One of the most important, valuable and powerful pieces of content on your eCommerce website isn’t your contact page - although that’s still a massive website must-have. It’s actually something that often goes overlooked - the FAQ page which is not usually featured on websites by many businesses although they really should.
Did you know that 41% Millennials turn to a site’s FAQs before contacting support?
Yes, almost half of your millennial customers prefer helping themselves before reaching out to your support staff for help. Just imagine how many support tickets, calls, and chat sessions you could save if you only found a way to help these customers right in your FAQs.
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions and an FAQ page is often included on websites to allow questions to be asked and answered in a public forum. Adding this page to your e-commerce website has many advantages and no real drawbacks, other than the time it takes to create. The information you’re providing on this page needs to be current and reflect the issues customers are having with relevant and supportive responses which address your customers’ queries.
So, why is your FAQ page important to your ecommerce website?
1. Save time of support
In business time equals money, and a well-constructed FAQ page will save you some of the many emails and phones calls fielding the same questions about your opening hours or return policy. The FAQ page can do the talking for you and provide the answer to pricing and payment and other operational details, so that you will not need to spent too much time supporting.
2. Build relationship with your customer
The way you answer the questions that your customers wonder has a huge impact on establishment of trust. Visitors who see your efforts to make your FAQs clear and understandable will consider your business trustworthy. This improves the perception customers have about your brand and also instils confidence, which leads to loyal customers who will return time and time again due to their positive shopping experiences.
3. Identify you as an expert
FAQ is considered as an effective way to demonstrate your expertise. By answering FAQ that solve your customer problems, you are marketing your skills for your business, service or product too. This will help increase your conversion by converting strange visitors to customers, and they are more likely to buy from the business which they consider professional and legitimate.
4. Improve site navigation
One of the most powerful way to improve your site navigation is FAQ page as each question can be hyper-linked to the relevant product, service or page on your website to redirect your customers to relevant content or solutions, which drive them through the conversion funnel.
5. Increasing your SEO Optimization
We’re all familiar with the basic steps we should take when doing keyword research for a website. However, there are some instances where it’s a little tricky to optimize a page. The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages fall into this category. The approach for these pages involves taking a closer look at your customer’s experience with your business or brand.
FAQs page will include good pieces of content, relevant keywords which search engines use to establish the ranking place that your page will attain.
6. Increasing your conversion
Your FAQ page represents one of the most valuable moments in a conversion funnel.
When your customers are confused of a lot of information about your product or service, they would probably leave your page, but if you offer them the answer to FAQs and make it visible to them when they visit your site, they will see your page valuable and understandable.
So you have defined the importance of a FAQs page. To make FAQs page performs all of its important and necessity, any sites out there put effort into making their FAQ page design as welcoming, clearcut, and as organized as possible, which avoid overwhelming the reader. In the next sections, we take a look at what make your FAQs page become high converting.
#Questions
When seeing a question, people forget about feeling anxious and focus more on the question. Thus, asking a question may eliminate that anxiety and people may be more willing to take an action and commit (opt in).
To write an effective FAQs page, firstly think of the questions that your customers would most often ask. You might be wondering where to collect these questions. Your inbox and customers support tickets will likely be the first place to look at. You should use questions asked by actual customers, not questions that you think they should be asking. Look through the emails that customers have sent you in the last few months and use them as a basis for your FAQ page. If you are a new business and there are not many questions to use, just take a look at other websites in the same industry, they will be effective sources for you to reference or even browse.
But you should also anticipate objections that you can turn into questions, especially if the answer will put your customer’s mind at ease. Strategically, consider raise the right questions to educate customers about your product and create demand.
You could also consider adding FAQs that pertain more to your industry than to your individual product or service. Your answers will position you as the authority on the subject matter, and that credibility can go a long way toward gaining a prospect’s trust.
However, you should focus on how to make your FAQs simple, understandable, real and up-to-date. After a long list of questions, remember to group your questions under categories like “Shipping” or “About the Product” to make it easier for visitors to navigate.
#Answers
Focus on clear communication first and the goal you’re trying to achieve with each question of your FAQs. Remember the main goal is to remove the concerns about your products, educate your audience about your brand and service, troubleshooting their problem and delivering the right solution for each issue.
You should answer questions in simple language without the use of technical terms, jargon and over complicated details. Some customers will find this type of language hard to understand and end up even more confused, which is the last thing you want, so be straightforward and concise in your response. While you should demonstrate authority through the depth of your answers, be sure you’re not losing your audience by giving them more than they need.
You can improve your answers dramatically by understanding what your users are looking for in them. So spend some time on this exercise, and notice how you start writing answers that your users finally benefit from.
#Put Your FAQs in a Logical Order
When organizing your FAQs, place the most common questions at the top of the list. The more
complex questions should then come further down the list.
If you find your FAQ page is becoming a bit long and might perhaps overwhelm the reader, then break it into sections. Group like questions and answers together and then place them under an informative subhead so that visitors can quickly scan the FAQ page to find the parts that are most relevant to their needs.
Another option to keep the size of the page manageable is to list only the questions and then have links to the answers. At the end of each answer, provide a ‘return to top’ link so they can easily return to the top of the FAQ page.
#Organized Layout
Organize your FAQ page with similar topics grouped together or use a table of contents which will make the layout easier to navigate. You can make the questions bold or slightly larger and then write the answers in normal text with whitespace between each question and answer so that it’s easy for your customers to determine where one ends and the next begins.
#Images sometimes are better than words
Use images wherever they can explain your answer more effectively than words.
If possible, use images to provide an example of what you’re talking about. This will add more visual appeal to your page and help to explain your response.
#Your search box is your most powerful asset.
If the great search engine wars of the late 90’s and early 00’s taught us anything, it’s that people just want a magic box that pulls up answers to their questions.
A big fear for support people is empty search results, but there are a couple of ways to prevent this.
First, invest the time to make your content easier to find! If you have a lot of support content, the knowledge manager can use titles, tags and keywords (plus their synonyms) to improve relevance and searchability. If you have limited content, well-curated lists and subsections can do the trick.
Second, you may have outgrown your search or content platform. Check with your web team to see if the existing search tool can be tweaked or enhanced. If not, then you might want to look into an out of the box solution search utility or think about changing your support’s content and search platform to something more scalable.
#Add links to Relevant Pages
Easy navigation is always a big plus.
By including relevant links in your answers, you help visitors find pages that they might miss, discover things that they didn’t know they were looking for and make it simple to find your main page, contact page, and ordering page.
You can also add links to pages that may provide more in-depth answers, making sure that the visitor is thoroughly satisfied that their question is answered.
#Add a CTA button
If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. When it comes to getting people to spend their money, this is often the case.
What happens after your visitors have read through your FAQ page and is convinced by you? A person may simply leave a site, but if you add a call-to-action on your FAQ page, it is more of an incentive to make a purchase.
People are psychologically conditioned from birth to do what is asked of them and a call-to-action will strike many on a subconscious level and encourage them to take that next step.
Threadless adds a CTA on its pages. When you click on one of the questions, you are taken to a page like this one.
Not only does it answer the question in a simple manner–and uses both charts and video to make it easier, but you will notice the links to important pages easily visible on the left. At the bottom of the page, they invite visitors to email the answer and also to subscribe to their mailings.
While the CTA isn’t a “buy this” button, it directs the visitor toward taking a step forward by leaving an email contact.
Conclusion
A well-organized and informative FAQ page can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolbox. Don’t neglect it.
Following even a few of the above hints will help increase the effectiveness of your FAQ page. And if you put all of them in action, you are well on your way to having a great FAQ page that increases your organic traffic as well as conversion rate significantly.
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