation, to picking a template, to building and customizing it—takes about four to six hours. Our marketing team can easily get a page up within a day, working completely in-house.

Get inspired with 27 jaw-dropping examples of ecommerce landing pages in our Ultimate Ecommerce Landing Page Lookbook.

When you need to collaborate

A more typical scenario for Packlane’s marketing team involves working with outside resources. Though their agency is an ocean and several time zones away, collaborating on landing pages is a simple process. Remy explains:

Our website is beautiful, but because it’s 100% custom, there is no CMS. Being able to collaborate with outside developers and designers on Unbounce without having to involve our internal tech team is a huge win. It saves time and allows our devs to focus on more important things.

Their “Size Matters” page, where customers can calculate custom sizing, is a ringing example of what this can accomplish. Pixel-perfect branding, slick design, animated graphics, and a dynamic calculator that gives recommended dimension and style options for your packaging make for a landing page that’s not only beautiful, but fully interactive.

Image courtesy of Packlane (Click to see the whole thing.)

It’s versatile, too. This page is used at several points of the customer journey, particularly as an onboarding and educational tool.

Our sales team and customer service team use this page to lead prospective and new customers through the customization process and help them figure out the right measurements for their packaging.

It’s simplified what can be a very complex and technical process, and has definitely helped convert more customers.

Learn from another ecommerce success story and how landing pages helped Zola boost their conversion rates from 5% to 20%: How Hyper-Targeted Marketing Helped Zola Take Over the Wedding Industry.

When you need to really target

With great customization power comes great responsibility. Packlane offers endless packaging options—be it by style, size, material, design, and labeling. They service customers from all sorts of verticals within ecommerce, and they cater to all of their different needs based on product type, seasonality, and audience. It’s a tall order, pun intended.

How do they tackle this complexity? Custom landing pages for specific industries and campaigns. Instead of relying on visitors to browse their website, or talk to a sales rep, or sign up to see their smorgasbord of packaging options, Remy describes how Packlane comes to them with targeted landing pages.

Our custom cosmetics page is one of our most-visited pages and ranks pretty well for custom cosmetics packaging. We do a lot of SEO, and the ability to add metadata is obviously really important.

We’re also big into A/B testing—one page I recall saw a conversion lift of 15% after testing headlines—so we’re looking forward to running experiments with this page. Results TBD!

Image courtesy of Packlane (Click to see the whole thing.)

Seasonal promotions are another example. For ecommerce marketers, the holiday season brings more than just sleigh bells and eggnog and strained small talk with your distant uncle over a shrimp cocktail platter. It brings massive opportunity for sales and festive campaigns.

Packlane answered opportunity’s festive knock with their “winter wonderland” White Ink landing page. It showcases white-ink designs for Packlane’s customers to get their customers (didn’t lie when I said they get meta) in the holiday spirit. Plus, they get a free downloadable package with 30 holiday-themed design assets.

Image courtesy of Packlane. (Click to see the whole thing.)

The results put Remy in a merry mood, too:

This page gets a good amount of traffic as well, and was a great way to test different promotional techniques like the free graphics package. We’ll probably do something similar in the future.

So whether you’re in a mad rush, managing a lot of cooks in the kitchen, or creating a bunch of different pages for specific audiences with specific needs, it doesn’t have to be accomplished at the expense of brand quality. Just ask Packlane.

Customize your way

Ready to start building and customizing your own ecommerce landing pages? Publish as many as you want, for free, with a 14-day Unbounce trial. And if you have any comments or tips of your own you’d like to share, fire away below.

Ecomm landing pagesOriginal Article