E-Commerce

How Your Store Can Create a Competitive Advantage via Compelling Content Rob Snell , Somewhere in sleepy, rural Mississippi - Jan 18, 2011

No matter what you sell in your online store, you have multiple competitors selling the exact same products online -- and they're only one click away! Why should a prospective customer buy something from you and not from Amazon? Or from your distinguished competition? Let's assume that your prices are competitive, that you have the product in stock, and that can ship the box. How do you add value as a retailer with this much online competition?

One extremely effective way is to leverage your product knowledge to the Web. You know more about what you sell than 99.9% of visitors to your website. Add value to your online store by guiding prospective customers through the maze of decisions that folks sometimes have to make when buying something somewhat complicated.

Creating unique and compelling content is a lot of work

When I speak at search marketing and e-commerce conferences, I get a lot of resistance from fellow retailers when I encourage them to write unique content for their product pages. Why? Probably because writing content is a lot  of work.

I'm a retailer, too. I get it. Retailers are busy. Retailers don't have enough time in the day to take care of customers, shipping, suppliers and employees -- and do the routine day-to-day -- much less sit around and brainstorm unique product descriptions.

Back in 2004, my baby brother Steve and I changed the way we approached selling online when our growth stopped due to an influx of new competitors. Instead of simply offering products for sale, we took a proactive approach and recommended that customers buy specific products to solve problems in specific situations. Over the next six years this one major change increased our sales an additional $10 million dollars.

Sharing this information is not a competitive advantage! The primary reason I share real numbers is to show folks that this approach really, really works. Unfortunately, my competitors have started to pick up on it, too, which means I should be working on my stores instead of writing for you guys, but having good competitors drive you to do your best is a good thing! And I don't always tell folks every little thing we do.

Where do you start creating content? How much do you write?

These are my two guidelines:

1. Best selling products. Start with your best selling products and work your way down the list so your best products get the most attention.
2. Higher ticket items. Write a paragraph of unique text for each $10 in an item's price, so you create more content for higher ticket items.

To be honest, my approach in the real world isn't so neat and tidy.

Let me show you a real product we sell on a real online store. I'll cover (1) the lifetime value of a product page and (2) how to organize and prioritize your products so you can spend your time and money creating content where you'll get the biggest bang for your buck.

Retriev-R-Trainer dummy launcher set

The first online order we got was for a Retriev-R Trainer dummy launcher that retriever trainers use to train their duck dogs to do complicated retrieves. We still sell the exact same product over 13 years later.

What's the lifetime value of the Retriev-R Trainer product page?

When I studied Yahoo! Store manager's reports, they showed that this single Retriev-R Trainer product page had generated slightly over $100,000 in retail sales since April 1997, with around 55,000 pageviews.

I was floored. I actually remember building that Retriev-R Trainer product page on our Yahoo! Store. I uploaded a product photo I took in my parents' front yard on a card table, copied some text from the PageMaker file of our old paper catalog, and created the product page. And then I didn't touch that content for another 8 years -- which is almost criminal -- but I wanted to show a real example, warts and all.

Look, I'm really not that organized, and I've run half-a-dozen odd analytics packages over the past 13 years, so it's hard to pin down when changes were made on the site without a lot of digging. But between archive.org, an old IndexTools account, and merchant order emails I was able to pin down when the changes happened.

Date	Content Changes	Sales and Traffic Changes
April 1997	Created page with one product photo with a 33 word product description.	-
April 2005	Expanded the text in the product description to 166 words.	Sales more than tripled in April 2005.
July 2007	Added six additional product photographs	Sales doubled in July 2007 from a combination of a slight increase in traffic and a 33% increase in conversion rate
August 2009	Price increase from $66 to $75	Sales immediately fell 25%.

 

Over $100,000 in revenue from a single page with a snippet of text and a few products photos! This example of the Retriev-R Trainer makes me seriously reconsider how much time and effort I should put into product pages, considering the long life cycle of a lot of the products we sell.

Minor changes to the content on your product pages can radically affect your sales, and sometimes changes to individual products can get lost in the mix.

OK, now you believe that expanding the content on your product pages can drive real dollars, how do you do it?

Creating content one page at a time

Gun Dog Supply is still a small company. My brother Steve and I still write the majority of the content for the website. We have a small production department that creates new pages for the Yahoo! Store, and takes tons of additional product photos, but when it comes to really pimping out our VIP pages, the two of us still get down in the trenches.

1. Budget your resources.
2. Prioritize your products. Start with your best-sellers
3. Have a checklist of text needed for each level of product
4. Work your way down the list.
5. Use templates and automation to bake in SEO-friendly writing for lower level products
6. Track changes over time with your analytics to see results.

Budgeting resources for creating content

Creating content is a full-time job, but that doesn't mean you can't split it up between multiple people in your company.

If you have an hour a day, that's 5 hours a week times 50 weeks or 250 hours a year to create content. I tend to write product content in spurts, concentrating on a new product launch for a week or so before the product ships, or focusing on a specific part of an SEO project like getting Title tags written for all the normal products at one time, or seeing which products need customer reviews instead of working on one specific product at a time.

Yet another way is take an imaginary person-year of 2,000 hours (40 hours a week x 50 weeks) and divvy up your content resources as a percentage of gross profits. Your top-shelf products will get days' worth if not weeks' worth of content time allocated, but use that to write category-wide buyer's guides, or full-line product reviews for all the products in a given category.

What if you don't have the staff, but have some extra money? Take 1% of last year's online sales of a product, and budget that for online content creation for that specific product. Outsource some of your content creation. Textbroker.com is great source for relatively inexpensive writing, and the 5-star writers are as good as any I've worked with in the past 15 years.

Prioritizing products with profit in mind

When you have thousands of products in your online store, where should you start optimizing? There's only so much time in the day.

Steve and I have over 10,000 pages on all our Yahoo! Stores combined, so when we're looking at which products to optimize, someone always says "Hey, let's start with the A's." No, let's start with the products where a little extra content will actually do some good.

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) can help you here. For most retailers, 20% of their products produce 80% or even 90% of their online sales. Focus even further to allocate time and energy towards products generating the most net profit (not revenue or pageviews).

I rank my most popular, best-selling products but I re-rank them by gross profit margin. I take Revenue Per Visitor for each product page and then multiply that times gross margin on that product to get Gross Profit Per Visitor.

Once you have this prioritized list, you then need to decide what content you want to create for product pages.

Making a content checklist and checking it twice

All products were not created equal. What's the difference to your bottom line between a 10% increase in the sales of your best-selling SKU compared to tripling the sales of a normal product in the middle of your list? Focus on your winners. That's where the real upside is. Chase the hundred dollar bills, not nickels and dimes.

Better performers need more different kinds of content than middle of the road or bottom of the barrel. For most stores I work on, I have three levels of products: top-shelf products, normal products, and backfill datafeed items (slow-selling products that I call "bottom feeders") -- and they all have different content needs.

1. Top shelf products need the full treatment:

• Compelling sales content with a headline + subhead
• Unique product descriptions
• Page summaries (abstract)
• Hand-written SEO elements (Titles, Meta Descriptions, Link Text)
• Custom copywriting fields like Grabbers, Differentiators, Short-name, and Alt-name
• Custom product-based text fields: range, warranty, accessories, etc.
• Multiple product pictures
• Videos demonstrating the product
• Links to manufacturer content
• Customer reviews for that SKU
• "Steve Says" editorial copy
• Buyer's guide for that product category.
• Comprehensive line review for new product launches

2. Normal products need much less content.

• Unique category and sub category page text
• Unique product NAME (for Title tags),
• Unique product description (usually simply rewriting the manufacturer's copy works)
• Baked-in SEO elements using our Yahoo! Store templates.

3. Slow-selling products usually have a minimum level of content, even for the lowest products in a data feed.

• Unique text on the subcategory pages for SEO reasons
• Manufacturer's description (copy and pasted)

Usually this will have to do until the product moves the sales needle enough to get my attention. These products are pretty low in our site's hierarchy, with little to no PageRank, so they don't appear in the Google index, and are usually only sold as add-ons to browsers or folks using our internal search tool.

Content generates revenue by increasing traffic and conversions

This stuff works, folks! Writing compelling content about how a particular product will benefit your customers converts more browsers into buyers. Writing unique product descriptions relevant to the products you sell drives more search engine traffic to your online store. More traffic and a higher conversion rate translate into dollars in your pocket. It's really that simple.

Rob Snell is long-time Yahoo! Store owner and developer of Snell Brothers. Rob blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies. Rob is also co-owner of Gun Dog Supply, an online retailer that sells hunting dog supplies through a Yahoo! Store.