S16 E11: How AI Is Revolutionizing Landing Pages

0:01Nik:Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at nik.co slash email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, all so you can unlock your next$100 ,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode.

0:35Nik:If you're still sending the same abandoned cart email to every shopper, I need you to stop and think about what that actually means. You're treating someone who browsed a$40 product as the same as someone who's got a$200 cart ready to go. Different people need different reasons to come back. And that's exactly what Instant does. Instant looks at every shopper's behavior on your site and sends the email they should actually get. Personalized copy, the right products, the right offer, all of this running automatically. Brands using Instant are seeing a 3 to 5x increase in their email revenue alone.

1:04Nik:This is your last chance to get Instant at 50 % off for your first 60 days. Grab it at instant.one slash Sharma. All right, welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. And today, we're going to talk all about AI landing pages. Now, these are basically AI generated or AI help created landing pages. And, you know, I've just had a bunch of thoughts on them recently. I used to have a landing page agency called Hooks, which I shut down. But at the time, we were building landing pages for a bunch of big brands. And, you know, one of the reasons that I shut it down was because we saw basically where AI was going.

1:47And I kind of really saw where AI landing pages were going. And I thought, you know, why would I want to be left holding the bag with, you know, a whole team and this big operation when we're just going to basically get replaced overnight. And that's kind of happening today. Like a lot of the landing page shops that I know of are saying that it's been much harder. Client flow is much less because when you look at brands today, you know, that are really executing a ton of landing pages, they're basically figuring out how to build them all internally now with their own team members. meaning they're using AI to kind of get ahead of the process or really like rapidize some of that process.

2:27So whether it's from a copywriting standpoint, a strategy, a design, a development, iteration, you know, a lot of that, a lot of those pieces are now just kind of getting done with AI. So I feel like we're getting into this world too, where, you know, we just tend to see more AI slop, which just refers to this abundance of things or stuff, creative pages, content being made by AI. And whether or not it's good is a different story. But I think we're actually going to get a ton of terrible landing pages as a result of these AI landing pages. But at the same time, how you finesse them and kind of make them 10 out of 10 from like a 4 or 5 out of 10 is, you know, that's that secret sauce.

3:12So that's what I'm going to hope to get into today. And I think a lot of that secret sauce, you know, it won't be a secret by the end of this episode, but also it's all stuff that's very easy to do and very easy to execute because luckily AI just makes all this easier. So, all right. So what are a few things that have changed? Well, one is AI page builders are really fast now. So whether it's the actual like loading time or it's the actual ability time to get a page live, you can now pretty much get pages live definitely same day, maybe within the same hour. You know, if you're using tools like Shopify or, you know, Unbounce or one of those, Replo, it's very easy to get pages up.

3:59At the same time, you can also use tools like Journey, which I have no affiliation with, but I've used a couple of times and found it very easy to build landing pages. So these page builders are now real and they're legit. It's not like back when ChatGPT was really starting to get good is when I first thought that I should maybe consider shutting hooks down. I was building wireframes in the chat using lines and dashes. So I could give it everything I wanted it to know, customer information, customer reviews, objections, you know, customer service emails about specific SKUs. And I could build a wireframe in the chat version of ChatGPT.

4:42But now we're talking about full on page builders that are developing modules and content being fully ready to go. So that's one thing that's changed. The other thing is the volume of ad creative is exploding right now. So you've definitely heard about Comfort, obviously. You know, 500 new videos a day go up and then they take a subset of those and turn them on every day as ads. They have an unlimited creative supply chain of content that is just booming, which is why their business is also booming. But this is something that's happening across the board. And if it's not happening across the board, then everybody's goal right now is to figure out How do we build a better creative supply chain?

5:23Because, you know, with how good ad platforms are getting, all you have to do is just feed it creative. The more creative you feed it, the more people you're likely to find in your demo and the more people you're going to get to your site to convert. So that's another thing that's changing is ad creative. Third is that AI shopping agents are completely changing how consumers are discovering brands. So, you know, you have checkout in InsideChat GPT now. You have Shopify merchants partnering with OpenAI. You have Google checkout happening now on other big e-commerce sites like Chewy or Quince.

6:03There's just all this innovation that's currently happening. This whole world of catalog ads is about to hit the LLMs very soon as well. Ad platforms are now starting to be launched. You know, we know that chat GPT ads are live, but it's going to start happening on the other ones as well. And then the last piece that's really big, which is kind of tied to all of this, is that the website is now both human readable and machine readable. So landing pages now have two jobs. They have to convert the customer and they have to feed the AI layer with clear product truth, instructions, details, data, reviews, comparisons, use cases, etc.

6:39So if you've been a listener of this pod before, you know that you know my landing page strategy is basically roll out the red carpet for this customer think of them as kim kardashian walking the red carpet you're the assistant you're you're losing all points if you don't have all the information that she needs as she's scrolling the page or walking this red carpet and um that's basically what you need to do today like today you almost need to have if you thought you had enough information on your page before you need to double down you need to put way more information you need to explain things very clearly.

7:13And one of the things we'll, well, I don't know if we'll talk about this much later because it's a little bit technical, but even having files on your landing pages that make your pages easily crawlable by these agents or by machines. So, you know, my thought is really that like AI landing pages is really just AI merchandising. And, you know, I always think of merchandising again, back to that office example or the TV show, The Office, when Dwight is setting up his beats in the garage sale and he puts the good beats up front. And then as the day goes on, he starts rearranging the beats to figure out, you know, what's going to bring the most people to his table because he's got the good looking beats in the front.

7:53That's basically what AI now enables you to do in real time, right? So before you would have an ad, it would go to a PDP and then you kind of hope the customer figures it out. Now you can have an ad angle, specific angle. It goes to a matching page. It has specific proof on it. It has a specific offer. It has specific objection handling and it has a relevant bundle. And then you go to checkout. What that really allows you to do is just like, if you've seen ads that are being run by Instant Hydration or Groons or IMA, these are all very ad angles, very specific ad angles that then go to matching like funnels.

8:32And that is really just AI merchandising, right? They can now choose exactly what kind of experience a customer is about to get. So here's kind of like a bunch of different ways where I think one brands are using this and two brands will be using this. So the first is that you're going to get these very specific angle to funnel experiences now. And it's also going to become kind of a non-negotiable. I remember, you know, in 2017 when I was running ads, it was always rule of thumb. You match the exact flavor of the ad to the exact flavor of the PDP. And that's pretty much all you could do at the time because, you know, you couldn't just create a bunch of flavor specific angle specific landing pages without, you know, filing a shit ton of tickets with the dev team and it causing a whole bunch of issues.

9:19but today because you can now use ai to build landing pages and you know if you want to do that you totally can right your ad can say this product fixed my dry scalp and then your landing page talks exactly about you know a dry scalp um experience a customer had or it leads with an angle of a clinical trial on your shower head where it solved the issue of a dry scalp right And so that's kind of what you can do now is you can match the promise. And the trap to not get stuck in basically is just building a ton of landing pages, thinking that it's each page that's not working versus the actual core strategy or core messaging.

10:00So that's one pitfall there. But that's one route where I think you can leverage this a lot. Another one is building pages by objection, not by the product. So for example, you can have a page segment itself around, is it worth the price? Will it work for me? Is this product actually different? How can I trust the claims? How fast am I going to see results? Is it easy to use? What do I do if I don't like it? And brands like Dr. Squatch or AG1, Hexclad, these guys all do this already, right? They have these objection-focused pages in their funnels. But now you can build these as well. so these are very easy to get up and running.

10:43Okay, now the third thought here, so these are just kind of like a bunch of thoughts I'd put together in a notes app and wanted to go through. Third thought is that the highest leverage AI inputs you can have is customer language. Now, I'm gonna expand here outside of just customer language because customer language is gonna be, you know, email and SMS replies, which, you know, if you've got your APIs connected, which actually, yeah, maybe we just talk about this for a second. So the way that I do it personally is I have all of my, I have all my brand stuff connected into a Mac mini and that Mac mini uses Hermes agent, which is kind of the software or think of it as like the Ironman suit that allows the computer to become autonomous and chat with you and do the things that you want it to do.

11:29But Hermes agent is where I essentially connect everything in. So I've got the API for my reviews app. I've got the API key for outer signal. So I can see customer profile information of who's actually purchasing. I've got the API key for heat map. So I can see what is actually happening on the site, what sections are working, what's not working, where are we getting clicks? What elements of the page? Is it more hero style photography? Is it more lifestyle? Is it more UGC? Is it this copy? Is it that button style? You know, heat map feeds all of that information in. I get the reviews app. I can't remember if I mentioned that.

12:04Customer service. so I can get support ticket information. What are people talking about? I have it connected to the X API so I can search for the brand or mentions about these products and product types or problems that we're solving on Twitter and see that in real time. Same thing with Reddit. We have Amazon reviews being fed in. We have basically all Facebook ad comments being fed in. So what we're doing is basically creating this brain or this nucleus where we're just trying to feed in as much possible information as we possibly can. And that gives the agent, you know, I've named mine Jet.

12:43So that gives Jet the most possible context, more context. Jet has more context than anybody could have because either A, you're gonna have to spend way too much time reading every single comment, every single, you know, reply, every single, you know, message, or you have Jet consume all of it so that as you are putting together what your strategy is, what your angle is, your brief, your comparison chart, or just information supporting a specific angle that you're trying to build a funnel around, you have all of that information ready to go. So it's going to create that brief or it's gonna write that copy.

13:23It's gonna design that page knowing what works on your site, what doesn't, knowing what headlines actually get clicked through on Facebook and which don't, and knowing who your customer profiles actually are versus just trying to guess based on, you know, what you're trying to do. So that is why, you know, I'm a huge fan of having the Hermes agent. I know some people do this in Claude Code. Some people do it in Codex. I like doing it in Hermes agent because I can then, I do it through Telegram and now actually iMessage. But in Telegram, the rest of my team can actually plug in, connect and talk to these agents as well.

14:00Nik:Time for the retention tip of the week brought to you by Instant. If you run an apparel brand, here's something most people get wrong. You treat returns like a cost center, but your returns flow is actually one of your highest leverage retention touch points. Think about it. A customer just returned something. That doesn't mean that they don't like your brand. It usually means the fit was off or the color wasn't right. So what do the best apparel brands do? They build a post-return email flow that does three things. One, acknowledge the return with zero friction. Two, immediately recommend the right alternative based on what was returned.

14:32Nik:And maybe the reason, maybe it's a different colorway, a different size, a different silhouette. And number three, include a small incentive to come back within 10 days. Brands that nail their conversions flow for returns, they see 30 to 40 % of their returners convert into repeat purchasers. The ones that don't, those customers are gone. Their return was their last interaction with you and it was a bad one. If you need help building smart post-purchase and post-return flows, Instant makes it super easy. Their AI-powered retention engine generates personalized emails for every shopper automatically.

15:04Nik:Check them out at instant.one slash Sharma. Okay, next thought is that AI pages can now make quizzes way less annoying. So one of the reasons, you know, we know that quizzes work. Quizzes have been a thing in e-commerce forever, whether it's supplements, skincare, you know, prose shampoo, Curology, whatever it may be, there's all these reasons that you might want to use a quiz in your onboarding flow. And, you know, anything you've seen in the world of telemedicine, quizzes are pretty much required. They also, if, you know, you're a big advertiser in telemedicine or in the health world, there's a lot of data you can't necessarily collect or pass back or signals you can't send back.

15:49And quizzes are actually a great, you know, like usually step, A certain step in the quiz, if they qualify that, there's like a direct correlation for people signing up or subscribing. And so a lot of times telemedicine brands will use those events as signals back to meta because you can't actually collect the purchase as an event. So quizzes are, you know, they're great. They do a lot of great work, but they're really annoying sometimes. And sometimes they're just really lame. So one thing I'm excited about with quizzes is how they're going to improve based on, you know, before you would have this data that's like, or these rules, dynamic rules, maybe they're called, where it would be like, all right, if somebody answers yes to this, you send them to this question.

16:28If they answer no to this, send them to that question. You know, if they answer whatever, they didn't, there was no third option. You couldn't say based on what they say, sent, you know, then route them down this path. So that's now going to happen. I haven't personally found these AI quizzes in the wild yet, but I'm going to start making a couple. And maybe I'll share some results with you guys as I do that. The next thought that I had written down is that I think at the same time, while AI is going to make it, you know, really amazing and fast and quick for growth marketers and people who just want to get things live to actually do that.

17:06We're also going to get to a point where we're going to see a bunch of garbage. So we're going to see that, you know, if you're not using, for example, if you don't have a proper design system or a brand book that your, you know, AI agent or whatever platform you're using is not kind of looking through, meaning like it doesn't have a brand book where it knows your copy, your messaging, your tone of voice, your colors, your button styles, your hover states, all of that. then it might also start recommending garbage based on what you say because you're you're going to say i need to i need this thing to convert like crazy right so it might start telling you hey uh use these kind of generic headlines use this create fake urgency start using more um you know you you have reviews with no specificity you have uh too much copy because there's no hierarchy based on you know what it knows about your brand so the thing is you have to feed it um you cannot automate like this design or branding process within the page creation process you can't just rely on ai to do that you have to make sure that you just as clear as you are when it comes to the strategy of the page being focused on conversion you have to also be very clear and very, yeah, honestly, just be very clear and over, like, give it too much information about your brand and where you're, what you're allowed to say or what you're okay with it saying and what you're not, you know, the more you can give it, the better.

18:41Otherwise, it's just going to be producing things that require you to make more edits. And the whole point of this thing is to get to a point where you can one shot these landing pages. One shot means it's just a term where it means, you know, one prompt gets you to your final kind of product. And you can definitely get there. But to get to one shot, one shotable landing pages, you're going to have to also make sure it knows everything about how you like pages built, what's allowed, what's not allowed, you know, anything from specific copy or terms or the way that talks about things, whatever.

19:16Nik:Now, the last piece that I'd like to touch on here is basically how to build these pages. So I'll tell you the couple of ways that I've gone about building these pages, and I think are very easily replicable by anybody listening. You know, I'm the one Indian who doesn't know how to code. So now thanks to AI, I can like read code and feel like I can follow a little bit. It's like reading Spanish, you know, I can read, I can speak pretty decent Spanish, I can read decent Spanish. But like, if you're talking to me really fast, I'm going to get every, you know, every third word basically and be able to put the context together.

19:53That's like me reading code. So I know that if I can do it, you can also do this. So one that I mentioned before is called Journey. That's a tool where you can basically, you know, it opens up like a replet or a lovable equivalent, which I guess are also great options to use here, as is Replow. I've heard very good things about Replow, but with Journey, you basically input a prompt of what you're trying to build and almost immediately it has a good understanding of your brand because that's just a part of its onboarding and it starts to build that right away. That good understanding of your brand, by the way, is what I was kind of talking about with the Hermes agent setup or whether you have that setup with Codex or Cloud Code where you're able to feed in a bunch of things and it has the most context.

20:37Now Journey does it, I think, more with like colors, fonts, maybe, you know, messaging tone. I'm sure that I can't remember exactly like what you're filling out exactly, but in the Hermes agent side, or if you've got your own agent, then you can plug way more things in via API than you would be able to if you were just doing Journey. But Journey is a great place to start if you feel like you're not able to get the other stuff set up, as is Replo, as is Lovable or Replit. But I would say Journey and Replo, probably your two places you can't go wrong to start. The second way is now just using either Cloud Code, Codex, your Claudebot slash Hermes agent or Manus.

21:22And what you can now do as of last week is, I know for sure Manus has an integration directly in Shopify. I believe Vercel and Replit also had posts up last week where they were announcing that they can also directly integrate into Shopify, which means basically anybody can directly integrate into Shopify. So what that means is you can now build pages with your agent directly. using all the information and get them live in your Shopify website on your own domain, the.com that you use, that's your homepage.com, not a subdomain, not a redirect, but your own page domain and have it go live. And I've already started to see brands do this where they're now redesigning and developing their PDP modules, their homepage modules, because now they're like, wait a second, I can put my design system in, I can develop the code, I can put it live immediately, test it, it's all still on brand.

22:20And I'm doing that within hours, not within days or sometimes weeks, you know, depending on what your kind of current setup looks like. So that's pretty much my rant on AI landing pages. I'm extremely deep in it. You know, me obviously just being a landing page fiend, but also just being super deep in the world of AI, as again, somebody who doesn't know how to code, this feels like a total video game. Like I feel like I'm playing GTA e-commerce edition where I can create anything I want. I can do anything I want. I can test anything I want. I have no restraints. You know, it's amazing. So I highly recommend you do it.

22:57This is the alpha that I think is going to separate, you know, the Q4 winners this year from those who felt like they didn't go hard enough. And one of the big reasons is because this, everything I just talked about directly ties back to better brand awareness, building better top of funnel, getting people educated, getting people to understand, you know, what your brand is, why it exists, why it's better, how it's going to make their life better. And all of that, but for agents and machines. So yeah, so this stuff gets me fired up. I hope it gets you fired up. And I know it gets you fired up.

23:35That's why you're still listening. But anyways, that's my episode for today. If you've got any questions about AI landing pages, shoot me an email. If you want me to check it out, if you want me to give you feedback, if you want me to, you know, if there's anything I can help with, let me know. Shoot me a DM on Twitter, at MrSharma. Shoot me an email, nick at nick.co. And yeah, by the way, We're also hosting our AI summit in June, June 25th at Webster Hall in New York City. And I'll be on stage doing a bunch of stuff, kind of like this, breaking things down, but also showing the setup and how I actually do it.

24:11And there's going to be a bunch of other people doing that as well across creative, finance, ops, pretty much everything in between. So that's all I got for you today. I hope you have a great rest of your week and I'll see you next week.

24:26Nik:Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG, retail, and e-commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.