Five Ways to Rejig a Product Page When It Doesn't Lead To Enough Sales
You’ve decided that you’re back in experimentation mode with your product page.
After trying out your best shot at designing the product page, and after seeing only a small fraction of visitors clicking that button you’re tracking, you’re ready to shake things up and try something new.
So here are five ways to rejig your page with an entirely different approach:
1. Create a Personal Connection
Reserve the top of your page to share the backstory of the product in a way that’s clearly going to cleave your visitors into two groups: those with whom your story will resonate, and those with whom it clearly won’t.
This approach bets on something that’s been part of human evolution for a long time: stories have a special place in how we understand the world. A good story sets up a context where there’s a problem that triggers a quest, reveals some personal challenges, and ends with an opening toward a better future.
Consider using early prototype photography, sketches, eye-widening anecdotes and vivid details to show some vulnerability. People buy more than the product, people buy into ideas too.
2. Downplay the Features
As we’ve written here before, features can sometimes bring some anxiety to the buyer. You might think adding features to your product will add appeal by covering every angle, but those features might be making your buyer pause and find that having to consider all those unneeded features will make the product complicated for them.
“Will I need to learn all those features? I just want something to help me with …”
Remember that your buyers are hiring your product for a specific job they want to get done. The only reason they’ve bothered to come to your site is because they’re on the hunt for something to help them make some kind of progress on a problem they’ve got. Whatever they have currently is not doing a good enough job, and they’re ready to replace it.
To downplay the features, make your words and your images support the job they want to get done and how this product will help do that.
3. Use a Pain-First Writing Method
To help the buyer feel like they’ve found the right product, consider describing in vivid details the kind of pain they might be in.
To do that, it might help to design a very long page, using mostly text, where you describe the situation they’re currently in using very precise words. Then you’ve be moving on with words to describe what they might have tried to fix it, and then describing the frustration they might have felt after trying that specific approach.
Then, you’d describe the aspiration they might be longing for, broadening up the text to describe what they want to achieve in the bigger picture, like what they’re dreaming of getting to one day.
After all that, describe how your product helps fix all that. The people who got to the bottom of the page surely have resonated with what you’re talking about, so you have better chances of getting a good match with those buyers.
4. Go Way Overboard On Features
Although approach #2 suggests downplaying features in favor of making sure you communicate how your product helps with a job, there’s one good reason to go overboard with your product’s features:
Being playful about your features.
Imagine having a page that very confidently overplays the features of your product. Less about being boastful, and more about being cheeky. Less about being boring, more about being memorable.
In this scenario, you’re going overboard to leave a mark and create some noise.
5. Create Some Intrigue
Another kind of noise you can make is by creating a rumour. They say nothing travels faster than a rumour.
So instead of very explicitly showing off your product, consider the power of creating a sense of intrigue when people land on your product page.
Maybe it’s by requiring your visitors to perform some interaction with the page before revealing the product.
Or maybe it’s by showing the main version of the product, but by rewarding visitors who dig deeper into your product page to reveal some exclusive, short-run, hard-to-get versions of your product.
So that’s it. I hope these five ways will give you some inspiration in trying something new with your product page. Have fun experimenting!
Stay Sharp!
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Pascal Laliberté
@pascallaliberte