How many times have you been enticed into buying a quirky table lamp online that looked and sounded so good that you simply could not resist yourself from adding it to your shopping cart online?

How many times do you check the product specs when ordering a gadget online?

If you pause to think about it, you will realise that a considerable chunk of your online shopping game is played out through reading the specific and detailed product descriptions of the things that you wish to purchase online.

Leading market surveyors Salsify reported that more than 87% of the online shoppers place a high value on product descriptions as important factors for making a decision regarding a purchase.

The stats are actually tipped in favour of the importance of having well-written product descriptions for your products and services. Here are some quick stats about the importance of product descriptions in the minds of your oh-so-valued customers.

• The young guns or the millennial generation consumers are 40% more likely to be influenced by impressive product descriptions that they see online

• The most desired types of information that consumers seek about the products that they view online are product descriptions (76%), reviews (71%) and images (66%) – in that order.

• 50% of the online shoppers have returned the products they purchased stating the reason that the goods did not match the descriptions

The need for having unambiguous and clearly-worded product descriptions that include the technical details of your products and also factor in the keywords for SEO is thus the need of the day if you wish to rake in more business for your ecommerce enterprise.

Why do you need engaging product descriptions?

Getting creative with your product descriptions is an exercise that you should try out at frequent intervals. If you are wondering why you should be going into all that trouble for composing product descriptions by yourself when you can simply rehash the manufacturer’s catalogue descriptions, you should be revising that strategy right now.

While regurgitating product specifications may seem tempting especially if you are keen to start out your ecommerce business right away, it is usually inadvisable. The two reasons that you should not be lifting off the manufacturer’s catalogue content as your product descriptions are:

(i)  Search engines HATE duplicate content for it confuses them. They cannot decide which page(s) featuring same content should be ranked higher in the SERPs and thus do not provide positive rankings to any of the pages. This results in your rankings falling a few places and affecting your visibility the wrong way, making your online marketing strategies a total dud.

(ii) Manufacturer’s catalogues usually focus on the many specifications of the products and are heavy in technical jargon. When you display a product on your page as an online marketer, you should be focussing on the perks that those product specs bring for your customers, so they are enticed into purchasing your product.

You can cash in on the benefits of having splendid product descriptions by tying it to your overall marketing strategy for better conversion rates. Here is why you should be paying much more importance to your product descriptions for the growth of your business right from today to cash in on the immense potential they have to offer.

They allure your customers

Whether you sell apparel or pet accessories online, you should focus on the factor that you need more customers to visit your website to purchase your product. Attractive and high-resolution images work fine as a part of the product descriptions, but you need rocking content to complement those images as well. Studies show that a large number of consumers read the product descriptions very carefully before making a purchase, so why not pay attention to how you market your products and services to them? You should ideally be aiming for product descriptions that make the customers want to buy your products right there and right then.

They help in brand-building

If you are a small online retail chain slowly working your way up the ecommerce ladder, refurbishing your product descriptions may rake in more revenue for you, and here’s why.

Since product descriptions are a detailed account of what you sell and the exact contents of your products, you will be able to spread brand awareness through them as well.

While stashing in too much product specs is not the way to have ideal product descriptions, you should be aiming for the optimum mix of technical lingo merged with marketing catch phrases and keywords to turn the tables in your favour.

Harp on the many benefits that your products will bring to the lives of your consumers, and you will have created the cornerstone for your brand to stand the test of time.

They work wonders with SEO

Since you get to have the upper hand when it comes to composing product descriptions, you can play around with inviting terms, a refreshed vocabulary and of course, keywords.

While optimising your website for search engines relies heavily on the use of keywords relevant to your domain, you might think that your rankings will suffer in case you do not have a lot of content on your page right now.

This is especially true for the small and medium businesses who somehow fail to make it to the big league due to the lack of content on their web pages.

A way around this problem is to include the in-demand keywords in your product descriptions, so your SEO strategy works with clockwork precision and results in getting more traffic your way.

Smart online marketers truly understand the potential of product descriptions, and looking at some of the bigwigs’ websites in your industry will give you a fair idea of how true this is.

Product descriptions play a huge role in the decision-making process for the consumers, so you should be looking for ways to make it so appealing that your customers would not want to leave your website without purchasing the goodies that you have to offer.

Parting words

From inviting potential customers to your site to building goodwill and establishing rapport with them, having great product descriptions can take your business a long way towards all-around growth. Include specific and eye-catching product descriptions for your business and watch as the conversion rates soar to the skies.

External sources

10 Stats That Prove the Importance of Product Content for E-commerce. (August 9, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.onespace.com/

Author bio:

Nathan William is a senior programmer at a software agency in Melbourne and Cdr Engineers Australia expert at MyAssignmenthelp.com. He likes to share her IT expertise for computer engineering with students struggling in writing assignments. As an IT expert, she is experienced in creating customised CDRs for Engineers in Australia.

Maximizing the number of sales you make is a fundamental part of running a store. This applies to online businesses just as much as brick and mortar ones. If you have an eCommerce website, boosting a website’s eCommerce conversion rate is something that’s definitely in your best interest.

What conversion rate should I aim for?

Don’t burn up too much concern over “average” conversion rates or what rates are reported in your niche. You can always take aim at improving your conversion rate and making it better than it is now.

Frankly, there are so many variables in play that it’s not really fair to try and make an “apples to apples” comparison between any two eCommerce sites. The quality of inbound traffic – something that can vary hugely according to lots of different factors – plays a major role.

In the very roughest terms, conversion rates are typically around one to two percent.

Good images matter

If you forced me to choose the absolute most important factor contributing to online product sales, I’d probably go with image quality.

An eCommerce site that worked solely with images, including no product descriptions whatsoever, could probably work – albeit not as well as a combined site. The reverse isn’t true: an all-text online store simply wouldn’t make sales.

Every consumer has a fundamental, deep-rooted desire to see what she’s buying before she makes a spending decision. Quality photos of your products are absolute necessities for making sales. Don’t try to make a single photo do all your selling work, either! Offer multiple angles, in-context shots, and high-detail close-ups.

Use compelling words

Not to undercut the previous point, but you need to pay attention to your product descriptions too. Product copy plays a vital role in the sales decision; prospective customers need to have information before they commit to purchasing. Clarity is better than persuasive deception here. You don’t need hype if you have full information. Let the facts speak for themselves.

Do you want short or long product descriptions? Frankly, you need both. The long, complete description is there for the on-the-fence customer, giving her enough facts to talk herself into buying. Your shorter version should concentrate on the essentials: Who needs the product, what they can expect it to do, and what makes it notably good.

In your longer description, make it your goal to provide answers to every question a buyer might possibly ask. Remember that a customer who’s convinced will just skip past the rest of your copy and head to checkout; a customer who has questions or doubts left is going to leave your store.

If your products come to you from outside manufacturers, do not simply regurgitate the product descriptions the makers hand you. Personalize your descriptions and make sure your customers know why you, specifically, recommend the product in questions.

Making use of videos

Images are good, but in the future video is increasingly going to supplant them as the selling tool of choice.

Producing product videos can be expensive and it’s impossible to tell for sure whether they’re going to help make more sales. Start off small by creating videos for a few of your products and see if they make an impact on the bottom line.

Customization equals ownership

Customizing a product is a fun process, and it has a surprisingly powerful effect on sales. Specifying the details of a product makes it feel like your own even before you click that “buy” button.

I learned the true power of customization when I bought a new laptop from Dell in 2008. It took me the better part of an hour to customize my ideal laptop using their website’s powerful options. The computer I wound up buying cost significantly more than any of Dell’s ready-made configurations. I got a powerful computer and a powerful lesson.

If it’s within your power to offer customization of your products, strive to do so. Customization translates into more sales!

Free shipping boosts conversions

Free shipping is becoming the rule rather than the exception in online commerce. Some retailers put conditions on free shipping, requiring customers to jump through certain hoops to “earn” it. Others simply give it away for free to all their customers, like Nordstrom. Online customers have certainly noticed.

According to research conducted by E-tailing Group, fully 73 percent of online customers consider free shipping to be a “critical” decision-making factor for online purchases. 93 percent of those surveyed said that free shipping encouraged them to buy more.

To go into further detail, high shipping loomed large as the most frequently given reason for an unsatisfactory online shopping experience. Shipping costs (i.e. the lack of them) are the biggest advantage that brick and mortar retailers have over their online competitors.

On average, orders that qualify for free shipping have an overall value 30 percent higher than their cost-incurring equivalents. The site 2BigFeet enjoyed a clear connection between free shipping and conversions: Dropshipping charges for orders over $100 boosted their conversion rate by an astounding 50 percent.

“Free” versus “cheap”

Chris Anderson, author of the book “Free,” offers some insight into the dramatic difference this distinction makes. Amazon has a global reach, and the company has seen sales boom in every country where they extend the offer of free shipping. France is a particularly important example. The company was initially unable to offer completely free shipping to French customers, charging a token 20-cent charge instead. In this case, “cheap” utterly failed to create the same sales-boosting magic as “free.” Sales remained largely stagnant until Amazon finally offered the people of France truly free shipping – and then they came up.

If you must charge for shipping…

Your business model might make it impossible to completely waive shipping fees. If you have to charge for shipping, make sure you mention it up front. Flat-fee shipping is also preferable to more complex calculations; customers love simplicity.

The real killer to your conversion rate is the surprise shipping fee that inflates the price of your products right at the end of the transaction. Based on the survey mentioned above, nearly half (47 percent) of customers will abandon a purchase if they only learn about additional shipping charges at checkout.

Abandoned shopping cart

A lot of online customers get close to completing a purchase before getting cold feet. The result is an abandoned shopping cart. The number of carts abandoned in online stores is constantly rising.

According to Forrester data, nearly every online shopper (89 percent) has abandoned a cart at least once. This is really a measure of growing consumer sophistication; more and more customers are comparison-shopping and abandoning deals when they find better ones.

Following up

A simple follow-up email is a great way to reduce your abandonment rates. An effective anti-abandonment campaign can pay for itself many times over; SmileyCookie discovered that a decent campaign enabled them to recapture 29 percent of the carts their customers abandoned.

The great news is that many integrated eCommerce web development platforms (e.g. 3DCart, Volusion, and Magento) have built-in abandonment tools. Even if your preferred platform doesn’t offer this functionality, it’s likely that reliable add-on software can add it.

As 2016 approaches, and we prepare to bid adieu to 2015, we took the time to look back and reflect on everything we’ve learned and written about this past year.

2015 was filled with guides to AB Testing, UX Design, and Psychological triggers. We dug deeper into landing page optimization, ecommerce, mobile and b2b optimization, everything we learned throughout the years from working with our customers and running countless AB tests.

To summarize this year, lets take a look at the most read, shared and debated Conversioner posts we’ve had and take a look at the year to come. *drum roll please*

#1. 26 Pricing Page Examples and Best Practices

Pricing has been the top question on everybody’s mind this year. The pricing page is that one place where your visitor decides to take that next step and put their trust in you and decide whether to invest their time and money in your business. How do you design a pricing page that helps your customer achieve their goals and increases your sales?  This post observes the most important elements of a pricing page, from strategy to messaging, design and AB testing. Checkout the in-depth analysis of 26 different pricing pages and learn how to optimize yours or create a new one from scratch.If you are going through this process, this is the post for you. And if you already have a great pricing page, perhaps you can make it even better! See how it compares to this list and if there’s something you can optimize (trick question! there’s always something you can optimize!).

2. 10 Psychological Triggers to Boost Revenues

Well, by now, thanks to Dan Ariely and his peers,  we know that we’re completely irrational beings and that different triggers affect our decision making process. Check out these 10 psychological triggers you can start using on your site to increase your revenues.

3. Boost eCommerce Conversion Rate: 30 Best Practices and Tips

e-Commerce was all the rage in 2015, and we have a feeling it’ll just keep going through 2016 as well. In this post, you learn 30 great tips on how to increase your ecommerce conversion rate, including tips about color, where to optimize, call to actions, personalization, emotional targeting, and forms. So if you missed this post, enter the new year prepared and read up on the greatest tips and tricks to improve your ecommerce site.

4. A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding UX Design

Sometimes we get lost in all of these shortened acronyms, so here’s a reminder of what UX stands for – User Experience. When you’re working towards increasing conversions, you are focusing on the benefits of the user- and you are doing this with imagery, with the copy. But the overall design has to keep the user in mind as well – and that’s a whole field in and of itself. But we wrote a beginner’s guide with you to get you started. It includes sources and tools that can get you started on the road to creating a great user experience for your visitors.

5. Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Marketing Persona

One point that comes up consistently throughout conversion optimization is -before matching your design, imagery, copy, and color to your customers – you have to know your target audience. And in order to really know and understand your target audience, you should build marketing personas. So here’s the play-by-play on how to go about doing that.

6. Speaking with Emotion: How to Increase Conversions with Words

The words we use have a powerful effect on the people around us. Online words are one of the main ways we communicate with our visitors. Check out this in-depth guide of words that can help you trigger the right emotions in your target audience.

7. 10 Landing Page Examples to Increase Sales

If you love landing pages like we love landing pages, you are going to love this post. It has some great examples on how to take your landing pages to the next level and increase sales. See what the best and worst companies are doing and how to apply these lessons to your landing page.

View Source

8. 42 Mobile Landing Page Optimization Tips

I don’t know if you’ve heard but – Mobile is the new Desktop, and 2015 took mobile to the next level. Over 51% of internet browsing is now done on our mobile devices, and in 2015, statistics show that  2 billion smartphones have been purchased in the world! So it’s time to stop ignoring those small screens and start giving those mobile visitors more attention. In lieu of these findings, we wrote a detailed post filled with different tips on how to optimize your mobile landing page and increase conversions.

Banana-Splash

9. AB Test Checklist: Everything You Need to Check Before Launching

You can’t optimize without testing, but how do you know you’re testing what you wanted to test, and that you’re doing it the right way? With all the different tools and different changes you’ve made, how do you know it’s going to go well? Here’s an All-Inclusive Checklist to end all Checklists that you should go through before you hit that “Start Experiment” button.

10. How to Consistently Grow Your Conversion Rates with Emotional Targeting

Last but definitely not least – how to grow conversion rates with emotional targeting. We wouldn’t be ourselves if we didn’t discuss emotional targeting, how to use it as a strategy, and how that, in turn, will increase your conversions. Read it here and learn how to take all those different posts on UX design, emotion-driving words, color psychology, marketing personas and A/B testing, to implement them into your strategy to create incredibly effective landing pages, pricing pages, and more.

We hope you’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from the posts over the last year – these 10 and many others – and are seeing your conversion rates grow. 2015 was a fantastic year for conversion optimization growth and development, as well as for mobile!  We are excited for what 2016 has in store! Prepare yourself for exciting and detailed posts on analytics, personalization technology advancement tools for both desktop and mobile, heatmaps and of course, more posts on emotional targeting!

As psychology researchers continue to learn about the human mind, as technology continues to advance, and as the interactions of humans with technology continue to change, we will continue to learn and update you with different ways to improve your conversion rates.

A New Year’s Gift From Us to You:

In honor of the new year, Banana Splash (our favorite mobile personalization tool) is offering all of our loyal Conversioner readers a 14 day free trial and a 20% discount for your first 3 months of membership! Just put in the code: conv20

 

Earlier this year we discussed the importance of creating a mobile optimization strategy rather than just going responsive. Though responsive design is better than having your visitors pinch and zoom, assuming that consumers use desktop devices the same way they use mobile devices is fundamentally wrong. Consumers use their mobile devices for connectivity and quick content. In fact, 60% of local searches now originate from smartphones (Bizreport).

The bottom line: People use devices differently which means we HAVE to build different user journeys.

People need a better way to consume and experience mobile content, but many mobile experiences are still lagging far behind. Check out these 42 mobile landing page optimization tips to create better landing pages for your mobile visitors and continue reading this article to create better checkout flows for your mobile shoppers.

Mobile Checkout Metrics to Follow

To optimize your mobile checkout flow first identify your mobile visitor’s behavior.

• How much mobile traffic do you actually have? Start by identifying the amount of traffic you have on each device. How much percentage does mobile account for?

• What devices do they use?

• Which pages to they visit? Another important element is identifying the most viewed pages. This will help in both identifying the path mobile visitors take and most importantly saving you money. Instead of optimizing the entire funnel and spending a lot of money, you can optimize specific pages within the funnel that require your attention.

• Where is the biggest drop in the funnel? Many times you’ll find that mobile visitors actually dropout much earlier in the process than the checkout. Once you’ve identified those tricky pages you’ll be able to optimize those before you reach the checkout funnel.

• How many visitors complete a purchase on mobile? The most important number – what percentage of mobile visitors actually complete a purchase? This number will help us define goals and monitor our success.

 

12 Mobile Checkout Elements you Should Optimize

The most important elements of the mobile checkout optimization process aren’t just about the look and feel, but also the development and the emotional triggers. Below is a list of 14 mobile checkout optimization tips you can follow to optimize your mobile revenues:

1. Pinch & Zoom – More than 73% of consumers won’t return to a website if it doesn’t load properly on their mobile devices. Pinch and zoom is obviously off the table. Make sure your visitors do not see this type of checkout.

** Pro tip: Creating a mobile site from scratch can be expensive, and a responsive design probably won’t increase conversions. Use Banana-Splash to trigger personalized messages for mobile visitors and convert them in one touch.

2. Simplicity – Though 60% of local searches now originate from smartphones and tablets, this is not the case for checkouts (bizreport). People still fear mobile checkouts and do not feel safe using them which is why creating a simple, easy to use mobile checkout is crucial for higher conversion rates:

• Remove distractions
• Make your call to action buttons stand out
• Create a shorter checkout flow

3. Speed – Another crucial part of conversion optimization in general and definitely in mobile. Here are few numbers to give you an idea of the importance in reducing page load time and increasing site speed:

• In 2006 Amazon was already reporting a 1% loss in revenue per 100ms site load delay.
• 1 second delay in page load time leads to: 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, 7% loss in conversions (aberdeen)
• 60% of web users say they expect a site to load on their mobile phone in 3 seconds or less. (Compuware)

Paste your website link in here and get some valuable tips on how to speed up your desktop and mobile site.

4. Registration – Probably the most debated question on desktop and mobile, requiring registration before a purchase, has it’s advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, by capturing your customer’s information you’ll be able to retarget them, create a better shopping experience and increase revenues in the long run (if you’re good at retention). On the other hand, registration creates a longer funnel that slows your customers down on the way to payment. Though you really want to register people before they checkout it could cause a large drop in your conversion rates. So, give users the opportunity to checkout without creating an account. If you simply cannot go without, try registering people with their facebook or Google accounts (Etsy example below), allowing them to click on one button and swiftly continue with their purchase.

5. Form fields and registration- During your checkout and registration process make sure you add vital fields only. As opposed to desktop in which most websites have both vital and non-vital fields showing, on mobile have only the most imperative fields to reduce noise and clutter. Don’t forget to disable autocorrect on certain fields (like addresses) and make sure your keyboards are field sensitive, for example when visitors are required to fill in their number they should get a numeric keyboard. The less information people need to fill in on mobile the more likely they are to convert. You can also break the process into a few short steps allowing it feel cleaner and easier. Essentially, it’s this:

vs. this:

6. Trust – Unfortunately most shoppers do not feel safe shopping on mobile web yet which is why your checkout page should include some social proof. The most common social proof techniques use trust icons, testimonials or reviews. In the example below the company made use of trust icons to ensure shoppers they can safely checkout on this site.

Dribble

1800Flowers also uses the Norton Secured and Secure Checkout trust icons on the top of the checkout page:

 

7. Showing Progress – Similar to the web experience, people like to feel their progress and know their journey upfront. Most visitors do not have the patience to complete a long checkout process and need an indication within the funnel showing them how far they have to go. Zalando uses a progress bar to show the user there are 4 steps within the checkout funnel.

 

8. Remove distractions – Online shoppers have a low attention span and get distracted easily. To reduce distractions and keep our customers shopping you must reduce the amount of links, banners and any other data that isn’t relevant in the shopping experience. All links such as help, shipping information and sales should open in a new window, and all information should be easily displayed above the fold so shoppers do not need to scroll in order to complete an action.

9. Checkout Access – Make sure people can enter their shopping bag and the checkout area easily from any page to complete their purchase quickly. While visitors browse items and add them to their cart, a good way to help them complete their purchase is by triggering a pop up that directs them to immediate checkout or ask them if they want to continue shopping.

10. Auto detect data – 62% of US online adults expect a mobile-friendly website and 23% expect their mobile experience to change based on location, according to Forrester’s US Mobile Mind Shift Online Survey. Prepopulate data into your forms and reduce the amount of action visitors must take to convert. Information such as the visitor’s state and city can be populated by simply getting visitors to fill in the zipcode field first.

 

11. Payment options – Giving customers the option to checkout in a few different ways will increase your conversion rates and social proof. By displaying logos such as checkout with Paypal or Amazon you increase trust as you are partnering with these well known brands and also allow your customers to checkout in their preferred way.

12. Quick Contact – During the mobile purchase customer may have questions or uncertainties. Fortunately one of the best features you can make use of within mobile is “Click to call” – allowing customers to instantly call you and ask their questions. If you have someone who can answer the phones and help your customers out, don’t miss out on this feature. If you do not have a person who can stand by the phones, a simple chat plugin can go a long way. In fact, 44% of respondents said that having a live person answer their questions while they were in the middle of an online purchase was one of the most important features a website could offer. Apple also offers a chat solution for its shoppers:

Taking the next step

There are many quick and simple tips for mobile checkout optimization. The most important element of mobile optimization is to constantly measure and test your results. As mobile traffic and search continues to grow, it is imperative to have a conversion optimization strategy that will allow you to grow and expand your mobile revenues.

 

More on mobile optimization:

• The mobile conversion optimization guide.

• 42 mobile landing page optimization tips