In our last post, we covered the first 3 essential virtues of a strong product page. In this edition we want to give you the final 3 fundamentals of a successful product page. Implement these to your shopping cart, note the date on your calendar, and track the changes in traffic flow and conversions.

CTA’S

Crafting authenticity is one thing, but to really drive your customers through the sales funnel, every product page needs a call to action. Calls To Action, or CTA’s are simple commanding statements that indicate to your customers the actions that they should take next to proceed down your sales funnel. A CTA can be something obvious like a call to purchase, or it can be something more subtle like asking for contact information, or a subscription. The point of a CTA is to get your customers to engage with your site and provide you with something of value to your business. 

Strong product pages don't just tell viewers about the product, they compel them to take action with their rich content and insightful reviews. Throughout your store's product page, you want to provide your customers with options. This is where newsletters, email subscriptions and freemiums really come in handy, as they will capture the attention of your undecided buyers. Wary visitors will only purchase the moment they are sure you will deliver them quality products and services.

So grab the attention of the undecided with a strong and concise CTA to conquer this fundamental product page virtue. 
 

Humanization

Sure, your site is authentic, high-quality, and structurally sound; you’ve even got some effective calls to action. However, if everything is too mechanical--if there’s no human element to your product pages--people will be turned off by the perfunctory language and imagery. You need to bring some humanity into your product pages with actual written statements from real customers and pictures of real people.

If you can show an actual person interacting with your products, it is a powerful psychological motivator. People are social creatures, and naturally vain. We enjoy seeing happy and attractive human beings doing things they enjoy. It’s something that we can all relate to, and it triggers an emotional response that we want to replicate over and over. Therefore, if we see a happy person working with a product on a website, there is a small natural inclination to wish the same enjoyment for ourselves. It’s not an overwhelming, brain-washing sort of impulse, but it is a potent effect that no online retailer can afford to ignore completely.

Beyond human imagery, you can also humanize a product page by including customer reviews. As we said, humans are social and learn by first by imitation and then improvisation. So if we see an example of someone’s thought process, textually represented, on the merit and value of a product it automatically produces the impulse experiment with the products ourselves to see if we can achieve the same effect.

Social media bookmarking is another aspect of humanization, as the very idea behind social media marketing, is to build communities, connect real people with other real people and to create new ways for business and customers to express themselves throughout the sales process.
 

Accessibility

The 6^th fundamental virtue that every product page needs to have taken into account is a direct line of communication to you, the seller. People need to be able to feel comfortable about any purchase that they’re going to make, and sometimes they have questions that need answers before they can feel too comfortable. So it’s your job to provide them with a timely outlet to do just that. You have a few options on a product page to do just that.

If at all possible, you should hire a support staff to be readily available, willing, and able to answer customer questions whenever they arise. Either by phone or live chat. This is a rather expensive option to set up, but in the long term it is a very viable investment.

Assuming that you can’t provide immediate contact and assistance for your customers, though, it might be worth considering to put in place some auto-response emails that will inform your customer’s that you have their question or comment on file, and that you’ll address it personally as soon as you’re able. It’s important to bring in that human element when directly addressing a customer.

So be casual yet respectful in your tone with these messages. Nobody wants to have a conversation with a robot. Seriously have you ever tried speaking with Cleverbot? So rude.

That’s all for our series on the fundamental virtues of product pages. I hope you’ve found these posts educational, and are able to put the things you’ve learned here to good use. Keep checking back for more helpful ecommerce information from your friends here at the Ashop blog.