How to Create a High-Converting Product Page
Last Updated: September 27, 2022 in Guides
Product pages are the cornerstone of any eCommerce enterprise and a crucial element of inbound marketing strategy. Brands that master the optimization of their product pages are able to boost their conversion rates to double digits.
Product page optimization for higher conversion rates is one of the biggest challenges online retail businesses face, which may explain the surprisingly low conversion figures. In this article, we will take a look at six of the most effective methods of creating and optimizing product pages to motivate your prospects to become your customers.
What Is a Product Page and Its Benefits?
A product page is an eCommerce website page that contains all the relevant product information, such as images, descriptions, specifications, prices, quantity available, and more.
The purpose of a product page is to help customers with their purchase decision and lead them to conversion. According to one recent study, only 3.3% of eCommerce product page visitors make a purchase. While on the whole, the average eCommerce website conversion rate stands between 1% and 2%.
Some of its benefits also include answering common questions about a product, providing user reviews and product comparison, and making the purchase process easier.
Which Tools and Methods Can You Use to Create a Product Page?
Content management systems such as Shopify, WordPress, and Magento are used for creating fully functional eCommerce websites that convert. You can hire a website development company or a developer to create a product page.
If you use WordPress, there are a lot of tools to create a product page easily and even without any dime. You can use page builder, Gutenberg, custom fields along with installing a shopping cart plugin like WooCommerce.
How to Create a Product Page that Is Highly Converting
Some of the essential elements of a high-converting product page include:
- A short, descriptive URL
- A concise CTA
- Legible pricing, shipping, and product information
- Hi-res images of a product
- User-generated reviews
- Social proof
- ...
However, the first step toward making a product page that converts is to create content that matches your users’ needs.
This means anticipating your shopper’s search intent, optimizing your content for keywords they use, listening to their pain points and needs online on forums and social media, and delivering what they expect to find. Or you can use some UX tools to find out the way they interact in your website to have a good preparation for the next campaign.
Here are the steps to take in order to create a product page that matches your users’ needs.
Prioritize Your Unique Value Proposition
Your unique value proposition (UVP) outlines your products’ main benefits and serves as your product page’s centerpiece.
Everything that your business does revolves around UVPs and the benefits your customers get by using your products. That’s why your UVPs must be crystal clear through timely and understandable messaging and copy.
The most effective product pages are about selling benefits, instead of product features. Explain to your prospects what they will get from purchasing your products and how your products can help solve their pain points.
Think about the main value you bring to your customers. Be very specific when establishing what your products do for people.
Then, ask yourself what makes this value truly unique. How do you stand out against the competition, what makes you different?
A unique value proposition can be a simple tagline that appears right on the product/service landing page. How you present it is equally as important as what it says – use bold, legible typography that makes the UVP stand out and make sure it’s above the fold.
A unique value proposition should be immediate and appear right at the beginning of the product page’s copy. The title should be all about describing the product in the most descriptive language.
In a nutshell, your visitors should take note of your UVP 5 to 10 seconds from entering your website. This is important as 55% of people spend less than 15 seconds on a page.
State Your Pricing And Product Features Clearly
The product’s price must be clearly visible and displayed in a bigger font than the rest of the product page copy, so as to avoid misunderstanding and confusion that may arise from the price not being prominently displayed.
The product price and any additional costs like VAT and shipping should also be clearly displayed.
As for product features and specifications, best practices suggest that product pages should have a tab dedicated to features such as product dimensions, color, weight, and other defining qualities.
Such info helps shoppers get a better understanding of the product and helps them with the buying process.
Up-sell And Cross-sell
Shoppers who decide to buy one of your products may still be interested in more items.
Your product pages should strive to inform users about your products, but they are also an opportunity to showcase related products that a buyer is likely to find interesting as well.
Cross-selling and up-selling suggestions increase shopper’s value. This also instates a sense of trust because you are curating personalized product recommendations for them.
The product suggestions should be in some way related to the main product or the buyer’s purchase history and interest.
As for products related to the main item, this could be anything from accessories for the product to an item that complements it.
If one of your cross-selling or up-selling items is out of stock, don’t worry: present shoppers with an email capture form so they can be notified when the product is back in stock. If the items are in stock, make sure buyers can add them to their wishlist so they don’t forget about them, if they’re not ready to buy immediately.
Create Designs that Match User Behavior & Interaction
Design, layout, and navigational elements also play a pivotal role in converting eCommerce shoppers.
Here are some tips to follow in order to improve the overall user experience on your online store.
Utilize Breadcrumbs For Better Orientation
Hierarchy and history-based breadcrumbs are the cornerstones of every eCommerce navigation.
Hierarchy breadcrumbs make it easier for shoppers to browse your collection of products because they can move up and down your category organization without problems. Without these breadcrumbs, they would feel stuck and disoriented and, ultimately, frustrated – which will prompt them to leave.
This type of breadcrumb is not history-based and doesn’t necessarily take your customers back to what they were looking at previously.
It’s important to use both hierarchy and history-based breadcrumbs on product pages because shoppers will land on them in different ways. They will sometimes want to look at related products in the same category and sometimes they will want to return to where they were a minute ago.
Use Attractive and Authentic Product Image
Professional, high-resolution images of your products in action as well static display are essential so that shoppers get a better idea of how your product looks and feels like.
Images should be large enough so shoppers can zoom in on their details, but the images should also be optimized so as not to slow the website down. Make sure you get a professional photographer that will take care of all the aspects such as lighting, color saturation and angles to make photographs as attractive as possible.
A bonus tip: Enable user-generated content in form of reviews with images. The customers that have brought an item may want to submit their review along with their own image of a purchased product. This helps grow prospects’ trust in you as a business and could have great implications for your conversion rates.
Prioritize Readability
The typography and fonts you use are a vital consideration for your shoppers’ user experience and shopping satisfaction. Pick a font that is easy to read, not too large or too small, and contrasting enough against your website’s background.
How you format your pages will also contribute to better readability: use shorter, two-line paragraphs, enough line clearance, and white space to give other elements some “breathing space.”
Add Some Call to Action
Provide Social Proof To Reduce Hesitation
Social proof elements include user ratings, reviews, client testimonials, and influencer marketing. The point of social proof is to build trust with customers.
As much as 95% of online shoppers look for online reviews before they make any purchase and 84% of them trust the reviews of others. Also, having more than 50 reviews for one product can increase its conversion rate by 5%.
Reviews help your shoppers decide to buy a product by providing the data needed to make an informed decision. Giving them the option to upload an image as they use your product will convince future shoppers and nudge them towards conversion.
Your product page design should incorporate social proof, customer reviews, and, if possible, a gallery of images of people using your products.
You can take this up a notch by asking your shoppers to leave their personal details for more personalized reviews that lend even more convincing power. For example, Sephora asks their shoppers about their eye color, skin type, and hair when they leave a review and shoppers can filter reviews by these parameters that match theirs, to better determine which products might work best for them.
Stir a Sense of Urgency
Buyers that are hesitant to buy or don’t feel a particular incentive will often leave your product page without converting.
By adding a sense of urgency to your products, you can instill a strong motivation to buy: the fear of missing out.
There are many ways in which you can add a sense of urgency to your eStore, but the most common is to limit the time to buy and/or quantity of items.
For instance, you can add a countdown clock to your website’s homepage, showcasing the expiration date and time of your special deals.
Another strategy that is effective at raising conversion rates is displaying how many items of a certain product you have left in your stock.
Use CTAs To Inspire Action
Call-to-action buttons are your eStore’s direct invitation to conversion and everything that you do content-wise on your website should find its purpose in this.
The important thing to note is that your CTA buttons should, ideally, point to one or at most two different conversion points so as not to dissipate shoppers’ attention. Also, CTAs should all have the same design across the eCommerce site because this lessens confusion and strengthens familiarity.
Besides, for maximum effectiveness, your first CTA should ideally be located above the fold and it should point to the sale or deal that is most current in your store. Plus, every CTA button should be clearly visible and highlighted on the page, meaning the use of vibrant, contrasting colors and a brief but highly enticing copy is advised.
The said copy can be anything, from the more generic “Add to cart” to “Buy now” which lends more of a sense of urgency. Or you can get the creative and bold and use something offbeat, in line with your branding.
Bonus Tips For Creating A Product Page That Converts
Optimize Website Speed
As much as 40% of users will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load, while 79% of online shoppers that are not satisfied with website performance will not buy from the same site again.
Slow-loading eCommerce websites miss out on capturing leads and converting them, making page loading speeds one of the crucial factors in customer conversion.
Big eCommerce websites, with lots of pages and products, are at risk of becoming too sluggish. Your page-loading speeds can be optimized in one of the following ways:
- Remove excess HTML, PHP, JS and CSS code
- Optimize and compress image sizes
- Use premium hosting plan
- Enable browser caching
- Streamline your product offering by removing poor-selling products
- Simplify your site structure, sitemap, and product network
Utilize SEO
Search engine optimization is the cornerstone of any highly-converting eCommerce website.
On-page and off-page SEO techniques help your eStore rank high in Google search results, get in front of highly-qualified prospects and answer your shoppers’ search intent.
The aforementioned website speed optimization is also an SEO signal: Google favors high-speed websites and ranks them higher.
Another way to optimize your website for search engines is to include a section with long-form blog content that helps and informs your visitors on topics that matter to them.
To further solidify your SEO efforts, you should also:
- Use well-researched keywords in your content to target users with and front-load them in your content, product titles, descriptions, meta tags, title tags, etc.
- Optimize your image names and alt-tags
- Use H1, H2, and H3 headers
- Write a unique meta description for each page
And finally, don't forget to install a good SEO plugin for WordPress!
You should add some tools to interact with your customers whenever they want a consultation, you should. The tools can be:
Conclusion
Creating or optimizing an existing product page for conversions is a multifaceted process that taps into various website aspects, from on-page SEO over navigation to content creation.
It is critical to cover all bases, mentioned in this article, to ensure your eCommerce product pages capture the attention of the highest number of leads and prospects possible and convert them using social proof, quality content, and excellent UX.