How to Create a Shopify Coming Soon Page

In these unprecedented times, for brands, starting an eCommerce business seems like the best solution. When you are launching a new product or brand over the internet, there are a few things that you need to prepare before officially starting your new venture.

To get people excited about your brand, a coming soon page is a good place to start. This serves as a placeholder and a teaser for your new brand. If you are able to craft it properly, it can get attention from visitors, allow you to gain some following and provide some marketing for your brand.

What is a coming soon page and do you need one?

In the pre-launch stage of your brand’s website, a coming soon page is the landing page where you may redirect audiences to learn more about your business or product before you open your website. 

This coming soon page can let you build excitement, it can also be used as a tool to get emails, and even encourage users to help you expand your reach before you fully launch.

Unlike FAQ, Contact, and About Us page templates, which are staples of many online businesses, a coming soon page’s greatest strength is that it isn’t a permanent page. It’s a placeholder.

Now unlike other pages on your website (FAQ, Contact, About Us), the coming soon page’s strongest asset is that it’s not permanent, it’s flexible enough to:

• Jumpstart your marketing: As it is just one single page, you can technically launch your website with a coming soon page quickly as it would entail creating fewer features than other pages.
• Gather subscribers: You can start building a community by allowing your target audience to subscribe and gathering emails even without a product ready. You could even add in your social media handles and start building a following while you get ready.
• Gain feedback: Gain some feedback from prospect customers by using the coming soon page to showcase your concept or idea.

So while a coming soon page is not necessary for all businesses, it’s a great tool for those who are building their brand, raising money and doing product development. It’s able to push your launch date as well up to several months.

What your coming soon page should do

Your coming soon page can be very short but help you achieve multiple goals. You will need to figure out where this page is a short-term or long-term launching campaign. The way you design it would be based on how long it will stay on your site. So a short-term launch campaign can be short and a long-term one can be more detailed.

Depending on the purpose of your campaign, here is a quick guide on what you need to have:

1. Let users know WHAT is coming soon and WHEN

Generate hype around your brand or product by showing a teaser photo or an image of that can give users an idea of what it is. It would be good to give them a date to look forward to. If you don’t have a specific date, you could place a month and year, or even just the year.

This helps give your audience a concrete timeline of your launch. You may even try placing a countdown timer when your launch date is coming very near.

 

A coming soon page can not only generate hype around your idea but help you gauge demand for your concept by seeing how people react to it, even before it’s available to buy.

This is invaluable feedback that can inform how you develop your product, determine your positioning, and design your website.

2. Build your pre-launch email list

We want to create this page not only to get them to visit and inform your audiences but also for you to get something in return. We want to keep them in our grasp and we want them to get something before they leave your page.

It would be best to have a subscriber box so you can contact them as soon as you launch and you’ll want to craft it in such a way that lets that because they’re excited, you want them to stay updated when you launch.

If this is just for a new product under a brand that’s already available, you can also try to create a retargeting audience or accept pre-orders.

Here are some incentives that can get customers to join your subscriber list:

• Early bird pricing
• Exclusive discounts or freebies
• Valuable content
• Entry into a contest

This way you are able to have some interaction with your target audience and maybe even gain feedback, encourage them to share with their networks, or have them remember you when your product launches.

3. Give prospective customers a way to get in touch

Before you launch, getting feedback will be such a powerful tool that’ll help you mitigate any issues or improve your campaign when you release your brand. Offer customers a way to get in touch with you, either through email or social media. Prepare yourself or your team to be responsive. The faster and more accurate you respond, the better it is building a relationship with your customers.

4. Encourage visitors to spread the word

If a lot of your target audience are excited about the product, they may share it with their friends and network, and as a brand, we want that. So, make it easier for them to share by placing social sharing buttons somewhere on your coming soon page.

You might even want to provide some incentives such as points, discounts or free gifts that will entice them to share more. The best way is to create a pre-launch loop that gives your new visitors a reason to share your page with other people. You could do this by adding a referral marketing widget that has different tiers of rewards depending on the number of referrals a user generates for you.

Coming soon pages are again not necessary for all businesses but it works best for those who need to do a pre-launch campaign to build hype, gather feedback, and grow their social media following and community, while they prepare for the actual launch.

A coming soon page lets you immediately start marketing your brand while the product is not yet fully ready. Think of it as a teaser for a movie that gets the customers excited and makes them look forward. This is your coming soon page. Excited, informative and useful.