Your PDP is your homepage

Since starting this newsletter, I’ve met some amazing people in the industry. One of those is Rishi Rawat, the Shopify product page guy , who spends 100% of his time optimizing content on product pages to boost conversion rates.?

I asked Rishi to contribute to this week’s newsletter and he delivered a brilliant thought piece highlighting the importance of the PDP in the customer journey (hint: your homepage doesn't matter anymore). Read his perspective in the Strategy Corner below, then read it again, then check out the product page of your best-selling item to see how your content stacks up.?

Or watch the two of us chat through his thinking in 6 minutes:

Quick reminder that Black Friday is only 67 days away. A new Bankrate survey found that half of winter holiday shoppers plan on starting their holiday shopping by October 31. Nearly 3 in 5 plan to buy fewer items, and 52 percent are pursuing more coupons, discounts, and sales.Are you prepared to meet their demand in the coming weeks???

?What’s going on in retail?

US retail sales rose 0.3% month-over-month in August after declining 0.4% a month earlier, per the US Commerce Department. Excluding gasoline, sales rose 0.8%.

Below is a snapshot of these changes in sales (adjusted for seasonality but not for inflation) for a few key categories that I pulled together from the most recent report:

Some callouts:?

While spending on gasoline has been decreasing monthly (-4.2% this month), spend levels are still significantly elevated compared to last year (+29%). This is a major expense for most US households and a main reason for the decline in discretionary spending:

Department stores (+0.9%) and apparel (+0.4%) are the only two month-over-month risers, bucking the trend of declines seen in all other retail categories and eCommerce overall. Likely an indicator that shoppers returned to their in-store habits for BTS shopping.?

Furniture & homegoods (-1.3%) have been maintaining their decline that started at the beginning of the year. The WSJ recently wrote about how the cooling housing market has negatively affected the category.??

For a sign of optimism and the importance of pricing & value this year, we can turn to Google search data where we observed searches for ‘discounts’ increased 10% this Labor Day compared to last year.?

Strategy Corner (composed by Rishi Rawat)

The idea behind the Pareto Effect is that 20% of things drive 80% of the value. So it makes sense to focus on the tip of the spear– the few things that generate the biggest conversion impacts.

What’s the tip of the spear in marketing? Let’s find out by following a shopper:

Say I want whiter teeth. I’d Google “teeth whitening kit” and see a bunch of Google Ads like this:

I will then eyeball, right click and open the most promising ads, which will open as browser tabs.

I’d start to investigate my favorite ad. Clicking it takes me directly to the product page (PDP). Nearly all Google Ads do– that’s the default configuration.

We assume these new visitors arrive at the product page, then navigate to the homepage to learn more about us. This isn’t what actually happens. They arrive at the product page and quickly– far too quickly for my comfort– decide if we’re the right fit. If we aren’t, they X out in under 5 seconds.

This behavior makes clear how important a role product pages play.

The PDP isn’t just a place to describe our product. As far as landing traffic is concerned, it’s our whole site.

This means we need to rethink product pages. It isn’t enough to use them to describe product features and benefits. They are responsible for heavy lifting of the whole sale.

The PDP’s First Job …?

… is to prevent shoppers from leaving before we’ve had a chance to build a case for our solution. To achieve this goal our PDP must nail the opening.

Your opening has two jobs:

Job 1: Getting visitors to forget about those other open tabs. As long as they remain in view our sale is at risk.

Job 2: Introduce us, the brand. We have to sell the new visitor on us before pitching them our products.

In the example above I Googled? “teeth whitening kit” and landed on this mobile PDP (I also had a few competitor tabs open, just in case):

This page immediately jumps into explaining what this product does.

Don’t just jump into describing your product. Your visitor isn’t invested in you … yet.

They’re barely on the site. One foot is out the door.

Before we start selling we need to get them to not bounce.

I’ve added an opening that does well in A/B tests:

You’ll notice that instead of starting with what this product does we start by stating teeth whitening kits aren’t all the same. This statement has been added to sow doubt. Now the shopper needs to dig deeper to understand why those other open tabs aren’t as good as this brand. She must continue reading.

The second sentence further distances the visitor from thinking about the open tabs by making it clear that this brand has reviewed and tested the alternatives. We don’t come out and say we’re better, but it’s implied. (Learn more about implied marketing: Implied Marketing vs. Stated Marketing)

We then get into talking about us as a brand and our ambitious goals. Things the shopper can get behind.

By the time the reader is done absorbing this content she’s fully engaged. Now’s the time to get into our product details.

To drive to the next steps towards conversion, there are 9 specific things that need to be whispered into the ears of Healthy Skeptics to get them to pull out their credit cards ??.

If you are interested to learn about Rishi’s nine truths, let me know and I’ll send it over.

That’s all for this week.?