Follow us and stay on top of everything CRO
Webinar

Looking to Massively Improve Conversions in 2022? Two Words — Product Pages

Duration - 60 minutes

Key Takeaways

  • Don't underestimate the power of learning from other marketers, even those from obscure brands. Often, the most innovative ideas come from unexpected places.
  • Spend time studying what other marketers are doing. This can provide new perspectives and ideas, and help improve your own marketing strategies.
  • Consider subscribing to newsletters or other resources that provide fresh, unconventional ideas that can inspire your own marketing strategies.
  • Don't limit your study to only big brands. Often, the most innovative marketing ideas come from obscure brands.
  • Remember that continuous learning and seeking inspiration from others is a key part of improving your marketing efforts.

Summary of the session

The webinar, led by Rishi, Founder of Frictionless Commerce and a seasoned sales strategist, explores the concept of treating product pages as the entire website rather than just a product description page. Rishi emphasizes the importance of capturing the user’s attention in a fraction of a second, as most users decide quickly whether to stay or leave a website. He shares data from 400 e-commerce websites, highlighting the urgency of converting shoppers in their first visit due to low return rates.

Rishi suggests treating product pages like direct response ads or movie trailers, focusing on selling the product rather than just describing it. He concludes with various mental models to optimize product pages for higher conversion rates.

Webinar Video

Webinar Deck

Top questions asked by the audience

  • My client has taken the PDP out of the customer journey. So the landing page for the paid media is a product landing page. According to you, how should one structure the product landing pages?

    - by Mark
    It's a landing page then. Right? So it's a landing page. So this is actually a very good question and I want to answer this question because this is something I encounter a lot. So some of the clients ... I work with, they actually don't have a product page. What they do is they take people to a landing page where there's a lot of information And then from the landing page itself, you can start the checkout process. So in a way, I'm kind of violating my own principle because I consider myself the product page guy. I think one of the things I should clarify here for the audience is that what is the definition of a product page? So I don't necessarily look at the product page as being the traditional definition of a product page. I look at the product pages being the page where the bulk of this, the heavy lifting of the selling happens. So if you have a landing page that is essentially selling doing the bulk of the job of the product page of selling and informing the buyer about what the product does and differentiating the products from the competitors and, you know, really kind of amplifying desire, then to me, even though traditionally that will be called a landing page, I would still mentally categorize that as a product page. So in that case, I have no problem with just working on that itself. I don't think we don't need to take people to the physical product page, but whatever page where we're doing the heavy lifting is what the product page is.
  • How important is the structure of a page? What should we first, the product video or reviews?

    - by Sahil
    Structure is really important. We don't do any testing around we're actually the weirdest conversion agency in the world. So not only do we only focus on product pages, which is a weird thing, but eve ...n within the product page, we never change the layout of the page. We are only working with the description. So Sahil, to answer your question, we actually never do testing where we kind of say, okay. What happens if we take the video lower or if we take the reviews higher? But your question also gets into the structure of the sales pitch, and I would say the structure really, really matters. So that's why in my presentation, I had the opening, the middle and the end. The opening really, really matters. In fact, I would say if I had to sacrifice 2 elements, I would sacrifice the middle and the end, but I would absolutely focus on the opening. Because what happens, what we find for the analytics data is that our biggest hurdle, our biggest challenge is not convincing the buyer to buy. Our biggest challenge is that the buyer leaves us in 10 seconds. So if we don't mail the opening, we're basically screwed, And so for that reason, the opening of the sales pitch is really, really important. The structure really matters. I think we don't focus enough on the structure. And I think we need to think more about the structure and experiment more with different structures to see what actually resonates with our types of buyers.
  • I have a site that has more than 30,000 SKUs. How would you suggest going about writing sales switches for 30,000 SKUs?

    - by Anthony
    That's a really good question, Anthony. I'm so happy that this question came in because I get this question very regularly. Especially for big brands, they'll say, you know, Rishi, we understand what ...you're saying, but we have, you know, we have 50,000 SKUs. So what you are saying doesn't make sense. So Anthony, to answer your question, I am pretty confident. Now unless you are a fashion, a panel brand where there is a quick fashion brand where you're constantly updating an inventory. That's a very unique use case. My CRO approach does not work there. It does work there in a different way, but, to answer your question, Anthony, I would look at your sales data. This is, this is really interesting question because, you need to look at the distribution of sales if you follow, there's a principle called Ziff's law, but there are lots of, like, there are lots of distribution laws that talk about the fact that you have probably, like, 10% of your products are driving, like, 40, 50 percent of your sales. That's not always the case, but it's typically the case. So what I would say, Anthony, is that you are trying to identify the best selling products on your website, and then you start doing sales pitch optimization on those pages. I do want Anthony to answer a different question. Very related to what he's saying because this is something we've developed a solution for because we ran into this problem a lot for clients where they would have, like, 10, 15 products that were each doing, like, 500,000 in sales. So they had enough transactions where we could do testing in all of them. And, but we can't work on 10 pages, right, because we are so hyper focused on one page. So, Anthony, I have a very simple solution for you. So my solution is that if you want to do experimentation on all your product pages, you have 30,000 SKUs. That's great. You need to kind of narrow your focus to the something we call the why we exist story. So what I mean is that as we mentioned in the presentation earlier, The key thing is that before the user is even ready to kind of understand what your product does, they need to be comfortable with you as a brand. They need to trust you as a brand. There is no point selling them on how amazing the purifier is if they don't trust what you're saying. So what we'd like to do in that case is that we've done an experiment using VWO. We've done an experiment where we for 50% of the audience on all the product pages up at a strategic location, one good location might be to the right of the price point. And the reason I like to add buttons to the right of the price is because we know from some heat tracking studies, people are hyper focused on price. There is no doubt that the biggest criteria for shoppers is your price point. So they're really focusing there. So if you want to draw, if you want to address their anxiety, which is why they focus there, it's important to place a button right at the price point. There's usually a nice open space. Like, even in this example, in Nash's juicer, there's right next to 1999, there is a little space. I would use that space, and I would say something like new here and you apply this experiment. This experiment is run on all your pages. When you click on new here, you will see a light box pop up where you're talking to them about what makes your brand special. Now the challenge here is you're not writing a sales page that is personalized for this product, but you're writing a sales pitch that needs to work for all of your products. And, actually, this is a very effective strategy. On product pages, we're able to improve conversion rates by, like, 15 or 20 or 30%. This approach does not give you that kind of a lift, but it'll give you a lift of 10% on your site wide conversions, which is actually a lot. So you can expect to see a 10% improvement in conversion rates if you are able to convincingly explain to people why they should trust you as a brand and you can reference the product, but you obviously can't personalize the content because you can't change it for every product page. I'm gonna give Anthony 2 more tips here real quick. One is, Anthony, when you do this experiment, you must set up tracking for people that clicked on that button next to the price point. Because what happens is you might feel like that's a very prominent location and people will click on it. You might find through VWO that only 5% of people clicked on it. So then what happens is you go back to a follow-up experiment where you are changing the design of it. Maybe you're changing the design around it to draw more attention to it. We make this very big mistake as marketers of assuming that just because something is on a page, people are seeing it. And the data is absolutely not supported at all. So just because it's on the page does not mean that your experiment works because if people didn't see that button and click on the button, let's say, for example, you do the experiment. And you find that it had no impact on conversion rates. Okay. So you might say Rishi's idea was a bad idea. But if you looked at the number of people that clicked on it, and if you find the number of people that clicked on the button was 2%, I would argue that your experiment was meaningless because if only 2% of people saw it and interacted with it, then your sales copy is invisible to 98% of buyers. Is a much bigger sample than the 2%. So your problem is not the fact that your sales pitch didn't work. It's the fact that people weren't interacting with their sales pitch. So go back and make that call to action more visible. The other tip I wanna give, Anthony, is that at the bot, this is a genius idea. And I'm sorry. I couldn't cover this in this presentation, but I have screenshots for it as well. But at the bottom of that presentation, not the presentation. At the bottom of that sales pitch, which you're running on all the pages, so it's a short description of what makes your brand special? Ask a very simple question. Did we answer your question? And it's got a yes, no, but thumbs up and thumbs down. And, what you will find and you would track this in VWO, track this as clicks and look at the proportional people that said yes and proportional people that said no. Very few people interact with it. So don't look at the absolute numbers. You'll probably get it most. You'll get a hundred people clicking on it, either one of them. So don't be set by, oh my god. 10,000 people activated the pop up, but only 500 people in or a hundred people interacted with it. That number is always going to be low. Not because it's not visible because people typically don't interact with these things, but what you can pay attention to Anthony is the proportions of the yes, no clicks. Because if the number of people thinking no is, let's say, 40 or 50% or maybe it's even 60%, that tells you that your sales pitch sucks and you did not answer people's questions. So what you do, and this is why things are the ultimate cheat code because my shopper is telling me if the sales pitch that I put together works for them or not, So you go back and you run a new experiment where you rewrite your description. So I gave a very, very long answer for Anthony, but he had a very good question. So hopefully this makes sense.
  • What would be Rishi's tip to somebody who's a dropshipper who's running maybe 50 stores and is out there to make a quick buck. What is the cheese tip to that guy?

    - by Shubhankar
    That's a tricky one. I mean, we cannot say that I exist so I can make a lot of money. Right? So it's a tricky one. I mean, you have to really ask yourself, how are you? What is the value you're del ...ivering to the buyer? So one of the things that we like to do is that, for example, if I'm working for a very good point, actually. So if I'm working for a brand, obviously, we typically work for brands that manufacture their own products, and so we are crafting a very different story for them. But if I'm working for a brand that is a reseller, like, for example, like Zappos, and I was working for Zappos. I would focus on the fact that I'm actually not related to the manufacturer. So I would basically say that, listen, We are not Nike, and Nike has no choice, but to keep Nike shoes, we have kept this runner or this jogger of Nike because we have evaluated we had no relationship with any manufacturer, and we evaluated all the manufacturers out there and concluded that this is the best product. So one of the things that are shipper could do is a drop shipper could basically say that listen, I'm an advocate for you for the consumer and I am a neutral third party and I've studied every single product in this category and I found one supplier that actually has a really good product for in terms of value for money because value for money changes depending on your price point. We can say for this price point, this manufacturer is the best. And that's why we only we, you know, you're kind of, like, positioning yourself as doing curation for the buyer. That's why we exist. I will say it's a weak story. It's not a super strong story, but I would say that if you're a dropshipper, it is the strongest story you're gonna come up with. So, hopefully, this answers your question.
  • What is your take on free shipping? Highlighting it on the product page is a good thing? Will it lead to a sizeable lead in conversions, what does the experience have?

    Oh, I mean, there is a secular trend. There is no study in the world. So given us a choice between a product that costs $100 with $10 of shipping versus the product that costs $110 with free shipping, ... the free shipping version will always win. Or it is that there has never been a test that's been run where that's not been true. And I think one of the things that we have to think about is, again, it depends on how we define control. So what are we comparing to? A lot of times online retailers look at other retailers for their comparison. And I think that's a valid point, but we are actually comparing the behavior of consumers in a retail store. And that's what online commerce is competing against offline commerce, primarily that's what we are competing against. And, therefore, when you think about it from that perspective, when you buy from a retail store, you do have a hidden cost. You have to drive to the store. You have to spend time in the store, and you drive back and fuel and time, whatever, but you're not paying them for shipping if you're buying in the store. And so free shipping is a huge psychological barrier, or it's the lack of free shipping that is a huge psychological barrier. So I'm absolutely in favor of it. When we do testing and experimentation, we never focus on policies. So if a client has a bad return policy or if they have no return policy or if they don't have free shipping, we try to divorce ourselves from that because we don't control that. And we really focus on storytelling. So if I had a choice to tell the client to offer free shipping, I would say 100% do it, but if they don't offer free shipping, that does not prevent me from writing, sales page that is so mesmerizing, so captivating that I will still get a massive improvement in conversion rates even without free shipping.
  • What do you think that users would go back and click on the other buttons as well?

    - by Bill
    That's a really good question, Bill. And I think this is where it gets very interesting. So you want to make sure that's exactly right. So you want to design it in a way where a skeptical buyer, if th ...ey go back and they want to click on, you know, I'm, I'm a juicing nerd, for example, that the content is actually personalized for that user. So, we don't track this to see how people went and clicked multiple buttons, but I always write a copy in a way where it's genuine. See, this is the important thing. None of what I'm talking about are marketing hacks. I want to get away from this whole idea of hacking the buyer or duping the buyer or somehow getting them to buy from us, let's be more authentic, and we have to ask ourselves, is this genuinely improving the experience of the buyer? So there might be scenarios where you actually might have 3 buttons, but have the same sales copy for all three buttons or maybe 1 minor tweak And I kind of feel like that's actually a disservice because at that point, if you're using it as a hat, you're giving the buyer the perception that this is personalized when reality it's not. And maybe only 2% of people will actually fact check and go back and check it, but I still feel like that's not the right thing. So my recommendation to bill is before having the buttons, ask yourself, does this categorization even make sense for my brand? Should I have 2 buttons versus 3 buttons? Should I frame the buttons differently? Because whatever you're testing should genuinely help the buyer and also help you, but it should make sense for both parties.

Transcription

Disclaimer- Please be aware that the content below is computer-generated, so kindly disregard any potential errors or shortcomings.

Shubhankar from VWO: Welcome to another VWO. I’m really happy to be partnering with Mister Rishi Rawat from Frictionless Commerce for this webinar. Rishi, quite a popular guy on LinkedIn. He runs his agency as I call Frictionless Commerce, and he’s a great guy. Rashi is ...