While many companies have put a lot of thought into creating an effective value proposition, one of the most commonly overlooked places for communicating your value proposition is your product detail page.

The good news is that by rethinking the information on these crucial pages, you can communicate more effectively with your customers at the moment of buying decision.

• Include benefit-rich language

It’s easy to fall into the habit of simply listing features on your product details page, because after all, the point of the page is to explain the product. But don’t forget to include benefit-rich language prominently. Think of features as the “what” of the product and benefits as the “why.”

• Rethink your headline

Rather than listing the name of the product all by itself in the headline, try including benefit-driven language here is well. Give the reader a reason to find out more about that particular product.

• Give value-driven copy high priority

Often, online retailers place the buy button high on the page, right underneath the product features. This pushes your value copy (such as product benefits, testimonials, and guarantees) further down the page, sometimes out of sight. Instead, try placing the call to action to the right or further down the page, and showing your viewers the value-driven copy before they have to decide whether or not to click your call to action.

• Include your value proposition on every page

For instance, if your unique value is that you provide free shipping on every order, include this information on every product details page, and place it prominently enough to be seen before the customer clicks away.

• Don’t hide value statements behind tabs

It’s common to see a box with tabs at the bottom of the product detail page, with each tab discussing a topic such as benefits, features, testimonials, and reviews. As much as possible, bring these topics out in the open. Make sure visitors can see your value proposition without taking an additional click.

Value, is one of the most important considerations for buyers. By making a few small changes to the arrangement and presentation of the information on your product detail pages, you can communicate your value proposition to your customers from the moment they land on your site to the moment they click they buy button.

This week’s edition covers tips on calls-to-action and webpage title optimization along with detailing the 4 stages of the buying cycle and some insights into neuroscience and neuromarketing for a better understanding of how the brain works and utilizing that to your website’s advantage:

- HubSpot reviews some best practices for writing a compelling call-to-action across different places on your website and various stages of your sales cycle in 10 Best Practices to Optimize the Language of Your Calls-to-Action

- Thumbtack recently decided to test an often overlooked part of a webpage and see if it would impact search traffic: the title tag. SEO Tip: Titles Matter, Probably More Than You Think is an overview of their test results along with a few tips they learned from their analysis

-  When Conversion Isn’t the Visitor’s Goal: Optimizing the 4 Stages of the Buying Cycle from Monetate examines the four stages a typical site visitor goes through before buying to help ensure a better path toward optimizing your conversion rate

- There’s a huge disconnect between how the human brain takes in and processes data, and how most websites are organized. Which Brain Is Your Website Selling To? from ClickZ shares key insights from neuroscience research to help you make huge improvements in how you communicate – and sell – through your website

- For a bit more neuroscience, Neuromarketing Research: 3 Keys that Trigger a Buying Decision from Writing On The Web outlines the three factors that determine whether or not a consumer is inclined to make a buying decision

That does it for this week and I’ll leave you with a quick reminder to request one free conversion idea for your website as well as to signup for our blog updates and conversion tips newsletter. If you have any tips, suggestions, or resources you’d like to share please leave us a comment below and please feel free to suggest topics that you would like to see covered in future Conversionator posts.

This week’s edition includes a helpful copywriting guide, mobile marketing suggestions, home page design best practices, and a couple of Google goodies:

- According Google they will make 500 search engine improvements in 2011. HubSpot shares Google’s recommendations to website owners and more specific guidance for ranking well in Google’s Guide to High Quality Websites

- Copyblogger put together a guide of the absolute essentials of copywriting plus a good bit of further reading for each in Copywriting Essentials from A to Z to help master the basics of copywriting and content marketing, which is also a helpful revisit of the fundamentals

- More than two thirds of the world’s population has a mobile subscription. 10 Ways to Find Customers with Mobile Marketing from Entrepreneur suggests 10 mobile-marketing channels to help your efforts in placing marketing messages where the most eyeballs are focused

- First impressions can either get users to browse through and read your site, or leave with disappointment. Bad Design Practices to Avoid on Your Home Page from UX Movement offers a few bad practices to avoid and best practices to follow so that your website doesn’t end up disappointing your users

- Images can help you show up on the first page of Google search results lists and in the process, you can increase click-throughs, ad views, and AdSense impressions. Five Ways to Search-Optimize Your Images from MarketingProfs shares a few simple SEO tactics that can actually make a picture worth a thousand words

That wraps it up for this week and I’ll leave you with a quick reminder to request one free conversion idea for your website as well as to signup for our blog updates and conversion tips newsletter. If you have any tips, suggestions, or resources you’d like to share please leave us a comment below and please feel free to suggest topics that you would like to see covered in future Conversionator posts.

While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a website without any words is likely to be ineffective. Even with an appealing graphic design and strategic layout, you’re unlikely to have a high conversion rate without text. In fact, text is actually the most important feature of your website; after all, it’s the text that is the key to attracting browsers in the first place.

Unfortunately, website text is often overlooked when it comes to site building. As a last-minute thought, text that is redundant, dull, unclear, or misleading actually works against your efforts to attract customers and close sales. How can you avoid the pitfalls of poor web copy and feature good copywriting for conversion?

Start with Your Keywords

Proper keyword usage among the text is what first attracts viewers to your site. By understanding how to best intertwine content with keywords, excellent copywriting actually snags the attention of search engines. Overuse, underuse, or awkward use of keywords work against your site and bump it down the search results lists. Copywriting for conversion first expertly accomplishes Search Engine optimization, or SEO

Be Clear and Concise

Right from the homepage, your web copy should work towards the end goal. Clear presentation of what you want your reader to do, and how they can do it, is imperative. Persuasive and informative, good copywriting for conversion should not merely fill space. Remember that fluff and redundancy repel clients.

At the same time, wordiness or too much inaccessible jargon can also alienate readers. Your website’s visitors should be able to catch on at a glance, and also be able to satisfy their continuing curiosity.

Engage Your Audience

Good copywrighting for conversion success will be just right for the audience at hand. If you host a formal business site, then your call to action should be very proper. If you’re looking to attract partiers, a spunkier approach would be wiser. Effective communication is key here – and keeping your viewer in mind is critical.

Hire a Profesional

While you may have a great understanding of your business and your site, it sometimes pays to go outside your company to get copywriting help. We recommend using a professional copywriter to write the key pages on your website. Well written copy will increase your conversion rate, which will more than cover the expense of hiring a professional to do the job.

Make sure that you don’t lose sight of the goal – get your visitors to click that button. And while pictures, flash, and custom graphics are appealing, don’t lose sight of the role that your copy plays in driving your visitors forward to conversion.

Please give us a call or send us an email if you’d like to learn more about how we can work with you to polish up the copy on your website.

Website redesign for usability is really an abstract concept. It means to take an existing website and make modifications to is so that it is easier to use.

In some cases it means removing things so as to help streamline it. In other cases, it might mean adding items to help explain different items as well as to improve the flow of the site.

The first step in website redesign for usability is to determine what the issues with the site are. This could be in any of the following categories:

●     The navigation of the site very complicated, with the links seemingly ambiguous.

●     The text does not go into enough depth.

●     The explanations are too technical, or include too much extraneous information.

●     The graphics add clutter to the site, confusing visitors.

●     The site gives an imposing feel, either because of the lack of design or the colors used.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but what should become apparent is the underlying principle of examining the sites content from the eyes of the consumer.

The next step is to determine the appropriate remedy for the problem. Here, you need to employ some creativity to mete out a solution. At the same time, you should not go overboard, since this might confuse your visitors, not help clarify things. The solution: come up with an eye catching remedy that strives for simplicity, promotes the product, and maintains clarity.

The final step is to test. Ask the different members of your company to see if they like the idea, or if it enhances the site. If they like a feature, then go ahead and implement it. If there seems to be recurring concerns about an issue, then you need to revise and help address that problem.

Redesign might be a time consuming project, but in the end, the results will prove to be both worth the work and the wait.

Additional Resources:

4 Tips for a Successful Website Redesign

Website Redesign: Making it Usable

Redesign your Website One Button at a Time