Use your “why we exist” story to get an unfair conversion advantage.

When a new user lands on an eCom site the marketer immediately focuses on pitching the product. But the thing is, you can’t sell the shopper the product without first selling them on you.

The Story So Far

A quick recap before we talk about the “why we exist” story.

Fact 1: Your product page is the most important page on your site. Here’s why:

Fact 2: People entering your product page have five (5) competitor brand tabs open on their browser— they are in a highly uncommitted state of mind. We need to give these visitors reasons to forget those open tabs.

We Googled “How to improve home air quality” and saw a bunch of promising product ads–

The shopper doesn’t know which air purifier is best for them so they right-click and open the most promising results in new tabs. Now they have four or five open tabs.

Fact 3: When the new user lands on your product page they are presented with a sales pitch. Here is one of the pages I landed on after searching “How to improve home air quality”:

In the screenshot above you’ll notice Rabbit Air, the brand, is doing a great job explaining the capabilities of this A3 ULTRA QUIET AIR PURIFIER model. But, as a new visitor to Rabbit Air, before hearing about what makes this model special, I need to know why I should trust Rabbit Air on the subject of air quality. Right?

Fact 4: Your sales pitch has two main elements:

1: Why we exist
2: Why this product must exist

Your product description likely already covers why this product must exist– this is where you’re educating the shopper on why your product is great (versus alternatives.)

What’s probably missing on the product page is your why we exist story.

The Job of Why We Exist Story

When a new visitor lands their first thought isn’t, “This is a great product I’m going to buy it” it is “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 your 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

Some of the things that we are trying to convey in the why we exist story are:

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

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

3: Philosophical alignment. Sir James Dyson, the founder of Dyson, said this: “I just want things to 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.

4: Knowledgeable friend. Buying something for the very first time can cause a huge amount of anxiety. We feel much more comfortable buying from someone who we consider a knowledgeable friend. Before pitching the product let the shopper know you can be a knowledgeable friend.

Where to Place the Why We Exist Story

On the product page.

Watch this video to see what the page visitor will see:

On a large site like Dyson.com, we can test on individual product pages but you might have a site where you don’t have one key product, you have many key products. In that case, your why we exist story needs to be marketed on more than just one product page. Check out this case study.

Testing “Why We Exist” Story

Set the A/B test such that one group doesn’t see “why we exist” links on the product pages and the other group does. In this test track two things:

A: How many people clicked any of the why we exist links on the product page.

B: Overall conversion rates.

If the % of clicks to why we exist is low continue adjusting placement, repetition, copy, and design till the click rate is around 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.

Further Reading

We hope you enjoyed this article that talked about how your why we exist story can radically improve your conversion rates.

We’ve spent the last 12 years in our marketing lab, experimenting with ways to optimize conversion rates and grow sales. We’re ready to spill the beans.

The following articles will save you 12 years:

— Before revealing the secret that’ll improve conversion rates by 20% let’s zoom out to see the forest for the🌲 and talk about product pages. Product pages have been hiding in plain sight the whole time. This article clearly articulates the importance of product pages: Product Page Optimization.

— For every 1,000 product pitches encountered the shopper buys one item (and we’re being generous). You want this to be your product. How do our brains choose? They rely on a ranking algorithm, not dissimilar to the one Google uses for search results. Our sales pitch construction kit is designed to get your pitch to the front of the line.

— The article above revealed how to construct the perfect sales pitch. Now, this killer pitch needs to be infused into your product page. We have just one chance to convert this visitor (only 15% of visitors ever return). Read this next: Applying Your Sales Pitch.

About Frictionless Commerce

We deliver an unfair advantage to technical product DTC brands by improving their advertising effectiveness by 20% in 90 days. Our secret? A buyer psychology copywriting framework. The process.

If you like doing the hard work yourself, our founder Rishi shares conversion ideas on LinkedIn every day. Connect with him here.

If you want to make your life easier and still increase conversions, jump on a call.