The absolute beginners guide to a high-converting home page

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Exciting news: I am putting together a rolling fund. After being one of the first checks in companies like: Haus, JUDY, Caraway, Levels, Omsom, Black Wolf Nation, Brightland, Settle, Snif, Sanzo, Tydo, Alloy, and many others, I want to share the upside with you.

My presence on the internet, along with my knowledge of being an operator, give me an advantage of seeing a lot of early-stage dealflow. I am extremely helpful to early-stage founders and because of it, I see more deals. 

For example, just with Twitter, I have earned almost 3.5M impressions. 

Secondly, my pattern-matching from being an operator helps me figure out who’s a winner.

“Nik is a walking encyclopedia of all things DTC. He will save you YEARS of time you would have otherwise spent researching the right tools, building the right web strategy and connecting with the right people. The earlier you can get him involved, the better.”
— Helena Price Hambrecht, Co-Founder & CEO, Haus 

If you’d like to participate in the rolling fund, please CLICK HERE to enter your information, so I can ensure you get access to the fund before it becomes a publicly available link. 

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In other exciting news, it’s my birthday tomorrow! It feels weird to turn 25 — one quarter of a century old. In true Nik fashion, my birthday lands on the busiest day of the week for me. If you’re compelled to gift me something for my birthday, I have one ask: 

I am putting together a new email subscribe page for this newsletter, and I want to incorporate more quotes from you, the readers. If you’d like to tweet answering WHY you read this newsletter, I would be forever grateful and will feature it on the new subscribe page! You can tag me by including @mrsharma in your tweet. Thank you!

 On to today's email: creating an effective homepage. There are 5 focal points for your homepage, and too often I come across homepages that make no sense for different touch points, whether someone is coming from an influencer’s swipe up, or seeing the site in the wild from an ad. Let’s build better “storefronts”. Remember, even if you’re not running an eCommerce site, you can incorporate a lot of these tips into your homepage.

The purpose of an effective homepage

There are a lot of website optimization articles out there, but not a ton that solely focus on your website's homepage.

Everyone knows that your website homepage is one of your customers' first impressions of your brand. Once a visitor lands on your homepage, they see it all: your logo, product visuals, your value proposition, a great headline, customer testimonials and more.

It's important to cut out all the fluff on your homepage and only present the most essential information above the fold. This is the best place to make your case on why your prospects should purchase your product. 

This is easier said than done, so that's why I wanted to talk through the perfect homepage. This blog post will highlight some of the elements that come together to create that perfect, high-converting experience for a potential customer.

Your homepage's purpose

Since your homepage might be your site visitor's first encounter with your brand, you need to understand its focus and what you're trying to accomplish with it.

The purpose of the homepage is to do a few things:

• Educate someone who has no idea of what your product does or what your brand sells and emphasizes
• Make it easy to purchase (ideally by giving them a good "starter pack" style bundle/product)
• Show validation, credibility, and/or social proof that you are legitimate
• Properly convey the problem and solution they are solving for
• Make it obvious why they are better than competitors and anything else on the market that currently exists

We make sure all of these points are addressed when we think through new homepages at Sharma Brands. 

In addition, all of the elements among the web page's layout (headlines, images, photography, copy, taglines, pricing, featured bundles/products) are only there because they have proven to work.

The headline in the hero section of the site should have proven results that in testing it had the highest CTR (click-through rate), and the four featured products should be the products with the highest sell-through rate (aka best sellers). By testing each of these elements in your web design, you will improve the user experience, decrease your bounce rate and increase sales overall.
 

Validating your consumers' wants and needs

When it comes to the validation, you have to keep one thing in mind: when consumers are shopping, they assume you are guilty until proven innocent. What does this mean?

It means you, as the brand, need to give your target audience all the validation that they are not making a stupid decision by buying what you're selling. You don't want your customer to be embarrassed that they made a silly purchase when the box arrives or their friend asks for a product recommendation. 

This is why I push the idea of reviews, UGC, and press snippets/quotes. You, as a brand, saying you have the best product doesn't mean anything. However, GearPatrol or Michelle Hayden saying the same thing means the world. 

Personalizing your web experience

If you want to take your website to the next level, think about how your homepage changes for people from different cities. 

For example, if you sell skincare, focus on pushing products and a business message that aligns with the location of someone coming to your site. If you sell flavored water, focus on pushing flavors that do well at different times of the day. 

This involves creating a website homepage design that is personalized to different buyer personas. In the end, the personalized approach might be just what the shopper needs in order to convert.

Provide value no matter what

One last tip is to think about how someone can learn something from your homepage that benefits them. It doesn't matter whether or not they end up becoming a customer of yours. 

For example, at JUDY we push emergency preparedness guides for consumers to at least know the bare minimum of what to do and expect in the case of emergencies that may affect them. 

The easiest way to do it is to think about the problem you solve and address it with a digital solution. Not only do you create something they'll remember, but you increase time on site and might get a second chance to sell them down the road.
 

The perfect homepage

It can be stressful deciding how you want to structure and design your homepage. 

You have to worry about everything from the navigation menu to the call-to-action buttons (CTAs) and more. In addition, you need to make your messaging and design pop, while still ensuring that all the keywords are optimized for SEO.

With these tips and a dash of inspiration, you can create a compelling homepage that provides a great mobile experience and drives sales for your company.

Onto some fun stuff… 

Software/App of the Week:

One of the best tricks in the book for increasing the conversion rate on your eCommerce site is to use a tool like Affirm, a BNPL (buy now, pay later) financing tool for shoppers.

From working with our brands, we've seen that whether you're selling with an average order value (AOV) of $50, or $800, Affirm helps increase the conversion rate in the cart, the spot where most online shoppers drop off. Affirm doesn’t charge hidden or late fees to customers, and as a result, it also helps increase the AOV of the cart.

With JUDY, we've been a beta customer for Affirm’s new Shopify Partnership, ShopPay Installments (read: Affirm, but natively built into Shopify as a payment option for all US customers), and when JUDY’s customers needed emergency kits during earthquakes, wildfires, or other emergencies, they were able to order it immediately and use it.

Another benefit is Affirm does a lot of marketing on their own, and because of that, they also add social proof to your landing pages, product pages, and checkout flow, as a BNPL provider. Similar to how Amazon Pay or Apple Pay in your cart helps increase conversion rate, Affirm is beginning to have a similar effect, especially for higher AOV baskets.

DTC Brands like JUDY, Tradesy (which saw a 75% increase in AOV), MadHappy, and Good American, all use Affirm or Shop Pay Installments, which is Shopify's branded BNPL tool, powered by Affirm. You can read about that announcement here.

Affirm has generously offered to onboard brands who use this special link and fill out the information at the bottom of the page.

Truly, there's no downside to Affirm. The conversion rate goes up. AOV goes up. Affirm also has a shoppable marketplace with an Alexa traffic score of 5,275, which becomes another channel of customer acquisition for you, too.

Enter your info on this page, and get started with Affirm.

Brand of the Week:

Eight Sleep — The best way to sleep at night.

If you have a hard time getting proper sleep, meaning the right amount of REM sleep, falling asleep quickly, waking up without the sound of the iPhone’s radar alarm, then Eight Sleep might be a solution for you.

I call Eight Sleep the “Tesla of Sleep Hardware.” They took something that has been around for years (the mattress) and added technology to make it a modern-day system to help your body restore all its levels (sleep amount, REM sleep, heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, etc.).

Good sleep isn’t JUST for the purpose of not being tired, it’s also for ensuring that your own body stays alert, and ready to respond to stimuli. That’s why when you’re sick, the best medicine is sleep.

I personally have used their mattress for the last 2 years and have a hard time leaving it. If it costed $10k or $20k, I would figure out how to make it fit into my budget to get it. Having a proper sleep and rest means that I can operate at 2x the normal capacity the next day — it’s not even comparative.

You can get the Pod Pro Cover for $72/month (or $2.40 per day) on a financing plan, which is cheaper than buying a Starbucks every morning to try to wake yourself up. My preference is actually the Pod Pro Cover.

Find the Eight Sleep system that’s best for you: eightsleep.com/compare

That’s all for today. If you made it to the end, just know I appreciate you a lot! I hope you have an incredible upcoming week and get those 9 hours of sleep tonight. If you have any questions from today’s email, you can shoot me a DM by clicking here.

Cheers!

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