Author: Ruthc

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7 ways to optimise your product page to attract more sales

 

The e-commerce landscape has shown steady growth over the past few years. In 2019, the total value of global online retail sales has been over USD$3.45 T. Moreover, by 2014, almost all purchases are expected to be made online. 

Still, many online brands are struggling with poor conversion rates. They focus on improving the checkout process and shopping carts. But, what about the majority of customers that don’t even get to that point? Many online shoppers will decide to leave your store after landing on a poorly optimized product page. 

Here are a few actionable steps that will help you level up your product page optimization.

1. Analyse your pages

Before you start optimizing your page, you need to pay attention to your site’s overall performance.

For starters, use a web crawler tool to find all pages in a website and analyze them thoroughly from different SEO aspects.

Your goal is to observe how fast the page loads, whether there are any faulty links or buttons, how your pages look on different devices. Most importantly, you need to ensure that the page is user-friendly and that it provides enough information to help customers make buying decisions.

2. Use high-quality visuals

Would you buy from an online store that either has low-quality product photos or doesn’t have them at all? 

Product photos should be the first thing a customer sees when landing on your product page. It should help them form their initial impressions about the product and evaluate its quality. 

An online customer cannot touch, try, or feel your product. This is why you need to represent your product in the right way. Invest in professional product photography and talk to a photographer about using the colours, filters, and layouts consistently. For each product, provide several photos taken from multiple angles. 

Also read: 6 simple tips for branding your website

To build trust with a customer and engage them, you can even implement a 360-degree shot of your product or even make a short video that would emphasize the best features of the product and show how it’s used. 

To emphasize the photo or the video of a product, leave lots of negative space and choose eye-pleasing and bright colours (preferably white).

3. Write thorough product content descriptions

Many brands make a big mistake when creating their product content, focusing on optimising it for the right keywords to help their page rank high

er. However, they don’t think about the impact of such keyword-heavy content on user experiences. When visiting your page, a customer wants to get as much information about your content as possible. Stats back me up on that, showing that almost 90 per cent of online buyers consider product content an extremely important part of their buying journey. 

High-quality product page content should include: 

1. A straightforward and informative product page title

2. An accurate price of the product

3. The material of the product

4. The dimensions or capacity of the product

5. The information about the brand

6. The colour of the product

7. The availability of the product

When writing product descriptions, make sure they’re engaging. Use personal, polite, and professional touch and, at the same time, try to connect with your potential customers on a more personal level.

They should be concise and clear – add headings and bulletins to make them easier to follow. Sure, adding a keyword is recommended, but always make sure that you insert it logically and organically. 

4. Write a clear call to action

When creating your online store, the idea is to guide a customer down the sales funnel, from the awareness stage to converting. This is where a strong call to action plays an immensely important role. 

Instead of the generic “Add to cart,” choose something more creative. Use your CTA button to tell a customer why to buy from you and where to do so. You don’t need to use fancy, lengthy phrases. Try to be as direct and concise as possible. 

Also read: Why your website design should be completely different in China

Also, pay attention to the colour, size, and the shape of the CTA button. Always choose ones that will make your call to action easily visible from all parts of the page, but make sure they’re visually appealing. 

5. Make your product page responsive

The number of mobile users is constantly growing and is expected to reach 7.26 billion by 2020.  Therefore, failing to optimize your product pages for mobile, you’re missing out on an amazing opportunity to grow your reach and increase conversion rates.

Your goal is to create a responsive website that will look and feel amazing on all devices. Unlike the traditional mobile-friendly website, a responsive website is flexible and adaptable to a user’s device.

For starters, improve your site’s speed, declutter your layout and eliminate all unnecessary elements on the product pages, and ensure that all links and buttons are easier to click. Later, as your store keeps growing, you can even build an online shopping mobile app and boost your conversions.

6. Build trust with online reviews

Today’s customers expect brands to be fully transparent and honest. And, one of the most effective ways to build trust with them is to enable product reviews and ratings. Namely, 85 per cent of your customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 

Positive reviews will help your customers get rid of any doubts they may have about your product and encourage them to make a buying decision. Still, this doesn’t mean you should ignore or be afraid of negative comments.

Namely, they are also an amazing opportunity to see what bothers your customers most, provide timely feedback, and improve your products/services in the long run. After all, if you cater to the dissatisfied customers’ needs and help them solve specific problems, you can ask them to edit the comment.

Additionally, you can even encourage customers to review you. For example, you could send them a post-purchase survey via email, ask loyal customers to write testimonials or display users’ comments on social networks. To boost user engagement, consider building a social media contest and encourage customers to share user-generated content you would later share on your product pages. 

7. Boost FOMO

One of the most effective sales tactics is to create urgency around your product. Your idea is to evoke customers fear of missing out (FOMO) and get them to think that may miss out on an amazing opportunity to buy your product.

There are numerous ways to do so. For example, create and announce time-sensitive sales and deals, limit free shipping, offer one-shot deals, etc.

You can also insert the quality of products in stock or add a clock to your product page to make visitors look at how much time they’re left until the sale is over. 

Conclusion

If the conversion rates from your product pages are low, it’s time to test their functionality and optimise them. By adding the features mentioned above, you will not only increase your sales, but also boost user experiences, gain lots of recommendations, and retain loyal customers.

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Image Credit:  Igor Miske

This post was first published on November 13, 2019

 

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5 things that will make you be remembered as a leader who mattered

The worst leaders are remembered for what they did to their people, the best for what they did for their people. It’s as simple, and as tricky, as that.

Tricky because, as a leader, it’s easy to focus solely on tending to the business and your career, forgetting that tending to your people first will take care of both.

Over a 30-year career of leading others, I’ve learned that delivering the “for” is as important as delivering the forecast (again, they aren’t mutually exclusive). It’s what good leaders, and good human beings, do. However, even with the most altruistic intent, you can miss doing the kind of thing that epitomizes your number one role as a leader.

To care.

Here are the five most powerful things you can do for your people to do right by your people.

1. Build a MOAT around them

MOAT stands for “managing on absolute trust,” and it’s a must. It’s what you would want as an employee, no? To carry this idea further, I pictured building a moat around my people as a key part of my job. Doing so creates an empowered island where employees are free to choose how they rule their kingdom (their projects, business, and affairs) without interference.

My staff were protected from outside interference, and yet there was always a drawbridge to my help and assistance. I’d cross over that drawbridge upon request or would proactively do so to provide coaching and nurturing (thus, they were never “on an island,” as the negative connotation goes).

A drawbridge is narrow, by design. So requests for new work I’d flow to my people had to be narrowed and prioritized too. Thinking of the drawbridge metaphor served as a reminder for me to prioritize what I asked the troops to work on.

Finally, moats are reserved for protecting and growing important assets. Picturing the moat around my people reminded me to reinforce that they were valued and valuable, worthy and worthwhile.

2. Give them the best feedback they’ve ever gotten

It’s not a high enough bar to merely invest the time it takes to give feedback. Any leader can do that, although clearly not every leader does. Research from Officevibe (an online leadership learning platform) shows that two-thirds of employees want more feedback, and 83 per cent say the feedback they get isn’t helpful.

The best bosses go beyond and thoughtfully plan out and deliver insightful, actionable, even brave, feedback. I could write a separate article on giving great feedback, but you get the lion’s share of it by keeping the following in mind.

Think of the best feedback you’ve ever gotten and replicate what had to be true for you to have gotten it. It required insight into you as a person and nailing a fundamental truth about what makes you great (that you should do more of) or what was holding you back. It took time, careful observation, and for the giver of the feedback to be caring enough about you to get the feedback spot-on and deliver it in a way you could hear it. Start here.

3. Care about their careers as much as you care about yours

Start by having crystallizing career conversations. Help them identify what they want to do in their careers, not what their supposed to want to do. Get clear with them on what it takes to get where they want to go, and discuss options without setting unrealistic expectations.

Then advocate for them ferociously–even have a marketing plan for showcasing their talents in ways that will give them a career boost. Do this by knowing who the target audience is of career influencers you want to expose each employee to, what the key career-enhancing messages are that you want to share, how you’ll share them, and when (in what scenarios).

4. Get the skeletons out of their closets

This means getting employees to share their most closely held performance weaknesses: the things they know they need to work on but are afraid to admit.

This puts learning in overdrive, but can only happen if you have a foundation of trust in place (which will be there if you’ve built a moat). Maybe they don’t like to speak in front of large groups or feel they stink at analysis. Agree to not put the opportunity on any formal performance report and just get to work helping the employee develop on that front.

5. Teach them in teachable moments

Continuing with the theme of investing in their development and growth, be on the lookout for teachable moments when learning is most powerful. Moments like right after they don’t give their best effort during a key presentation or when they’re seeing things only from their side during conflicts or tensions. In those moments, coach.

Most importantly, do these things right because they’re the right things to do.