Every superhero has his or her weakness and in the case of Superman, his weakness is caused by kryptonite. Kryptonite is that one small negative element that overpowers all the other positive elements and leaves the whole system powerless. And usually, Lex Luthor is involved and the fate of the world is in the balance. Big breath. We are only talking about your product page and there are no super villains!
Let’s look at your product page as a superhero. Our superhero has a problem: its superpowers are weakened and you don’t know why. You have a great product but it’s not selling like you thought it would. You also have an effective in-bound marketing campaign that is generating solid traffic to your product page but your conversion is around .5% of your site visitors. You are tracking leads from your multi-channel campaign but there is a drop-off, the trail grows cold, your superpowers ebb and Lex Luthor has the upper hand.. Why?
First you have to test and analyze your site traffic to understand who your audience is, why they are on your site and what they are doing on your site. This may all sound basic but by examining these three qualities, we can understand what your product page’s kryptonite is. By building a foundation around the basics, you will always have rational solutions to your problems.
When using tools like Google Analytics, CrazyEgg or HotJar you can:
- Easily see where people have clicked or not clicked on your page.
- Distinguish all of the clicks you get on your site segmented by referral sources and search terms.
- Show how far people have scrolled down the page and where they drop off.
- Recruit user testers for one on one testing and interviews,
- Set up feedback polls.
- Create stepped conversion funnels.
- Set up real-time recordings of your visitors on your product page as they tap, slide and navigate around.
Examining all of this data will give us clues to where the weaknesses are on our page.
Understanding your audience behavior is the first step and guiding their behavior is the next step. A well engineered product page should highlight the value proposition and lead the user to immediate action. Every product has it’s own unique value proposition formula (we’ll cover this in another article) and this formula should be reinforced by our product’s key selling points. The product’s key selling points are brought to life by images, text and video. Again, we have a basic point here but the key to the effectiveness of these elements is creating the right mix of all three. Too much of one or the other will kill a conversion quickly.
As Tom Petty says about the key to writing a hit song, “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.”
A simple, logical and entertaining path to immediate action is our goal. The kryptonite on you product page could be the 3 minute product demo video that was poorly produced or it could be an overly lengthy product description that goes into too much detail. By understanding your audiences behavior and by effectively guiding their behavior your will be able to get rid of the kryptonite on your product page and save the world!
peter hill ~ pixelicious 