When initializing your online eCommerce store, sometimes it can be easy to assume your product pages are the easiest pages of all to create. After all, all that’s needed are pictures, variants, and a bit of copy promoting why your product is so great.
But that’s not entirely the case. Without optimizing your product pages to drive conversions, visitors will remain just that: Visitors. In order to inspire people to buy your products, product pages should be designed strategically, and incorporate a host of proven conversion rate tactics.
If you’re unsure of where to get started, we’ve put together some key, overlooked, components each one of your product pages should have to aid your conversion rates, and boost your revenue.
A clear call-to-action (CTA)
The main goal of any product page is to get your visitor to want to hit either “Buy” or “Add to Cart”, so either of those imperatives should be catching the visitors eye the moment they land on the page.
For best practice, make sure these CTA’s are clearly distinguishable from the rest of the content.
Keep the area around the button uncluttered so that there are no distractions that could block the user, and most importantly: Ensure it is a button.
Traditionally, online shoppers are conditioned to look for buttons and having your CTA embedded into plain text could appear confusing and untrustworthy. Check out the example from Pilgrim below.
If your pages already contain CTAs centered on buttons, consider A/B testing different color schemes. US retailer, RIPT Apparel, changed the color of its ‘add to cart’ CTA and generated 6.3% more conversions.
Sometimes just changing from a blue to red can make a big difference, although this isn’t universal for everyone.
High-Quality Product Photography and Videography
One adage will always remain true: People buy with their eyes. Visual merchandising is an essential part of selling goods for retailers, with studies showing humans process images up to 60,000 times faster than words, with the brain retaining 80% of the images it sees versus only 20% of what it reads.
However, many eCommerce store owners overlook this and fail to invest in high-quality photography or videography. With adults spending on average five hours a day viewing video content, good product photography or a well-shot video can give your product the extra persuasion power your words can’t.
High-quality product photography or videography can help:
- Build trust to overcome objections
- Create a good, genuine first impression
- Manage potential customers expectations
- Aid and increase social sharing
- Establish brand consistency and tone
- Differentiate from competitors offering similar products
Whilst it’s a costly investment to begin with, it will more than pay for itself down the road. Also, it’s important to conduct product design research.
Trust Badges
A trust badge is a badge or seal placed on your website with the goal of instilling trust in your potential customers. The badges usually denote safety features, for example, secure credit card transactions, money back or return guarantees, as well as any shipping or quality promises.
Trust badges are increasingly important because consumers over time have become more wary of giving out their personal information online in lieu of security breaches and other fraudulent website schemes.
48% of shoppers confirmed trust badges reassure them and some sites have seen increases of up to 32% in their conversion rates once applying an E-mark badge.
Badges you should implement include:
- Safe checkout badges: The seal given when signing up with a company providing an SSL certificate. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protects an internet connection and the information shared across that connection.
- Free Shipping or Returns: Can invoke feelings of security and trust in your customers by removing additional fees they could encounter when purchasing, and may also persuade them to buy from you over a competitor if a competitor is charging shipping.
- Accepted Payment Badges: When consumers recognize logos from Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and PayPal, the level of trust in your website is boosted because of your presumed affiliation with the payment providers. Familiarity breeds security.
Social Proof
Social proof is an effective way to generate trust, strengthen your reputation, build your brand, and ultimately boost conversions on your product pages.
Reviews are just one element of social proof that can have huge impacts on purchase decisions. Displaying reviews has been shown to increase conversion rates by 270% because up to 95% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase, proving overall that customers trust reviews more than descriptions provided by a store.
But there are other elements of social proof that you can, and should add. For example:
- Social media bars that provide the option to share, or show how many times your content has been shared.
- Heart or like buttons that show how many previous visitors have viewed the page and ‘liked’ it.
- User-generated content such as Instagram posts from existing happy customers
- Logos from other affiliated companies who use your products
- Any in-depth case studies from previous customers
Social proof is priceless, and on product pages especially it helps to establish credibility by building trust while giving any potential consumers the emotional information they need from others before they make their purchasing decisions.
Psychological Principles
Leveraging psychological principles both in your copy and in subtle widget additions on your product page can drive more consumers. The main concepts that are often used by most successful eCommerce retailers include:
- Reciprocity: Imploring the need to give something in return for getting something for free, i.e: Buy One, Get One Free or bulk discounts, “Buy 3 for 25% off of your overall purchase”
- Urgency: Encouraging the need to buy before it’s too late. For example, “Hurry, this offer only lasts for 48 hours”
- Scarcity: Enticing the need to buy before quantities are gone. E.g: “Only 2 left in stock!”
- Social Proof: Fuelling the need to buy because others have bought. Most commonly deployed for you in good customer reviews like, “This product has changed my life!”
- Authority: Influencing the need to buy through celebrities, thought leaders or industry icons purchases.
Value propositions
One simple way to boost conversion rates that is often overlooked is selling the benefits that consumers will experience as a result of buying and using your products. This is known as your value proposition.
A value proposition should always be written in the language of the customer and it should join a conversation that is already going on in the customer’s mind. That conversation usually includes your customer’s motivations to buy the product, and any objections that could delay a purchase. I.e: “That bottle opener looks useful, but it’s also expensive.”
If you’re unsure of a product’s value proposition, or of potential customers’ motivations, an easy way to identify this is to research. Simply Google your product to see how your consumers talk about it through the Google searches they make.
Visit seller marketplaces where your competitors have made sales using your product, and scroll through the reviews to decipher the potential benefits a customer receives from purchasing.
Once you have this, craft the style of their phrasing into your copy to curate a compelling product description. Write original content that helps prospective customers imagine themselves using your products, and receive the benefits of doing so.
Asking yourself the following questions can be a quick way to check customers are grasping your value proposition from your product page:
- Who are my ideal customers?
- What do my customers want?
- How can my products help them?
- What benefits do my customers gain from my products?
- How does my product change, impact, or add value to their lives?
- What could be the end result my customers are looking for?
To summarize, by optimizing your product pages to encourage trust, and build a reputable sense of brand loyalty, your journey to improving sales conversions will be a profitable and rewarding one.