How to Create an Effective Coming Soon Page

A “coming soon” website page is a great digital marketing tool as it helps create a buzz for your new website and establish your online presence.

It’s not good for your brand reputation if potential customers look it up and get a landing page from the domain provider. It is better to greet your customers and visitors with a “Coming Soon” page that communicates what is coming and when.

Here are a few tips in creating an effective coming soon page.

The wow! effect

A coming soon page has no business cluttering the web if it doesn’t have any wow! effect working for it. If you can’t give your coming soon page design any wow! then you shouldn’t publish it at all. The whole point of a coming soon page is to get people interested in what’s coming, not to bore them to death.

Of course, the most difficult part here is that this wow! effect is very difficult to define. It all comes down to the overall feel of the design. It’s simply something that is or isn’t visible at the end of the day once the work has been done.

Say what’s coming

Since it is a coming soon page then there has to be something coming, right?

Rule #1

If you want people to anticipate what’s coming, you have to tell them what it is. Focus on creating curiosity. Share the interesting stuff, not the boring features. Don’t give away too much information though. If you do, people will get the impression that they know everything, so they no longer have to anticipate anything. You must find the right balance between curiosity and information.

This should also be reflected in the design. Boring designs have no place among coming soon pages. The easiest way to make your design interesting-description-friendly as opposed to boring-description-friendly is to use rather big-sized fonts. If there’s only place for a limited lines of text, then it forces the website owner to provide only the essential information.

Countdown timers

Countdown timers are simple and easy-to-grasp. There are tens of plugins and scripts available providing such functionality and it’s perfectly understandable for the visitor.

However, it makes launching the final website a bit more difficult. If you have a timer, then you absolutely have to launch the website when the timer displays zero. There can be no delay or the whole point of a timer loses its meaning.

Email lists/newsletters

Newsletters and email lists are one of the best performing marketing methods online. It’s almost strange that email marketing works that well in every market imaginable. The simple fact is that people still use email as their main mean of communication online. Even despite the amount of spam that’s circulating around.

Placing an email newsletter signup form on a coming soon page is one of the best things you can do. Period.

If you’ve managed to arouse enough interest in the product/website, then at least some percentage of your visitors should be interested in getting timely updates about it. You can then use the list to announce the launch the minute it happens. This will bring you an additional stream of visitors right from the get-go.

And finally, email newsletters are a lot easier to promote than blank coming soon pages.

Prelaunch bonuses and discounts

Depending on the thing that’s coming, offering some prelaunch bonuses or discounts can make sense. Especially if it’s a new tool, service or traditional product. You can offer a discount to everyone who subscribes to your newsletter. You’re killing two birds with one stone here. Apart from the fact that you get people to sign up to your newsletter, you’re also giving them a great reason to visit the website once it’s live.

Keep SEO in mind

Although a coming soon page is bound to have a short lifespan, you should still have SEO in mind during the creation process. Remember to use proper <h> tags, page titles and descriptions

If there’s a promotional campaign prepared for the website (e.g. guest posting or some link building campaigns) then making the coming soon page SEO-friendly will surely help the marketing efforts.

How about a blog?

The main coming soon page is one thing. But a blog that goes along with it can make the whole website a lot more attractive. Let’s face it, there are very few reasons why a visitor would want to come back to a coming soon page. There are, however, many reasons why they would want to come back to a blog.

Of course, this is a lot more work, but if you’re working on a coming soon page for a medium or big company, then you can point out such a possibility.

Have it easy, use a special theme

Nowadays, WordPress is among the most popular website management platforms available. What this results in, is a big number of themes (free and paid ones) meant to achieve tens of different things. Not surprisingly, there’s also a fair share of coming soon themes.

Even if you don’t want to use any part of the design offered by a given theme, you can probably still use the framework. Such themes often provide quite a nice set of features that will make your work way easier.

SOURCE: Web Design Ledger