04 Feb
Create a Coming Soon Page and Start Marketing Before You Launch.
To have a successful website launch, you need to create a coming soon page and start marketing before you launch.
Coming soon pages can help build excitement around your brand prior to your launch. They can help you built a list of people interested in your business. But just like any landing page, coming soon pages need to be optimized for conversion to have the best results.
Also, marketing your website before you launch is a great way to generate interest in your business.
Here’s a quick summary of the topics we will discuss in this article:
- What is a coming soon page ?
- Do you need a coming soon page ?
- Benefits of coming soon pages
- What your coming soon page should include ?
- How to create a coming soon page on Shopify ?
- Start marketing before you launch
- Conclusion
What is a coming soon page?
Coming soon page is a landing page where you direct your visitors to learn about your business or product to grasp their interest and emails. This page is also known as pre-launch page.
As Contact Us, About Us are the important pages of any business, a Coming Soon page’s strength is that it’s not permanent.
Moreover, a coming soon page offers you the flexibility to:
- Get a quick start on marketing: As it’s a single page instead of an entire website, you can “go to market” with a coming soon page in less than a few hours.
- Build an email list to launch to: Without a product ready to sell, you can double down on building a social media following and email list that you can communicate with leading up to your launch.
- Get early feedback: Put your concept in front of would-be customers, check their interest, and use their feedback to inform how you build out your idea.
Do you need a coming soon page?
A coming soon page can let you get a head start, build and promote in parallel, and make sure you have an audience to launch to. Coming Soon Pages add credibility to a business.
Yet coming soon page is not necessary for every business. You can soft launch your store in a short time and can make improvements side by side.
A soft launch of a website is a preview of what your site will look like. Instead of releasing your full site to the public, you’re giving them a teaser of what they can expect in the upcoming days.
Benefits of coming soon page?
Here are few benefits of building a coming soon page:
- Lead generation: Mostly pre-launch pages have an email subscription form. By this way, you can invite visitors to subscribe and receive brand-related news, including the website launch date. To grow your subscriptions, you can offer small incentives such as free discount coupons.
- SEO: Google is very strict when it comes to website indexing and ranking. If you want to get listed by the largest search engine, you need a credible website with relevant keywords and quality design even before you launch it.
- Hide construction process: The Coming Soon Page looks much more attractive than website under construction. It will hide the design process and post some useful content along the way.
- Build a reputation: A user who sees a developing website with tons of missing elements will probably run away and never come back again. Your job is to prevent this by displaying a totally legit Coming Soon Page.
- Display launch date: Even if your website is not completed yet, you still need to keep the visitors updated about the launch date. You can add a countdown timer to the Coming Soon Page to keep users informed and excited.
- Cross-promotion: The Coming Soon Page should contain links leading to your social media accounts. Cross-promotion helps you to raise awareness and let more people know about the upcoming website.
What your coming soon page should include?
There are many ways you can go about it, most effective coming soon pages integrate the following objectives.
1. Explain what is “coming soon” and when
Coming soon not only creates the hype of your service or product but it shows you how many people are interested in your product even before it is launched.
Additional, you can give your audience actual timeline for your launch, either by displaying your launch date or even a countdown timer to show that your launch date is just around the corner.
2. Build your pre-launch email list
This is a smart way to market your new website before the launch. Therefore, when you are driving people to your coming soon page where there is nothing to buy immediately make sure to have a plan to keep them from slipping away.
Plus your coming soon pages help you capture your audience. In most cases people built an email list. But it can also mean building a retargeting audience or accepting pre-orders.
You can improve your chances of getting visitors to join your email list by offering them an incentive:
- Early bird pricing
- Exclusive discounts or freebies
- Valuable content
- Entry into a contest
- Behind the scene access
3. Give potential customers a way to get in touch
Open a way to communicate with the people who visit you through email or social media, or live chat. Influence people to join your pre-launch audience in 1-on-1 conversations, and get honest input about your concept.
You can also add a live chat widget, like Tidio Live Chat or Shopify Chat to allow your coming soon page to reach visitors.
4. Encourage visitors to spread the word
People might like your idea and want to share it with their friends therefore make it easy for them by including social sharing buttons.
Though, make it excited for them by adding incentive to share your page with friends to engage with their brand on social media. You can use a contest app like Gleam, for example, to offer an additional entry for every social action a visitor takes.
Some of the best coming soon pages create a “viral loop”: where everyone you reach is given an incentive (such as a discount or entry into a contest), not just for joining your email list, but for sharing your page with others.
However, most popular way to create a viral loop is by adding a referral marketing widget (Viral Loops) to your page to offer different tiers of rewards depending on how many referrals a person generates for you.
How to create a coming soon page on Shopify ?
If you want to build your own coming soon page, there are two common ways you can go for it. Both of them let you build your store in the background at your own pace and go live in a couple of clicks when you’re ready.
Let’s discuss each of them below:
1. Use your Shopify password page as your coming soon page
If you want a simple page to explain your business and build your email list, you can use your password page to launch your coming soon page on Shopify. By default, most password pages have the basic requirements of a coming soon page (an email signup form, social sharing buttons, etc.).
As it’s password-protected, you can also allow select people to view your website-in-progress by simply giving them the password.
Turn on your Shopify store’s password page by going to your Online Store’s Preferences and choosing to “Enable password”. Here you can customize your main message to visitors and explain what you are launching.
To finish setting up your password page as a coming soon page, you need to head over to your theme editor and customize it directly. You will be able to turn on the newsletter signup field and add additional copy to frame your form.
In a short time, you will have a coming soon page to collect emails as you build your actual store. On the other hand you can also use an app like Modern Pre-Launcher, which lets you launch a clean coming soon page with some extra features, like a countdown.
2. Publish a “coming soon” version of your theme
One more way to create a coming soon page is to create two different versions of your store: a “coming soon” version that you will publish for temporary time as pre-launch marketing efforts, and a “working” version that you will continue to build for your official launch.
This can be a single page where you can add product photos, an explainer video, calls to action, social proof, and more.
You can make use of full set of features available in your theme to further convince visitors and include other pre-launch goals you might have, such as driving people to specifically follow your social media accounts.
To further customize the look and feel of your coming soon page, you can check out Shopify apps.
Start marketing before you launch
The first step in a knockout marketing strategy is to find your product’s audience. Find a forum where they flock to discuss the latest trends.
After you have found a way to reach your audience, you can start experimenting with ads on platforms they frequently visit. You don’t even need a landing page or a website to start. You just need to create ads that lead nowhere. This is called a 404 testing. It is a way to confirm your idea and see whether your product appeals to your audience before you do any serious developing.
Once number of people starts to engage with your ads. Now you can create your first landing page. A landing page should have a clear purpose to get people to sign up for your service.
Connect with the people who are signing up through email and ask them for feedback. A mailing list is a great way to build a connection with your audience.
Moreover, you can create attractive content as well. Developing quality content takes time.
Make sure your pre-launch plan includes tactics to keep your customers and target audience engaged through social media, content marketing, and influencer marketing.
Conclusion
To summarize, you should craft an attractive Coming Soon page to keep the visitors informed about the launch date and give them the possibility to subscribe and follow your brand.
However, make sure to use this opportunity as it is just the first step towards building a reputable website, but it’s very important for the future success of your online business.
Coming Soon page is optional, many business owners don’t create one. Yet by creating an eye-catching coming soon page with amazing content will help you hold your audience and will create a hype of your product or services.
Good Luck !