So you’ve e-Commerce’d your site up. (Hopefully with Magento, our favorite.) And you’re ready to roll. The homepage is ready. The product shots have been Photoshopped to perfection. The design and the color schemes look very cool (ahem, an aesthetic term) and you’ve set up your checkout process with a secure third-party payment gateway.
That’s it, right? Well – not if you haven’t dedicated as much effort as you already have to your product pages.
Here’s a list of awesome tips for turning your product pages into awesome sales magnets:
Optimize it. This, really, is a given, since you want the search engines to find you as easily and as often as the human visitors do. Great ways to make your product page SEO-friendly include: avoiding duplicate content and duplicate URLs; writing up unique and compelling text descriptions for each product (don’t just copy the manufacturers’ descriptions); and editing this content in a way that makes it relevant to your most important keywords, search phrases, and geographic location.
Bullet-ize. When you write your product descriptions, it’s useful to highlight the benefits, the hows and whys that tell – urge! – people to buy your product. And when you write the benefits, it’s useful to organize them into a bulleted list. That way, it’s easier to read – and “straighter” to the point. It’s a classic sales and marketing tactic, and it makes for highly effective copy. A bulleted list of benefits also helps your customers and visitors make quick decisions.
De-clutter. Take away design elements – like fancy Flash animation, audio that automatically plays – that draw attention away from your products. Keep the page simple and sales-oriented. And avoid placing too many products in one page. In fact, we’d go so far as to recommend that there should only be one product per page. Doing this helps you avoid duplicating content, and it also aids in improving – instead of stifling – your chances of conversion.
Insert more add-to-cart buttons. Ask for the sale often. That’s easy enough to do in person (especially if you’re an experienced salesman or woman), but trying to be aggressive online can sometimes be misinterpreted. The best – and perhaps subtlest – way of persuading online shoppers to buy is to add multiple add-to-cart buttons in every product page, such that they can still see this Call to Action even when they scroll down to the end of the page, read the descriptions, or checked out related products in the same category.
Social share. Product pages are, first and foremost, sales tools, but that doesn’t stop you from using it to market and publicize what you have to offer. Add social sharing buttons – for Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Delicious, Reddit, etc. – to enable visitors to share your pages across their online networks of friends and family. By leveraging the power of social media, you’ll make it easy for shoppers to “like”, “share”, or “tweet” the awesome experience that they had using your website.
Say so whenever stock is running low. Are your best-sellers so hot that you seem to run out of stock before you can manufacture or order the next round of supply? Well, say so in the product page. Add a button or a line of text that this product is running low on stock. Don’t worry about shoppers being discouraged by that, because it actually works the opposite way. They will be encouraged to buy – and buy now – thanks to the urgency that a stock level indicator is bound to create and drive.
Add video content. Sometimes, no matter how great and eloquent the product descriptions are, people will still scratch their heads and wonder, “So wait, how does that work again?” Answer questions like this by embedding a video on product pages that need it. Video is a great way of visually explaining how and why your product works. It’s also a neat SEO-friendly tool, increasing your chances of appearing in search engines’ results pages for videos.
Improve navigation. This is one of the characteristic traits of a successful e-Commerce site. Don’t set up your product pages in a way that they’re more than two or three clicks away from the home page. If the shoppers can’t find you in the shortest possible time, chances are they might not bother searching at all.
BONUS TIP: Buy next time. If you can’t, despite your best efforts, close a sale today, you can still encourage visitors to buy next time, or sometime soon, or when the occasion calls for it. One great way of doing this is by setting up E-mail reminders (our favorite E-mail marketing tool is MailChimp) for notifying visitors to buy, on a later date, an item that had caught their eye. They choose the occasion or the date – and when that time comes, you come through to remind them.
What are your favorite product page tips, tricks, and tactics? Let us know by leaving a comment below. You can also contact the friendly Lakeshore Branding team to help you with your Internet marketing, SEO, social media, and e-Commerce needs.