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

Regular attendees of the webinar might be familiar that Rishi’s been with us, previously. And due to the high NPS scores we had on that webinar, we’ve kind of been forced to bring Rishi back. So, Rishi, and thanks for coming back.

Rishi:

Yeah. Thanks for having me on board again. And, I’m very excited to talk about the love of my life. I don’t have children.

So product pages are my children, and I study them closely, and I’m very fascinated by that subject. I wanna keep this very casual and I wanna kind of quickly go through the core points that I wanna make. And, hopefully, as I’m going through it, if I’m talking about stuff, questions will emerge as those questions come up. If you can share them with us, I’m happy to address all of those questions. The whole purpose of this is to answer your questions.

So with that, I’m gonna kind of get started with the fact that I’ve been doing this now for 13 years. I’ve been effectively in the wilderness, thinking about this subject, obsessing about the idea of conversion optimization. And what has happened, there are 5 core lessons that have really emerged, and I wanna cover those 5 lessons with you. 

So the first thing is let’s start off at the top and really ask ourselves how do shoppers actually search online? What is that mechanism like?

Then we’re gonna talk about the fact that the marketer has one shot. I think it’s really important for us to understand the context. 

The third one is how to think about your product page. The next one is developing a product page sales pitch. And you’ll notice that I’ve used the word sales pitch here, and it’s very intentional.

I think we tend to look at our product pages as being a description and we need to get away from that and look at it as a sales pitch. We’ll cover that in section 4. And then finally, we’ll talk about how we maximize impact.

So I’m just gonna get started and play a short video to show how shoppers search online, and this is just an example of how someone will look for something like a curling iron. They see all these ads. They see what’s promising. They kind of scroll down a little bit, and then they click on the one that seems the most relevant to them. So they’re still kind of, you know, deciding. And now they’ve come to the product page And the product page is where they close the pop up if they don’t wanna see it. And then the product page is where they are kind of deciding, you know, is this the curling iron?

I want to buy it? Is this a brand I want to focus on? This is how shoppers behave. And so it really goes from a search intent to a search result to clicking on that result coming to the product page or wherever well, let me put it this way. 

What happens is the way Google product listing ads are structured is that they configure to the product page. So the people who are seeing those little tiles are clicking on them coming directly to your product page. They’re not going to your homepage. They’re not going to your category page. You can do custom coding to make that happen. The default setting is that they come to the product page.

So, it’s really interesting, but for this user that has come to this product page looking for a curling iron. They’ve never heard of this brand. They don’t care about this brand right now. They’ve come to the product page. The entire website is that one product page.

And I think it’s really important to kind of look at your product pages being your entire website versus just being a page where you’re describing what that product does and then the homepage is where you talk about your brand, your about this page is where you talk about your origin story. Actually, that’s not how it actually happens. The user is literally coming to this page. And they are deciding in a fraction of a second if you deserve their attention or not. And nine times out of 10, they conclude that we don’t, and then they leave the website, and they look at some of the other tabs that are open.

That is what we are competing against. So I wanna talk about this idea of one shot. This is a screenshot from my website. I’ve looked at data for 400 ecommerce websites. So I know that this is very common for everyone. And I would say my return rate is 11%. Right, your return rate might be 20%. And, you know, 20% is on the upper end. The fact is that even if it’s at 20%, you still have 80% of people that are never coming back to the website. And so for me as a marketer, I need to convert the shopper in this session itself.

Again, this is the lens through which I’m looking at the problem, and this is how we kind of optimize conversion rates. So how should we be thinking about our product pages? In the next couple of slides, I’m gonna talk about different mental models to think about your product page. So the first thing I wanna share, which is a beautiful idea, is that every 24 hours, millions and millions of people land on a product page for a product that they’ve they’ve never seen and based on the sales pitch on that product page, simply based on the sales pitch on that product page, they part with their hard earned hard earned dollars, which means basically they’re taking their wallet out and they’re saying, okay. This is the curling iron I wanna buy. This looks really good. They’ve covered all the questions I had. I’m just gonna buy from them. They’re not, they don’t even know who the brand is at this point. Right?

I mean, that’s the magic of product bridge optimization. And this happens millions of times on websites every single day. So we have to really say, okay. What’s already happening? How do we make this happen more for our product pages? Another thing I’d like to talk about is I kind of look at the product page as being like a direct response ad.

Some of you on this webinar might be very young. You might have never seen a direct response ad. I’m old school. I’m a big fan of old school direct response ads. And the way they would work is that you would have a magazine and in the magazine, there’d be a page devoted to a product, and there would be a little coupon box.

You would enter your information. You would send mail to them. And that’s how they would track it. I like to look at the product pages and treat it like a direct response ad. And I find that when I treat it like a direct response ad, it really sharpens my thinking versus thinking about it as a place where I’m describing the features and benefits of the product.

The purpose of the product page and make no mistake about this, the purpose of the product page is to not describe your product it is to sell your product. So the product base where we are making our sales pitch, and it’s really important for us to really understand that. I’m gonna talk about this in a few different ways because I think people learn differently. So another way of looking at this is to think of your product page, as or think about your ad as a movie trailer.

So if you’re advertising on Facebook, a lot of people are spending a lot of money in advertising on Facebook, which is a good thing, but the ads that you’re showing on Facebook are essentially just a trailer. And when they come to the product page, the product page is the feature film. And if you think about it from that perspective, you’ll realize that we are doing the opposite. Right now, we are spending a lot of time. One of the surveys I do with customers is When was the last time you made an adjustment to your ad?

And they have 3 options almost always. They’ll say in the last couple of days. Then I asked them, when was the last time you reloaded the description in your product page, and the answer is invariably, we don’t remember. And so I wanna flip that I wanna look at the product page as a feature film. Can you imagine watching a trailer where the trailer is really promising and really appetizing?

But then you go watch the movie and the movie is terrible. That’s a bad experience. So you want to start working on your ads after you’ve nailed your product page. Another way of looking at it, and we covered this earlier, is that for payment that is coming to the product page similar to the curling iron example that I showed you, the product page is not just one page in your website. It is your entire website.

And so you have to think about your entire website as being that product page for that specific type of buyer. So now we’ve thought that we’ve kinda covered different angles, the importance of the product page, I would actually talk about how do we construct the sales pitch on that product page? So this is a mental model. So there are 3 aspects of the sales pitch that we need to think about. There are 3 parts of it.

The first part of it is the opening, and the purpose of the opening is to not close the sale. And I think this is a mistake that we make as we immediately start focusing on closing the sale. The purpose of the opening is to actually get the user to stop ignoring the alternatives. Typically when a user comes to our website, they have multiple tabs open. That means they are looking at multiple curling irons or they’re looking at multiple air purifiers. Or they’re looking at multiple vacation destinations, and you are just one of the tabs.

So before I’m ready to convert you, I have to first convince you that please don’t ignore the other tab. So you have to write a copy in a very specific way, and we have a very specific formulation for this. The second thing you’re doing as part of your opening is you are helping them overcome the unfamiliarity barrier. This is a really important concept. We are so focused on trying to get the person to buy our product that we don’t realize that you can’t even begin to start getting the person to buy a product unless you’ve made the buyer comfortable with who you are.

So you have to tell them why you exist. And that’s gonna be part of the opening. Now once you cross the opening, you get the middle of the sales pitch. The middle of the sales pitch is where you’re really demonstrating expertise, like your raw knowledge and expertise about this product. You are talking about all the features of the product and how you really want to let the buyer know that you don’t just sell a curling iron or you don’t just sell an air purifier.

You are actually an expert in that subject. You want to, like, position yourself as an expert. You need to also, during the stage itself, anticipate all the missing features that the product might have or the inferior features that the product might have and start addressing them up front. And then we get to the closing of the sales pitch. The closing has just one objective.

So what happens is as the user is going through the sales pitch, All of these questions are bubbling in their mind. You know, should I buy this now? Is this feature really useful? Is this going to cover my entire room? You know, all of these questions are bubbling in their mind.

The job of the copywriter is to anticipate what those questions are and to start addressing them. So the closing is where we start addressing all of those, busting all of those objections. Because guess what happens if the user gets to the bottom of the sales page and we’ve still not addressed those questions, they defer judgment. So they aren’t very kind to us. They don’t reject us, but what they say is that I don’t have all the information and I need to make the purchase today.

So I’ll come back after a couple of days and make a purchase when I have all that information. We saw in the earlier slide that my website’s return rate was 11 which means there’s a 89% chance that they’ll never come back. And so these are really small odds. So we need to make sure that our closing covers all of those negative questions. I’m gonna now share a case study, for one of our clients called handicap pets.com, and we’re gonna show you how we talked about the 3 parts of the sales pitch, the story.

We’re gonna talk about how we use their story to massively improve conversion rates by 38%. So this is the page that the client had. This is the top half of the page. This is the lower half of the page. You’ll notice it’s very content heavy.

They’re talking about all their wheelchairs. They’re trying to give all the information up front. And our basic hypothesis was that yes, you have the best wheelchair in the world for dogs, but when a user first comes to the website, they don’t really know who we are. And what makes us special as a company. So what would happen?

It was a thought experiment. What would happen if we changed our focus, from the product and focused on telling a little bit about who we are. So we ran an experiment where this is the treatment. This is the top half of the page, and actually I should come back here. And what we notice over here is we’ve got a picture of the founder on the bottom right corner, and we’ve got a description that says, do you wish your best friend could run, play, and exercise like other pets?

And that’s a headline, and then we put a description over here. And then we’re really not talking about the product at all. We’re talking about the problem it solves. We’re talking about who we are, our background, trying to show the founder, images show a video that demonstrates what the product does. And then there’s a button over there.

You notice it says, why buy from us? This is the number one question that the user has. If you don’t convince the buyer that you are someone that they should be considering, it’s meaningless to sell them on why a product is the best in the world. So when you click on “buy from us”, we show a pop up where we’re actually showing the team behind the company and explaining what these guys do and what they stand for. And that’s how we notice a 38 percent improvement in conversion rates for this page.

So the only change we made was at the top of the page, we created, we introduced their story, and then we’ve really effectively dramatized their story. So that’s how the sales pitch gets affected on the product page. So now that we’ve talked about this, I wanna get to the final part of the presentation. And here, we’re gonna be talking about how we maximize impact. 

So you’ve constructed a sales pitch. You’ve constructed a story for your product. Right? You’ve got an opening. You’ve got a middle. You’ve got an end.

You’ve kind of formulated it really beautifully. You’re happy with how it looks. Now the question is, okay, how do I actually instrument this on my product page? So I’m gonna talk about this and  the most interesting part of the presentation. I’m gonna talk about a crazy idea, and I think this is surprising to me that this has not been solved already.

If you go to any website in the world, your website, your competitors website, and you go to the same website on your desktop, and you go to the same website on your mobile device, You go to the website on a Monday, and you go to the website on a Wednesday. You send that link to your friend, and they go to the website every single person. No matter what the date is, no matter what device it is, no matter who’s seeing it, is seeing that exact same product description. This means that the marketer did this incredible hypothesis where they were able to construct a sales page that is perfectly balanced for all types of buyers. And I do not think this is even humanly possible.

So the idea that the description in every page is the same, to me, is a huge wasted opportunity. And I’m gonna talk about that next. So there isn’t a perfect product page. There are only perfect product pages And so if you’re selling a wheelchair, there is a version of that wheelchair page description that might appeal to me and have the highest effect on conversion dates for me, but there’s a different version that’s of that product page that will have a different conversion rate effect for a different type of buyer because different buyers have different shopper modalities. We behave in different ways.

We analyze different things differently. We prioritize information differently. So I wanna just emphasize the point over here. So your shopping habits are different from mine. What motivates you is different from me?

Yet when we go to a product page, we are both shown the exact same description, and I think that’s a huge lost opportunity. So let’s contrast this. Let’s think about it. One of the mistakes that I think, one of the opportunities that we need to think about is where can we learn from? Retail, maybe ecommerce is twenty five years old, but retail is three hundred years old.

Maybe even older than that. Right? Maybe it’s a thousand years old. The point is that humans have been selling for a long time. So what can we learn from them?

Let’s think about what happens in a retail store. So if in a retail store, and I actually go back to the site, if we go to the retail store and if you encounter a really knowledgeable salesperson, do you know what they do? What they do is they engage you at a conversation, a very natural conversation. And through that conversation, they understand who you are, what your context is, how long you’ve been looking to solve this problem. Do you just happen to walk into the store because you had time to kill, or did you come to the store because you want to make the purchase today? Is this something that frustrates you a lot, or is this a minor annoyance for you? Are you price sensitive? Are you price insensitive? Have you looked at a lot of brands? Have you looked at very few brands?

Are you a power user? Or are you someone who’s new to it? So imagine I like to use the example of, you know, a blender, a juicer. There are some people that get into juicing because they really understand nutrition. There are other people they’re gonna get into juicing because they simply want to lose weight and these are different buying modalities.

So the salesperson through this very clever conversation style is asking us a whole bunch of questions. And through those questions, they’re kind of automatically bucketing us in different ways or this is organic by the way. It’s not like they have a formula for it. This is how humans interact. And in that process, by the time they are done having this quick conversation, with you, at the end of it, they are, they are making a very specific recommendation.

And this is the idea that I want to incorporate onto product pages. One thing I should mention before we move to the next slide is that some of you might say that, oh, Rishi, we have a wizard on our website. I don’t think this is the same as a wizard. I’ll tell you why. So, again, going back to that salesperson’s analogy, imagine you walked into the store and the salesperson said, you know, What are you looking for?

You said I’m looking for a blender, and the salesperson said, okay. Great. But before I show you anything, I’m gonna ask you ten questions. And I’m gonna then show you the right, the perfect blender. That would be a very awkward way of having a conversation.

So that’s my problem with the wizards is that the user is being shown an interface where they have to answer a bunch of questions. It seems like a self checkout lane in a grocery store. It doesn’t seem very human. The other problem is that consumers are very aware of the fact that wizards always have a product recommendation at the end of it. So it’s kind of loaded.

So I want to kind of incorporate this in a much more subtle way, and I’m gonna show that, on the next slide. So again, the question is, what if we were to take this human technology and apply it to our product pages? So there are many ways of slicing and dicing this. So one way is to think about methodical and impulsive shops. I’m gonna show you an example of a case study we did for a client of ours. So here, what we found was that this is a technical product.

It’s an air purifier that costs $800 and the consumer is not just going to buy it based on a very short description. So the client very rightfully had a very detailed view for the product. They had the technical specs. They talked about the HIPAA filter. They talked about how many cycles it does per hour.

They talked about the motor behind it, all of the technical details that they knew were important. They didn’t know what details matter to what consumer, but they knew that in totality, these details really mattered because it was a higher price point item. But what we realized was that there are 2 types of people that are coming to this page. There are people that are really detail oriented, and then there are people that just want the quick story. They just are not really interested in technology.

They just want to make sure that they’re buying the right purifier, but they want to even though they want short content, they want it to be really good content. And the challenge the client gave us was that I want you to write a copy in a way, do the description so that it appeals to detail oriented shoppers, and it appeals to people that are not looking for details. And this was a trick question by the client, and so I’m a very lazy guy. So I said, you know what? Forget that.

I’m gonna make the user do the hard work. So what we did was on the product page when you come down to the description area, we have a headline, there’s a sub headline, and then there’s an explanation for what this product does in a very brief way. And then we say how much time do you have today. Now there are many things I want to talk about on this slide. First of all, this improved conversion by 20%.

But the thing I want to draw attention to is a couple of interesting choices we made. You notice that we didn’t just ask the questions up front. Again, it goes back to the analogy of the salesperson. When you ask questions up front without context, people will never participate in them. So what we do is we always show sales copies above it so that we are warming the user.

We’re warming the user and getting them over that comfort zone or getting them into that comfort zone before we ask them questions. The other thing we did was that we were trying to separate out for people who wanted a lot of details and for people who wanted very few details. But you notice the question, the buttons, the copy it says I have 2 minutes. I have time. Why didn’t we say give me lots of information and give me the short version?

You know why? Because what we found was that the consumer doesn’t want to feel guilty about themselves by saying, oh, I just want the short information because nobody wants to be an ill informed buyer. We want to be an informed buyer. So we use the proxy question. This is a very important copywriting technique to always use a proxy question to get to the same answer.

What we realized was that people who wanted the short version, they would never admit it. They would never tell us that, you know, I just want the short version. What they would say is I have less time. So we add this button that says I have 2 minutes, and I have time. When you click on it, I have 2 minutes.

You see the shortened version of the sales page. It’s got all the key points, but it’s very much summarized. If you make the mistake of clicking, I have time. We showed five pages worth of content. We threw everything at you, and we noticed a 25% improvement in conversion rates.

So this is one example of how you can actually start personalizing your product page for these different types of buyers. I’m gonna talk about it. It will actually it’s a 30% improvement in conversion rates. I apologize. Then the other way of personalizing this is based on the awareness level.

The first thing we talked about was impulsive and methodical shoppers. The other way of personalizing is based on awareness levels. So this is a made up example, but we have certainly tested this for our clients. And here, what’s happening is we’re selling a juicer. And, again, you’ll notice we do the same thing where we start off by describing what the product does before we start asking questions.

But if you can zoom in and just pay attention to the lowest part of it, it says pick an option that best fits you. The first one says, I’m new to juicing. the 2nd one says I’m a juicer, but I’m new to your brand. And the third one says I’m a juicing nerd, but new to your brand. So these were the 3 awareness levels that we identified.

So the first one is basically someone who’s absolutely new to the category. 2nd person is not new to the category, but they’re new to this brand. They’ve never bought Nash’s juicer before. And then the 3rd category is someone who’s an Uber user but they are new to your brand. So these are 3 distinct buckets we found out.

And what happens is and this is why it’s the ultimate cheat code. If someone takes an eye new to juicing, we hide the remaining 2 buttons, and the content that appears lower on the page is personalized. For the person who is new to choosing. So it’s exactly like in a sales, sales floor situation where if you imagine the sales person could hack the brain of the consumer and understand what their level of awareness is. We are doing this by letting the user select that and then personalize and copy.

The only point I want to emphasize over here is that it has to be done in a very creative way because it’s kind of like a magic trick. If the user feels that you’re just simply asking the questions to personalize content, that is very transactional. It’s never going to work. It has to be done very organically. So we very intentionally wrote the copy, and we very gently got to the question.

So it seems like an organic flow. It’s happening in the subconscious so that’s the final slide. And then I’ve. I’ve actually I’m wrapping this up early. I wanna open this up to questions, and I’m happy to actually go back to some other slides as well, if you have questions, but that’s my presentation talking about product pages. For those of you who are not subscribed to my newsletter and are looking for ways to, like, radically improve conversion rates in your product page, you can scan this little barcode. It’ll take you to my sign up page and then you’ll be able to sign up and get my weekly.

I do send a newsletter email once a week. I wanted to keep this short. I wanna open this up to questions, and I’m happy to go back to other slides if we need to expand on them.

Shubhankar:

That was a really detailed presentation. Inbox is already flowing. Like, it’s overflowing with questions.

This is probably your last chance to ask, any questions. Before I take questions from the audience though, Rishi, I can’t tell but wonder that you’re a very sly guy. Like, even when you were going, you’re taking us through all of the e-commerce pages that you ended up making. I couldn’t help but wonder if there were so many small things that were so nice. Like, if you can take us to the product page that you showed before this one, the one of the air purifier, like this, the copy itself is so clever. It showcases something which not a lot of people will usually care about.

How much noise does this make? Right? And you could have put the decimal level there, but you chose not to. And you’re including a picture of not just the purifier, but of the purifier in its surroundings, which is just telling the users how it’ll look in their homes, it looks in their studio, it looks in their apartment or whatever.

And I just can’t help but wonder how much research would have, you know, gone after this. Would you like that question? Yeah. That’s a question.

Rishi:

So, actually, you know, I don’t wanna go down a very controversial path because I think a lot of people are very upset with me for what I’m gonna say next, but I’m not a fan of user research. All of this that you’re seeing here was, almost like a detective. You know, we apply, like, creative reasoning. We have a model for making creative guesses about the buyer and making obvious guesses about the buyer. So all of this is done without research.

But, you’re right. We did think about all of these things, but we did it by interrogating the client. So we actually had lots of conversations with the client, who is a product expert, versus actually talking to users. And, so, yeah, I think that’s my answer.

Shubhankar:

That’s beautiful. I think that it just goes even in more detail to how you’ve named the product itself. Like, Asia and Eric, that doesn’t sound like a product’s name, but, you know, that sounds like a guy’s name.

Seems like I’m making a friend home and not buying an April fire. And I think that that gesture itself is worthy of the 30% uplift, which is probably okay. 

Rishi:

And, you know, and you bring a really good point. If you notice a copy over here, we call this technique priming. So we wanna condition the buyer. So it says in the last sentence, it says air purifiers are complicated machines. So we’re already kind of creating this idea that it’s a complicated machine and you’re right.

We intentionally used the word EGA because we wanted to almost animate the product. It says EGA has a lot of important features we want to share with you And so we’ve and then we abruptly stopped there. It was like, hey. How much time do you have today? And most people will really think about that and say, you know what?

There’s a lot of complicated details these guys wanna talk to me about, and it sends a lot of context. So very good observation. What we do is we look at every single word on a page. It’s kind of crazy, but we look at every single word in the page, and we look at every word or every idea that’s being communicated as a tax, and we ask ourselves, is this a tax that we want the user to pay? And through that mechanism, we’re able to really remove all the fat, all the unnecessary tax, and we’re left with something that is really powerful, but in the least number of words.

Shubhankar:

I think that idea is really powerful. I think, the idea that you can, you know, basically take a knife to your own product page and you know, remove all the excesses from there. So what do you have? Is this a pure goal? I think that’s very powerful.

One more question I had in mind was, now, speaking about ecommerce and that’s the great thing about being digital. You can really define your audiences. So let’s go back to the juicer example.

And, you might have certain keywords that you might be targeting. So, let’s say for somebody who’s new to the space, right, they would probably Google something like, best user under $200 or best user under $100. And for somebody who’s more used to a juicer, they would probably do something like a nutribullet versus this or Yes. Best cold press juicer or something like that.

And I think that’s, again, a really beautiful way in the sense that you can kind of personalize your page because, you know, that, hey, this query is probably going to be used by a user who’s going to have an XMR of maturity level, and I can map their needs from this the question they’re asking me. Like, you know, I’m going back to the salesman analogy that you use. Right? When you walk in that door, the salesman doesn’t know you. They don’t know if you have a juicer at home or not, but just because of how you behave and the first couple of questions you ask, they’re able to make a very educated guess of your maturity.

I think one could do the same thing here.

Rishi:

That’s such a beautiful idea. You’re right. I mean, I always look at the world in terms of control versus the challenger. So the control is that we’re living in a world where the marketer has to think about all the permutations and accommodations of all of their customers and write a sales pitch that works for everybody. That is, like, monumentally hard to do.

Fifty times harder to write copy that works for all audiences versus writing copy that works for one specific audience. And then you maybe it’s a little ineligible. Sometimes marketers feel like, you know, we don’t want that. You know, sometimes I hear clients say things like, Rishi, we’re adding a button. That means the user now has to click on something to get to the content. Isn’t this increasing friction?

And I think it’s very important for us to draw a distinction between good friction and bad friction. The user does not mind clicking on a button. If that means they’ll get content that is 10 times more relevant to them. So we must get away from this idea that all friction is bad. It’s okay for the user to click a few times if that means that they’re getting to gold that is personalized for their use case.

Shubhankar:

I’m not going to audience questions yet because I have so many of my own. One more thing I wanted to ask you was about using video on product pages. That’s something I’ve not seen a lot of. But I certainly feel when done well, it’s a really powerful tool. What are your thoughts on that?

Rishi:

That’s a really good question and actually something that I’ve been writing about a lot, and thinking about a lot as well. So there is a very specific reason why I like copy which is the fact that copy is malleable, which means I can come up with 10 different versions of this sales pitch on this page in 4 days but I certainly cannot come up with 10 different versions of the video because it’s so much more expensive, so much more complicated. So what I tell brands is that There is no doubt. And having done this for donkey’s years, I’ve done so many video tests, and I can tell you a very interesting statistic when it comes to testing video is that the video quality, it actually does not matter as much. Having a video is always more effective.

All else being equal they’re not having a video. So if a player doesn’t have a video and you add a video, even if the video is long, even if it’s bad quality, you are going to see a bump in conversion rates because people are so used to consuming video content. However, here is my recommendation. Start optimization with copy because by optimizing the copy, you can figure out the right formulation, the perfect combination of the script that produces the best impact. Convert that script into a video for a multiplier effect and then continue optimizing the copy for a future video.

So that’s how you maximize using video.

Shubhankar:

Yeah. I think also, one might be inclined to believe that, you know, with certain search engines preferring video content, there’s a higher chance that your page would rank higher on Google or any other search engine just because of having some video content on the page. Right? Cool. I know I can finally answer the audience’s questions.

So, can we create the 3 buckets on landing pages instead of websites.

Rishi:

So instead of, like, the product page, maybe?

Shubhankar:

Yep.

Rishi:

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, absolutely. So I wanna give some context over here. You know, I get this question a lot.

Like, Rishi, your focus on product pages, Can we hire you, or can we focus on landing page optimization? So I have no principal concern with landing pages. I love landing pages. I think what happens is that the purchase in the behavior intent is different on the landing page. What we find in heat tracking studies and user recordings is that when users first click on an ad and they come to a page, they very quickly navigate from that page.

They move around very quickly. They’re clicking around very quickly. And they come to a grinding halt when they come to the product page. So no matter how your funnel is structured, people are gonna very quickly navigate to that funnel, whether it’s a landing page, it’s a category page, it’s a homepage, you’ll notice in your recordings, people are very quickly navigating. And then when you come to the product page, they come to a grinding halt, and the reason for this is that we have been conditioned to know what to expect once we cross the product page, which is that we have to enter our credit card information.

And so for me, the concern with landing, you could absolutely do these kinds of buckets on the landing page, but keep in mind that people are not paying a lot of attention on the landing page. They’re paying a lot more attention on the product page. It is for that reason that I like to focus on product pages, but to Nancy’s question, you can 100% apply the same principles. You could even have a system where on the landing page, you’re asking that question. And then when they come to the product page, the content is personalized based on the selection they made.

Shubhankar:

Yeah. I think that really brings us to the next question from Mark. And, he’s saying that his client has taken the PDP out of the customer journey. So the landing page for the paid media is a product landing page. And so he wants some opinions around how one should structure the product landing pages.

So her question is, should it be a mix of informative and sales content.

Rishi:

Yeah. I mean, I don’t have a specific answer. I haven’t seen this page, but I think it does. If you know, sales and information, yeah, they kind of go hand in hand. Right?

Shubhankar:

But would you even recommend that, taking the product description page or the customer journey itself?

Rishi:

So I guess I don’t follow that part. So they are taking people directly from the ad to the product page. Correct?

Shubhankar:

To the product landing page. So they have a, like, a hybrid s page, I’m thinking. 

Rishi:

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.

Shubhankar:

Yeah. I think I couldn’t agree with a few motors, especially on the checkout website with Google Pay and PayPal buttons. Right? It’s very easy to create a checkout flow, which starts and finishes on that page right there. And I think, that’s again, you know, taking friction out of the equation, but I think that’s unwanted friction that one would very much want, not to be part of the case.

So Sahil has a question for you. He says, hi, Rishi. How important is the structure of a page? What should we first, the product video or reviews?

Rishi:

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 even 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.

Shubhankar:

So, yeah, a pair says where the sales pitch for VWO comes in, guys, go and test the structure of the page with VWO, and you will find that out for yourself. Okay, Rishi. I have a question from Anthony. So Anthony is in a weird, I would say lucky space where he has a site that has more than 30,000 SKUs. And he says, how would you suggest going about writing sales switches for 30,000 SKUs?

Rishi:

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.

Shubhankar:

Rishi, your kind of long answer gives me another point. You always stress on why we exist. So 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?

Rishi:

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 delivering 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.

Shubhankar:

Rishi, another question. This one’s probably my favorite question of the bunch, what is your take on free shipping?

Rishi:

Oh, what is my take on free shipping?

Shubhankar:

Highlighting it on the product page is a good thing? Will it lead to a sizable lead in conversions, what does the experience have?

Rishi:

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.

Shubhankar:

Yeah. That’s powerful. That kind of brings me to a second question. What do you show a discount right there on the product page? Right?

So what I’m asking is we have Nasha Dusa for $99. Would you say 120 with a strike through and then 99, or similarly would you say that, buy this now and get free shipping more divided for the next 20 minutes or something like that?

Rishi:

So, that’s a good question. And this is where I want to be completely honest with the audience and say that we actually don’t do any testing, any testing in those areas. So you know, I can talk about it conceptually, but my knowledge will be just as good as your knowledge. I don’t have any data to support it. Sure.

I mean, I don’t have a good answer for this. I’m so focused on the sales pitch that I don’t really think too much about it. Now what I will say is that whenever we give a discount, the cardinal sin that marketers make is that they’ll say 120. They’ll strike it out and they’ll say 99, and then just leave it at that. Consumers are very used to getting discounts.

So what will happen is people will see that, and they’ll say like, okay. Great. Awesome. So what we like to do is we like to emphasize the discount. So to the right of the discount, we’ll have a link that says why this discount when you click on it, we’ll give them a really nice story that says, you know, like, for example, we never give discounts, but we are giving this special discount because we hope that you will buy the product and you will love it so much that you will tell all your friends about it.

And so you can do free advertising for us or something like that. The consumer knows that there is nothing known as a free gift. So in the marketer, say that I’m giving you a free gift. That’s just a horrible strategy because the consumer doesn’t buy it, but if you’re able to convert that and say that this is actually not a free gift, I’m actually converting you to my Salesforce because I’m confident that you will love the product so much I’m gonna lose money on this sale because I know you’ll tell 2 of your friends about me. Now the consumer’s like, oh, okay.

Now I get his angle. So what I would say is that never give a discount without a sales pitch supporting that discount. That’s what I’m saying.

Shubhankar:

Well, it’s all about this story, isn’t it?

Rishi:

It’s all about the story.

Shubhankar:

Yeah. I think, I would just, you know, probably due to the positiveness of time, probably go on to our last question. This is from Bill. And Bill asked, what do you think that users would go back and click on the other buttons as well? He’s wondering if this might happen due to natural curiosity.

Or the users want to see different versions of the page?

Rishi:

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 they 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.

Shubhankar:

Yeah. I think I can. You know, just having that element where it would just increase the engagement, you know, even if there’s, like, a small subsection of your user base, which is coming again to see what those other buttons are, that means they’re really engaging well with your story. Right? And if you have a captive audience, selling to that captive audience just becomes so much easier.

So I think Rishi is onto something here. I think that’s a really powerful trip. Okay, Rishi. I think, do you want to ask one more question? Or, I think we can do one more.

So this one’s on design. I know you so that you don’t focus on design but on stories. But, for Nasdaq’s benefit, I’m going to take this one. He said, if given a choice, what will you do? Make the UX of the site really simple and keep it ready traditionally, or what do you do?

More radical UX design, to entice young customers. So he’s focusing on the new customers on possibly teenagers who are just coming on to the online shopping scene, digital natives, what would you do differently for them?

Rishi:

Yeah. So, you know, I think this is, I don’t know if you guys can see it, but behind me is my favorite book on copywriting. It’s called the Adweek copywriting handbook. I’ve read the book, you know, 7, 8 times now. It is my bible for copywriting.

And one of the things that the author Joseph Sugarman talks about is that every product has a nature. So there is an inherent nature in the product. So if you are selling, for example, a smoke detector, which is a security device, which, you know, protects your family if there’s a fire in the house, that has a very specific nature versus, of a juicer that has a different nature. So the question is about, you know, targeting, you know, the radical UX/UI. Now this is kind of outside of the scope of my discussion and my area of expertise, but I’ll answer the question.

Given a choice between a, you know, radical UI/UX for a demographic that is, you know, digital native. That is the nature of the product. That is the nature of their audience. I would say that totally makes sense. I think also if it’s a very edgy brand or if it’s a very edgy kind of product, part of our appeal is the fact that we’re completely different, right, we’re rule breakers.

And so in a way, you kinda have to break the UI/UX rules to stand out. So in that use case, it would make sense, but I can’t give any scientific response because I have no evidence for it, but intuitively it makes sense.

Shubhankar:

Thanks. Thanks for that answer. Rishi, you’ve been more than helpful. We’ve had so many questions. I’m sorry for the audience members whose questions we can’t take.

Unfortunately, this is all the time we have today. Please feel free to write to us or message Rishi on LinkedIn. I’m pretty sure you would love to reply to all of your questions over there.

Rishi:

And I will send you a QR, scan this, and sign up for my newsletter. Once a week, I share conversion insights. I  spend 20% of my time studying what other marketers are doing because I’m the dumbest guy in the room. So I like to get inspiration from really clever marketers. And oftentimes, the most clever innovative marketing ideas are not coming from the biggest brands in the world.

They’re coming from obscure brands you’ve never heard of. So I spent a lot of time studying them. I record the best examples. And then once a week, I like to share what I found.

So if you’re looking for quick hits of ideas that you’ve never liked, just blow your mind, or blow your mind in a very unconventional way. I think you might like my newsletter.

Shubhankar:

Yeah. I’m personally a subscriber to issues newsletter, and I can advocate for it very strongly. Feel free to join for it while it’s free.