Use your Why We Exist story to get an unfair conversion advantage.

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

What Happens When Shopper Lands on Your Product Page

The moment the user lands they are presented with your sales pitch. I Googled “How to improve home air quality” and landed on this mobile product page (PDP):

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?

Your sales pitch has two main elements:

1: Why we exist– your origin story (explained in more detail below).
2: Why this product must exist– this is where you’re educating the shopper on why your product is great (versus alternatives.)

Your product description likely already covers why this product must exist.

What’s probably missing 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 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: 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.

Placing Why We Exist Pitch on the Product Page

Don’t place the Why We Exist pitch on the product page (PDP) directly. If the pitch is placed directly on the page running an A/B test will only reveal the impact, it will not show how many converted specifically because they consumed that content. But the marketer needs to know if they nailed their Why We Exist pitch.

So my recommendation is to conditionally place multiple Why We Exist CTAs across the PDP– a link on the top, a button and link in the middle of the page, and another on the bottom of the page.

This way if the shopper misses one they can still catch the others. And since the CTAs are conditional clicking one will hide the others. This maximizes visibility while minimizing repetition. You can see an example here: 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 does.

Use test to track two things:

A: How many people clicked any of the Why We Exist PDP CTAs?

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 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.