If your site has a star product (drives 40% of overall sales) it makes sense to focus on that specific product page. But if your sales are distributed across multiple product pages, with each playing an important role, it makes sense to work at the product page template level, which is what this article is about.

For this sitewide product page testing, we use a Why We Exist pitch.

This video will shed light on why Why We Exist is such a lethal conversion strategy:

The Job of Why We Exist Story

For a new visitor to a product page, their first thought isn’t, “This is a great product I’m going to buy it” it’s “Who are these guys? Should I seriously consider their offering?”

As a result, the first thing I need to do is sell this new visitor on me, the brand.

That’s what Why We Exist solves.

We use why we exist story to help our new visitors cross the unfamiliarity barrier (visually explained below):

What to Include in Your Why We Exist Story

Few of the things we are trying to convey in the Why We Exist story are:

1: Empathizing with the visitor. Letting them know we hear👂 and understand their struggle.

2: Demonstrating expertise. You’ve spent years improving your processes– manufacturing, research, shipping, warehousing, and studying the competition. By paying one low price the shopper gains all the benefits of all those learnings. This is a huge advantage and needs to be communicated in your story. Dig deeper into the subject of demonstrating expertise here: Copywriting Secret: Demonstrate Expertise.

3: Point of view alignment. Sir James Dyson, the founder of Dyson, said this: “I just think things should work properly.”

This is what the brand embodies. And this is why Dyson.com was able to expand from being just a vacuum cleaner brand to being a whole family of products all of which satisfied the “I just want things to work properly” ethos. To learn more about this tactic read this post: Point of View (POV).

Where to Place “Why We Exist” Pitch

The “Why We Exist” CTA needs to be conditionally shown across the length of your funnel (homepage, category page, product page, and checkout flow) and you will need to show this multiple times at the product page template level.

Conditionally means once any of the “Why We Exist” CTAs are clicked all other mentions become invisible.

The beauty of this model is that it maximizes the discovery rate (people who miss it at one location will be nudged again and again) while minimizing annoyance (since people who click will not see it again).

Live example here (the page also has an explainer video): https://www.frictionless-commerce.com/demo.

Testing Why We Exist Story

Set the A/B test so one group isn’t shown our Why We Exist pitch and the other group is.

Use the test to track two things:

A: The number of site visitors who discovered the Why We Exist pitch

B: Conversion impact of Why We Exist pitch

If the pitch discovery rate is under 10% continue adjusting placement, repetition, copy, and design till the click rate is over 10%. If the click rate is much lower than 10% then it’s hard to draw a conclusion about the test because too few people even interacted with Why We Exist for us to know if it was any good.

It’s like running a customer satisfaction survey and implementing changes based on the opinions of three respondents. Their feedback is certainly appreciated, but it can’t be considered representative.

“Why We Exist” Case Study

This case study will change your life. It even has a test concept walkthrough video: Conversion Copywriting: How One Section Lifted Overall Sales.

We did a similar experiment for another client, HandicappedPets.com. We conditionally placed multiple call-to-actions (CTAs) on the product page to draw attention to their Why We Exist story. You can read this case study here: How Revealing Your “Why We Exist Story” Can Boost Conversions Sitewide.

Why We Exist– Next Steps

Now that you’ve made the first draft of your Why We Exist pitch you need to do the following to maximize revenue:

1: Identify the core Selling Angles for your sales pitch.

2: Add Feedback Beacons to the pitch.

3: Apply our A/B testing strategy.

4: Subscribe to our weekly conversion ideas newsletter.

You could absolutely follow this process yourself but if you don’t have the time and if your Shopify site is doing over $4 million in annual sales or if your bestseller is doing over $1 million in online sales then may want to consider talking to us. The benefit of working with us is that we’ve done this process so many damn times we can do it in our sleep.

I’m happy to jump on a call.