Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse
With all the effort you put into perfecting your sales funnel, are your offer pages leaving money on the table?
Because if you have an ecommerce store, your offer page (also called your product page) is the one page on your website that every single lead must visit before they become a customer.
That’s why I believe that your offer pages are the most important pages on your website.
And in this blog post I’m going to give you the exact layouts and conversion assets I use in two of my biggest Shopify stores.
The Wrong Question: traditional vs long form?
For a long time I was asking the wrong question about offer pages.
I would think, “Hey, I’ve got headlines, photos, videos and customer reviews—how do I show them off?”
“Do I try to keep everything above the fold so customers won’t have to scroll? Or should I lay all of them out on a long form page with many many sections?”
At the time this seemed like the best question to test. So we did. We tested a lot—on both stores—trying to understand what our customers wanted from us.
And here’s what we got from all our hard work: Meh, doesn’t really matter.
Every performance test we ran on these two themes has been too close to call. In fact, the results have been so break-even that, I don’t think it’s an important question for me to ask anymore.
Instead I ask, Which elements do my offer pages need in order to convert the most visitors?
My Winning Product Page Elements
Anticipating what a customer wants before they want it is one of the things that has made my stores so successful. And from this success I’ve created what I humbly call “My Winning Product Page Elements”.
Every time I create a new product or make a new offer, I make sure these 8 elements are checked off first:
? High quality product shots *including zoomable images
? Story-based description of the ownership benefits
? Product sales video
? 3rd party pitch videos
? “Add to Cart” *with badges
? Customer reviews and Q&A
? Customer video reviews & Social proof
? Cross-sells (if you like)
This checklist is how I maximize the conversion rate of all my offer pages, and how I get my customers to feel better about purchasing from my stores.
Because you probably know that you need multiple touch points with a person before they are willing to buy from you. Well, the same is true for your individual offer pages:
Your customers need multiple pieces of content to consume about the offer before they are willing to actually say Yes to it. That’s why traditional vs long-form layouts was never the most important question, because it isn’t about whether they have to scroll to find these things or click on a tab.
It’s all about the quality of content they find when they get there.
And if you’re interested in seeing examples of how these look between my stores, then I recommend you watch the video that goes along with this post because I documented everything with some great screen shots.
3 Keys to boosting these conversion elements
Now let’s dig a little deeper. There are some key actions you can start today to really boost these conversion elements.
#1. Incentivize your customers to give video reviews.
Customers want more than one video. And if your one product video is a sales video, you should definitely have two or more 3rd party pitch videos. On BeeFriendly we have four directly beneath our sales video.
And they don’t even have to be professionally produced—sure it will help but start by working with what you have, including your customers. But my customers won’t just leave a video review or a selfie for nothing. I have to incentivize the heck out of them first.
Here’s how I get my customers to leave video reviews: I offer gift cards to my products in exchange for simple reviews. On both of my stores, if you buy a product I’ll send you an email offering a $10 gift card in exchange for a 30 second to 1 minute video reviewing the product they just bought.
This is some of the best social proof you can have, and it’s worth far more than ten bucks.
If you do want a professional 3rd party promo video, check out Rob Burns at www.Videotelepathy.com. They do a great job with our products. We’ve had about 20 videos produced through his company for BeeFriendly, and you can see them up and running on our store page.
#2. Bring the important elements “above the fold”.
I know I said that our customers don’t really care if we use traditional or long form layouts, but that doesn’t mean our stores are going all wild west.
No matter what layout you choose, you still want your customers to engage with your most effective assets first.
So on my 8-figure Shopify store, the first 4 things my customers see are always these:
1. Hero shot of the product
2. Story-based description
3. A sales video along with two 3rd party videos
4. An Add to Cart button
Here’s the big idea: if you’re prepared to buy my product, and all you want is to reach the Add to Cart button, then I’m going to make it as easy as possible for you to find it.
Because I know now that the rest of my customers who are looking for social proof have no problem scrolling a few inches to find it.
And if you’re using a mobile device, the only thing that changes is that we drop the video down below. Everything else you need to make your purchase is still given to you first.
#3. Add Unique Seller Proposition Badges
I kept this one until the end in case you’re already using it. By adding unique seller propositions below the Add to Cart button, we averaged an 8-12% increase in the numbers of customers who clicked.
What are Unique Seller Propositions?
These are little icons that say things like “Best Price,” “Satisfaction Guaranteed” and “Free Shipping,” that add and act as visual touch points to boost your customers confidence in what they’re buying.
And with an average increase of 8-12%, if you only take one thing away from this blog post, adding unique seller propositions to your store will be well worth your time.
And as a small bonus…
If you’re looking for a really nice application to promote and publish your customer reviews, the software we use to do this is Yotpo. They’ll email your customers for you to get their reviews, and they work great in both of my stores.
Start focusing on what really matters
Your product and offer pages really are the most important pages on your site.
They are where you want to commit the time to making sure the sales content is done well, that the sales video is done well and that you really do go out and get social proof.
Do you remember your cousin Jerry—the one you haven’t talked to in a few years? Yeah ask that guy for a review. Invite him over for dinner, get him in front of a camera and let him try out your product.
You don’t have to make it elaborate or complicated, but it does need to get done and the results will speak for themselves.
*If you haven’t read the Home Page Habanera blog post that accompanies this, you can view the post by clicking here.
In it, I show you the steps to make your home page look and function like Amazon, Zappos and the other top ten online retailers, and it is the perfect companion to this week’s post.
Video Highlights
0:24 Traditional .v. Long Form, It Doesn’t Matter
0:54 Winning Product Page Elements
1:36 VideoTelepathy 3rd Party Pitch Videos
2:33 Above The Fold
3:30 Consumers Need Multiple Touch-Points For A Conversion
4:20 Zipify Pages
4:42 Customer Video Reviews
6:04 Offer Page Split Tests
6:55 Yotpo Traditional Reviews
7:57 Product Offer Pages Are Most Important
8:12 Cousin Jerry
Click Here For Video Transcript
Ezra: So the question is, do I do traditional pages or long form sales pages? Traditional or long form? This is more of a traditional e-commerce offer page. This would be more of a long form sales page where you’ve got a little bit of a sales video, and some left-right content and things like that. Which one is better? It actually doesn’t so much matter. The elements on the pages are the exact same. You’ll notice on Boom we use one, on Beefriendly we use the other.
We’ve tried to split test this specific thing several times and every time we end up with a pretty much breakeven because, again, the traffic that you’re driving to your store and how people are getting there is going to dictate the results of your tests and all of our traffic is coming from the same place, so our offer pages end up being pretty much breakeven.
So let’s talk about the long form sales page, some elements, some winning elements just for your offer pages. Multiple high-quality product images, as I mentioned. Well-done product descriptions that use mini-stories, stories about your experience, stories about someone’s experience, stories about the ownership benefit of the product. A product sales video, sales video of some kind for your product. We supplement our product sales video with additional what we call third-party pitch videos. And these are videos of some arbitrary third party talking about how wonderful our product is, and they work so well.
Actually, if you look at your hot sauce bag, this is exactly what Rob Burns does. He has a company called Video Telepathy, and they create third-party pitch videos, and they do them really, really well. So if you need a third-party pitch video for your brand, I would hire Rob Burns. We hired him for Beefriendly. I think he produced like, what, 20 videos for us, something like that? They’re phenomenal.
“Add to cart” button above the fold if you can. Unique selling propositions and image format under the add to cart button. So basically under your add to cart button, you’d have like a little image that’s like, “Free shipping, and we guarantee your satisfaction,” etc., etc. Image zoom, letting people zoom over your images if you’ve got specific images. Reviews, user-generated content, and Q and A. So that’s sort of the FAQ. Customer video views, as I will show you in just a second, social proof images, and you might also like cross sells. Let’s take a look at each of those elements individually.
So product sales video, hero shot, call to action content above the fold. So above the fold, we’ve got a hero shot, a little bit of content, and some video. Now, on mobile, which is where a lot of your traffic is going to come from, it’s just going to be the hero shot, the text snippet, and the add to cart and the videos will be down a one scroll below if you’re condensing that on the mobile. So you’ll notice that all these elements are visible as soon as you land on the page. Same thing with the other type of page. You can switch to see the product. If you click this button, it goes from image to video, so your videos are above the fold. Then you’ve got your third-party pitch videos there.
This is the unique selling propositions under the add to cart button. On average you’ll see an 8% to 12% lift in the number of people who clicked that button by adding this social proof imagery under the button. Third-party pitch videos. Third-party pitch videos, they work really, really well. You want to have more than one video. People need…it’s kind of interesting where we say that they need multiple touch points for a conversion. Like you have to get in front of people multiple times before they’re willing to buy from you. But then on your offer page, they need multiple pieces of content to consume about the offer before they’re willing to actually say yes to it, which is why we do that.
And then we’ve obviously got a little navigation, brand imagery, and stuff. That’s the unique selling proposition. If you’re using the other type of page, you want to tab your content so it’s easy to see. So it’s like the viewpoint that…the traditional e-commerce page came from a time when people didn’t scroll. So the content is made to be as condensed as possible, so we use these little tabs. Long form left-right content, as I mentioned, headline, bullets, image, image, headline, bullets, call to action button.
We’ve got a block in Zipify pages that goes, headline, bullets, image, video, headline, bullets. So you can switch that up. But the point is that going down the page is image, text, image, text, video, text. It goes like this, so it’s easy to scan through it. We don’t put a lot of content. We space it out. Check these out. These are awesome.
So customer video reviews. This is all in the same page, by the way. Basically, we incentivize people to give us a review by sending them an email after they buy, saying, “Hey, would you like a $10 gift certificate to our store? Here’s what we want you to do. Pull out your iPhone, grab our product. Here’s a little script of what we want you to say. Talk about why you love our product. It’s got to be under 90 seconds. Send us an email and then immediately you’ll get a gift certificate.” So we’re incentivizing people to give us a video review.
The only difference between these customer video reviews — and when you click at one, it just pops up — and third-party pitch videos is that these are not professionally produced, and Rob Burns’ are professionally produced, but the same thing. There’s some third party talking about how great you are. One is professionally done. The other is done on an iPhone. These things work really, really well. Put them on your offer pages.
In fact, we’re going to be asking some of you for testimonials why you’re here. Have we started doing that? Yeah, we’re going to do it during the breaks and lunch. So we’re going to ask you guys to give us testimonials about the event, if you’re a Traffic MBA member, about traffic MBA. If you’re OneClickUpsell member, about OneClickUpsell, etc. Because it helps us and it will help you too if you do the same thing. So take the time to do that.
And then obviously… Yeah, we split test on desktop and mobile and so far…you’ll notice in our themes. So we have a Shopify theme where all this is built in. We give both options because it kind of depends on your product. Like for example, the beauty market, the cosmetic market, we’re finding that the long form are working a little bit better, but then in the skin care market, like organic skin care, the other ones are working just a little bit better, but it’s so close that it almost doesn’t matter. It’s like so dead even in all of our tests.
I’d be curious in your market. I know you sell what you find. And the beauty of the theme, which I think you have, is that you could have one page that’s done traditional and one page that’s done long form and the same for a different product, like you’re not forced to use one or the other.
Then we go into traditional reviews. You can use a review. We use Yotpo, Y-O-T-P-O, for our reviews. Lets people put in images and stuff. The other cool thing it does it lets people ask questions and things like that so people could look at questions from customers. So that’s just another kind of social proof. Notice we have image social proof, video social proof, text social proof. Same thing. So this is what a page might look like altogether. Going down, then you hit your social proof, then you get this section where you get the “You might also like.” And then you might, underneath that, go into the Firestone footer.
Beefriendly page might look something like this all the way down the page, goes down. Zappos is a really good example of…what’s up?
Woman: How do you encourage people to leave reviews?
Ezra: So that would be the third-party application that you’re using in your store, like Yotpo. They email customers at a certain interval after they buy to say, “Hey, leave us a review. Hey, you’ve got to leave us a review.”
Now, your product and offer pages are the most important pages on your website. These are what you really want to focus on. You want to make sure the sales content is done well, that the sales video is done well, that you go out and get social proof, even if it’s from your cousin to start.
You know cousin Jerry? The one you haven’t talked to in a while, that guy. Get him on camera. Have him try your product, have him approve of your product. Get there or invite him over for dinner. It’s been a couple of years, you haven’t seen each other. Come on Jerry. We’re counting on you. It doesn’t matter. And then as you get going, you’ll get like real stuff.
