Page skimmers are those visitors to your page who scroll down and then bounce off, and are often viewed as a source of frustration for many merchants everywhere. They often don’t result in conversions, which is the main goal of attracting users to your site. While it’s always a good idea to try and increase traffic as much as possible, it’s just as good of an idea to know what to do with that traffic, as well as recognising that not all traffic is created equally. One of the things we here at RepricerExpress will be looking at today is how to make excellent use of page skimmers—whether in terms of your Amazon listings or tweaking your own webstore pages—so read on to learn more.
Speed Up the Process
There are oodles of reasons for why Google is so massively successful, and one of them — albeit a small one — is showing users how long their search took. Depending on what you’re searching for, Google doesn’t actually operate drastically faster or slower than other search engines, but it appears to because it tells you exactly how long to respond to your search. People, in just about every area of life, don’t like waiting for anything (think lines in the supermarket, wondering when the bus is coming, etc.), but they’re a lot more patient about the process if they have a good idea of where the goal line is.
One of the ways you can apply this to yourself is simple: have your landing page load as quickly as possible. Of course, with your Amazon listings, that will be largely taken care of by Amazon, but if you use Amazon Product Ads as well, to drive sales to your own webstore, ensuring your page loads straight away when a user clicks on your ad, is absolutely crucial. If that means you have to streamline the content or wipe out fancy graphics to do so, then do it. Again going back to Google, their landing page is as simple and minimalistic as you can get, and it loads very quickly. You’ve got mere seconds to make an awesome first impression on your users, and forcing them to wait seconds and seconds while you load something seemingly impressive will only serve to turn them off and send them elsewhere.
Pro tip: Do away with music that plays as soon as users hit your landing page. It’s annoying, and doesn’t add anything of value at all.
Use Colours to Your Advantage
It’s no secret that colours inspire specific moods in people, so the only question is, are you using the right ones to match your message? For example, if you’re selling gym or exercise products, using calming colours like blues and greens will soothe your visitors and put them in the absolutely wrong mood for working out. Something like reds or oranges, colours that incite more fiery and energetic feelings, would be more appropriate.
Conversely, gender differences dictate that you should be using different colours for the same product. Staying with the gym equipment example, women will be more drawn to blues, greens and purples (still remembering to not make those first two your dominant ones for the reasons listed above), while using blues, greens and blacks will work better for men. We saw this with Coca-Cola when they were trying to come up with a way to market diet pop to men. They knew that men would almost never go for something marked as “diet”, so they essentially took the same pop, called it “Coke Zero”, and made the can black. It was very smart on their part, and resulted in decent sales for them.
Keep Your Demands and Requests Simple
Too many merchants make the mistake of beating around the bush, hoping that a subtle approach will result in the goal they’re chasing after: a sale. And so, they put up various doodads on their site that lead the user round and round in circles, blatantly ignoring the first rule of marketing that says, if you want something, just ask for it.
Instead of confusing your users by pointing out this feature or that benefit or asking them to sign up for whatever thing you have going, erase all that and just let them know exactly what you need from them. If it’s a sale, tell them that by asking, “Do you want to want to save money now?” instead of asking them to sign up. Amazon does a brilliant job of this by way of their Buy Boxes, which gives people an extremely easy and direct way of completing the purchase. If you don’t have something along the lines of a straightforward way of converting them, then it’s a project you need to get started on right away.
Carry this advice into your Amazon listings also and ensure your title and descriptions get ‘right to point’ with clear and useful wording that says exactly what the product is.
Don’t Be Shy
Let’s compare two countries for a second, Canada and the United States. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of their general personalities? Canadians are usually thought of as polite, laid-back people, while Americans are more known for being brash and confident.
And then let’s look at their performances on the world athletics stage. In every Olympics, whether it’s the summer or winter Games, Americans consistently scoop up more medals than their northern neighbours. Even taking into account their population differences, Americans still earn more medals per capita than Canadians. Why is this? Simple: they’re not shying about telling the world about how awesome they are at every sporting event. When Canadians decided to adopt the American approach for the Vancouver Olympics in a project called “Own the Podium”, their medal count shot way up.
Take the American approach into your own webstore and Amazon listings by putting promises and guarantees right there where users can see it: headlines, page elements, testimonials, and calls-to-actions. Turning your page skimmers into buyers requires you to be explicit about how you’re more capable than the competition, and shamelessly flaunting what you’ve got is a fast way of doing it — especially when you’ve got precious little time of making that first impression.
