Ecommerce
Negativity Won’t Net You More Online Sales in Ecomm
OVERVIEW
Key Insights for Ecommerce
Unlike your typical product page, landing pages provide a seamless buying experience from first click to checkout. But what’s an optimized ecomm page look like? Simple, positive copy (plus the right visitors) will help you get more packages out the door.
Pessimism isn’t a sales secret in ecomm.
Last year was kind of a bummer, and that showed up in ecommerce copy with increases in overall negative sentiment. Our research suggests this type of language is probably hurting your conversion rates.
Paid search traffic may not be your best bet.
Although the bulk of traffic to both click-through and form-fill ecomm pages is coming from search engines, our analysis of channel performance shows that you’re more likely to get conversions from social and email visitors.
Short and simple? Nah—shorter and simpler.
We pointed out in our 2020 report that easier reading and fewer words seemed to lead to higher landing page conversion rates. That’s still true—only now, the trend is even more pronounced.
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Key Insight: Conversion Rate
Subscription boxes lead the way for conversions in ecomm.
Conversion Rate: 2020 vs. 2021
What’s this mean? This graph (called a “box plot”) shows how the conversion rates of landing pages are distributed. The dotted horizontal line is the median conversion rate, while the “box” shows where most pages sit. The vertical lines (or “whiskers”) represent the range of the remaining pages, excluding any extreme outliers.
Key Insight: Sentiment
You won’t sell customers on fear, disgust, sadness, or anger.
(So, like, don’t be a downer.)
Ecommerce landing pages tend to be more emotion-packed than those in other industries, showing (on average) higher levels of almost every sentiment. That didn’t change over the past year. Online sellers increased their use of all types of emotional language, especially the ones we’d consider negative: anger (+8.9%), fear (+6.5%), sadness (+8.1%), and the like.
We’ll point out that negative sentiments aren’t always bad, but they don’t pair well with ecomm. Just check out the graph below to see how this kinda language could be impacting your conversion rates.
On the other hand, our model shows ecommerce copy that stirs up feelings of joy and anticipation correlates with an increase in landing page performance. It’s like that Monty Python tune: Always look on the bright side—only, y’know, write it into your product descriptions.
Avoid using negative language on your landing page. Instead, keep things positive by evoking feelings of joy and anticipation—words like “adorable,” “magical,” and “unbeatable.”
Sentiments: 2020 vs. 2021
These types of emotional language saw the biggest change in use (increase or decrease) on ecommerce pages over the past year.
+8.9%
More Anger Words
+29.1%
More Disgust Words
+8.1%
More Sadness Words
Even when your product description requires some negative language—like, say, an emergency prep kit—visitors should still understand the value being delivered. Use negative language to properly frame the benefits and needs of the product to evoke a positive response.
CEO, Sharma Brands
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Crank up your sales numbers by optimizing for more conversions
Wanna get the most outta these insights? Here’s how we recommend you use ‘em in your marketing.
1. Pick the insights that are most relevant to you.
Do pages in your industry convert better when they’re short? Maybe your copy is giving off the wrong vibes? Take note of the findings that are relevant to your campaigns.
2. Apply the recommendations to your pages.
Create a variant of your landing page and make the changes recommended in this report. Use A/B testing to see how it performs.
3. Get new insights and keep on optimizing.
Use the results from your landing page variant to inform the creation of more variants. Keep improving your pages and watch as your conversion rates climb.
Key Insight: Traffic
You’re more likely to convert people coming from Facebook than Google.
Paid search drives roughly half of all traffic to form-fill and click-through landing pages in ecommerce (53.7% and 49.0%, respectively). Social platforms account for about one-fifth (19.8% and 19.1%). All other traffic channels (like email, display ads, organic search) bring in the remaining one-third of visitors.
On click-through pages, visitors arriving from paid search are about as likely to convert as those coming from other channels. But the median for social is just an eensy bit better, which means you might wanna experiment with shifting some of your search budget over to Facebook or Instagram.
The performance gap is much clearer on form pages. Email is clearly the top-converting traffic channel (with an admittedly smaller sample), followed by social ads. Our recommendation here? Ecomm marketers running lead gen campaigns should probably prioritize social visitors over search.
Experiment with driving more social traffic to your landing pages—especially if you’re asking visitors to complete a form.
Key Insight: Readability
Use straightforward, accessible language to nab more sales.
One of the insights in last year’s report was that difficult language doesn’t do so well in ecomm. Whether it’s because our lives have gotten busier or we’re just in a hurry to get back to TikTok, people are most likely to buy when your copy is short and to-the-point.
That observation holds up in 2021. (Phew.) The correlation between reading ease, word count, and landing page performance is actually even clearer this year, which means our advice is the same: Write easy-to-read copy that doesn’t run on forever. Think “buy our hand soaps” over “contemplate purchasing our metacarpal detergent.” (Actually, we’re keeping “metacarpal detergent.” That’s ours now.)
If you wanna optimize for readability, try to keep your copy under 300 words and at (or easier than) a middle school comprehension level.
Readability: 2020 vs. 2021
Here’s how reading ease and word count have changed on ecommerce landing pages since our last report.
+7.7%
Easier to Read
+9.2%
More Total Words
Key Insight: Conversion Type
If you’re capturing leads, you might wanna skip the ‘name’ field.
We looked at the number and types of form fields used on ecomm landing pages to see how they influenced conversion rates. Some of what we found wasn’t totally surprising. For example, forms with less fields (like one or two) tend to convert a lot better than those with more (three plus).
But here’s something interesting: When you ask for a visitor’s name on your form—whether it’s their first or last name—our research shows they can be less likely to hit “submit.”
If you really need someone’s name (like to ship their order), go ahead and add it to your form. But if you’re collecting leads for a newsletter or some other marketing campaign, we’d suggest just asking for an email and getting the rest of their contact details later.
Avoid asking for visitors’ names in forms (unless you’ve gotta have it) and aim to have less than three fields.
Ecommerce
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At least, that’s what the average lift data shows. Smart Traffic looks at each visitor’s attributes and sends ‘em to the page where they’re most likely to convert.
See how Smart Traffic “automagically” gets you more conversions.