Your website’s product display page (PDP) is where customers find all relevant information about your product to make a purchase decision. This simple definition often undermines the importance of PDPs.
Look at it this way. Without a tactile interaction with your product, customers need even more convincing to be able to trust a product to go through with the purchase. So, while you may have won half the battle by getting customers to visit your product display page (through SEO or otherwise), the other, equally critical half is where an actual purchase materializes.
Not all online sellers have mastered the art of putting together compelling PDPs. It’s possible that a lot of your competition falls into this bracket as well. This presents a unique opportunity to boost conversion rates and market share.
So, let’s talk a walk through some of the most important factors that define PDP efficacy:
Design to solve
Everything about your PDP design needs to be intuitive, unidirectional and aimed at answering customer questions. Keep your page visually clean and avoid clutter. It is often seen that, in the effort to give customers all the information all at once, websites tend to visually overwhelm them. Too much information, too much clutter, scattered points calling for action, jarring fonts and font sizes – these factors can all be detrimental to the over-user experience. Apart from ensuring a linear flow, you must ensure that all calls to action, certifications, etc. are easy to find and access.
Craft compelling copy
How you describe your products will determine how customers see value in your offering. These are some of the most significant pointers to follow when writing PDP copy:
- Be descriptive and accurate. Customers count on your word to assess and visualize the product. Leave no questions unanswered and be accurate with your factual information.
- Steer clear of jargon that doesn’t matter to the customer
- Keep things succinct. Limited customer attention span means you need to give readers all they want, as soon as possible.
- The customer’s point of view is all that matters, and that’s how you must write your copy. Establish use cases, elaborate on features that are most relevant to the customer, and create value.
- Consistency, as always, is key. The tone of voice used for your copy should be consistent with your business identity and target audience.
Unleash visuals to add value
83% of smartphone users said that product images play a vital role in purchase decisions (Field Agent). Similarly, videos, illustrations, charts, etc. also help go the extra mile to build a case for your product. Check out a few of these pointers on how best to leverage visuals:
- The more images, the better. That said, ensure you only include relevant visuals covering different aspects of your product.
- True colors and scale. While this may not always impact purchase decisions, it can definitely lead to returns. Make sure you represent true colors and depict scale for products where there is scope for confusion.
- Videos can be used for both, aesthetic embellishment, as well as the elaboration of the use case. Either way, value addition should be the primary driver.
- Use illustrations or diagrams to explain the usability of technical products
- Integrate augmented reality (AR) and other similar advancements if viable. They will help your brand stay relevant and keep up with evolving customer expectations.
Earn trust with social proof
While copy, visuals, and other such elements are the building blocks of effective PDPs, what you really want is credibility. And what better way to achieve this than social proof.
Product reviews, ratings, customer comments, customer photographs of products in use, social media mentions and other user generated content go a long way in building your brand’s authenticity. It makes potential customers feel at ease and assured that ‘real people’ have benefitted from using your product. That said, it’s important to keep these channels transparent and not block out negative reviews. Because hey, you don’t want your products to come off as being too good to be true.
Make it interactive
While businesses do their best to answer customer questions through PDPs, there will always be more. In this scenario, it pays rich dividends to empower customers with some means to interact with businesses or other users to have their questions answered. Here are a few effective ways to engage and interact with customers:
- FAQ pages can be used to preempt and answer in-depth questions about products – information that may be too detailed to include in product descriptions
- Chat (powered by bots or otherwise) can be deployed for more direct conversations with customers
- Comment sections are another great way to interact with customers. Apart from providing a forum for customers to get inputs from other customers, a business’s active participation in these sections also goes a long way in establishing credibility.
With all these points in mind, you still don’t want to proceed based on gut assumptions. Create a PDP that you think works best, systematically test it with A/B testing, and see what serves your customers. This will help you make incremental improvements to your PDPs and more importantly, engage customers and boost conversion.
Need help with your PDPs?
Getting the right approach to creating PDPs is not always easy if you don’t know where to start. If you’re experiencing low conversion rates or high cart abandonment, you may want to consider optimizing your product display pages for better results. Check out Codifyd’s digital commerce services and work with us to create PDPs that engage your customers like never before.