20 Ways to Optimize Your Unique Value Proposition and Lift Website Sales Today

What if I told you there is an element on every website that is crucial for increasing sales and conversion rates, but is often neglected by online marketers and online business owners?

It’s your unique value proposition (UVP – or unique selling proposition). To be effective, it should quickly show visitors the benefits of using your website, who it’s ideally for, and why use it instead of competitors.

But websites often poorly convey their UVP, unknowingly causing visitor misunderstanding, higher bounce rates and many lost sales.

In this in-depth article you’ll learn 20 ways to quickly improve your UVP. And if you do a great job with this (and better than your competitors do), you’ll get fantastic increases in sales and leads without needing more traffic. Indeed, it’s one of the key things I get my clients to focus on.

Ready to give your UVP some much needed love? Let’s get started in two key areas of tips…

Optimize the uniqueness and strength of your value proposition

These first 7 tips are essential. It doesn’t matter how good your website looks or how much traffic you get if your UVP is not very engaging, unique or strong – it won’t convert well into sales or leads. Never presume its already good enough! Here are some ways to improve and get the most out of it:

1: Get great UVP feedback from your target audience
First it’s essential to get feedback about your UVP from people who will be interested in your offerings.  Use a tool like UserTesting.com or UsabilityHub.com to get this feedback and find out what they think, including what could be improved. You should also test showing them different UVP variations to see which versions appeal to them most. Here are 3 revealing questions you can use to get highly actionable feedback:

2: Brainstorm ideas to improve your UVP and test to find best elements
Start thinking of new ideas to improve and mention in your UVP. For example, maybe your customer support is available longer hours than competitors, or you don’t include hidden fees like other websites do, or you have the most customers. Then test to find the most compelling elements from your ideas – using Adwords or Facebook ads is great for testing to see which are most compelling to use on your website.

3: Make your UVP customer focused, not business focused
Make sure you realize your UVP is not your mission statement! Instead, put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and think ‘what’s in for me’ and ‘why should I use this website’ – don’t just list the objectives of your business (often very dull).

To help with this, always use more visitor centric wording in your UVP, like ‘you’ and ‘yours’ instead of ‘we’ and ‘our’. Here is an example of a poor about page with business-focused mission statement, not showing good UVP – a real turn off for visitors, right?

4: Answer common visitor problems and pain points with your UVP
To make your website and UVP even more customer focused, make sure you address your visitor’s common problems and pain points in your area of business, and then make sure your UVP helps solve them. Spend some time brainstorming these most common pain points, challenges and frustrations, then clearly highlight why your UVP and offering is the best solution for them.

Here is a great best practice example of UVP solving pain points on Unbounce.com:

5: Evaluate and beat your competitor’s UVP
Review your major competitor’s websites – do you offer anything good that they don’t? Or vice versa? It is essential to think of ideas to make your value proposition a bit more unique. Perhaps no one offers free returns yet or a money back guarantee? And if you are selling products, always give reasons for visitors to buy from you instead of Amazon.com! Lastly, don’t just copy competitor ideas – make them better!

6: Is your offering really that valuable and beneficial in the first place?
Take a step back for a while. Is there actually much interest and demand in your value proposition? It doesn’t matter how unique it is if people don’t really care about the benefits you are offering. Getting good feedback on this essential – run a quick visitor survey using a tool like Hotjar.com to discover their true interest. Maybe its time to pivot into a business that people really care about and there is a real need for?

7: Don’t show off by using many superlatives in your UVP
Don’t scare your visitors away by using over-the-top superlatives in your UVP that you can’t back up with facts or stats – this will often cause an increase in bounce rates and lost sales. For example don’t just say ‘the worlds best’ or ‘#1 provider in the USA” if you can’t prove it! Removing wording like that will make your UVP seem more believable and less salesy – and more engaging!

Optimize the promotion of UVP on your website

Many websites have strong UVP, but forget or neglect to promote it well. It doesn’t matter how good your UVP is if your visitors often don’t seen it or be influenced by it. Never just presume they know it! To ensure its quickly understood, show it on key places on your website – as you’ll see in these next tips:

8: Prioritize the best parts of your UVP and promote them more
Don’t presume all elements of your UVP are equally important. Maybe your price match guarantee is more important than your free shipping? Find out which parts engage visitors better by doing some testing. Either with A/B testing, or if you don’t have enough traffic you can test using titles in Google Adwords or Facebook ads. Once you find the most clicked versions, promote them more often by using the next tips.

9: Use bullet points to show UVP above page fold on homepage
One of the quickest ways of conveying UVP is by adding some short bullet points on your homepage that highlight the top reasons to use your website (particularly instead of a competitor). This should be shown above the page fold so your visitors can see it without having to scroll, and come up with a good title for the section (like ‘reasons why you’ll love us’). Here is a good example from one of my clients:

10: Use a tagline under your logo to show elements of your UVP
This is quick easy thing to add to your website – take 3-5 keywords that best highlight your UVP and add them right under your logo as a tagline. Your visitor’s eyes often look towards the logo first, so adding UVP messaging there ensures that it’s quickly seen and engaged.

11: Use UVP-focused headlines on key pages to increase prominence
Headlines are often one of the key levers for increasing conversions and sales, particularly for engaging visitors quicker. Therefore, on your homepage and key pages, use a compelling headline that mentions the strongest aspects/benefits of your UVP. Asking questions and mentioning pain points is a great way of doing this. Here are a few good UVP focused headlines for your inspiration:

12: Mention key aspects of your UVP in the header of your website
Don’t presume that visitors will see your UVP on your homepage – many visitors will arrive on interior pages via SEO in particular. To compensate for this and make sure your UVP is seen no matter what page is arrived on, mention the most compelling key elements of your UVP in your header, ideally with icons to help draw your visitor’s eyes.

This is particularly important for ecommerce websites to mention things like free shipping, lowest price guarantee etc. Here’s an excellent use of this on AO.com:

13: Promote your UVP high up in your blog sidebar
Never just presume your blog visitors will understand your UVP and who it’s for, even if you think its obvious. And realize that many blog visitors will only see your article pages and miss the UVP on your homepage. To prevent this from happening, in your sidebar you should create a small area with a quick overview of the benefits and reasons of your blog (a summary of your UVP), and place it towards the top to ensure its noticed.  Here is a great example of this on the RebootedBody.com blog:

14: Create a ‘why us’ page to compare your offering to others
Take your UVP messaging to the next level by  creating a page that explains ‘why use us’ and the uniqueness of your offering in more detail. This page should compare your website offering against your key competitors, and even against the offline/conventional way of doing it. Be honest though, and always include some aspects that your website is not quite as good.

Using a comparison table or a matrix can often work well to highlight UVP – here is a great example of a ‘why us’ page from one of my clients:

15: Add UVP related items to your main navigation menu
After you have created a good ‘why use us’ page, you should add a link for this page in your main navigation menu so it can be prominently seen and often visited. You should also have a page in your navigation menu with the wording of ‘benefits’ that explains this in more detail – don’t just say ‘products’ or ‘services’. Those two navigation improvements are great ways to get your UVP quickly seen and engaged upon, from any page on your website.

16: Simplify your UVP to make it easily scanable
When mentioning your UVP and benefits avoid using long paragraphs – visitors often don’t read online as much, they scan. To help ensure your UVP is read, cut out less important words to make it easier to read and digest, format them visually, and make use of bullet points and bold to convey key points/words.

And don’t confuse your visitors by using jargon or less known acronyms – always dumb down your UVP wording. Here is an excellent example of a great visual, highly scanable UVP on WebSynthesis.com:

17: Reinforce your UVP on your checkout/signup flow
On your checkout or sign-up pages to reduce visitor abandonment (where the chances are often highest of) you should also reinforce your UVP by repeating the key benefits of using your website. A great place to show this is in the sidebar of these pages, using short bullet points.

For best results, this UVP wording should be shown in combination with risk reducers like guarantees, and secure wording/imagery. Adroll.com does an excellent job of this doing this on their checkout page:

18: Emphasize uniqueness when mentioning benefits and features
When mentioning features of your service/products on key pages, always take the opportunity to add wording to point out ones that are most unique or better than your competitors.

For example instead of just saying ‘we offer 200 templates’, also add ‘double more than leading providers’. Or for the pricing section, don’t just state the price, also mention things like ‘we don’t include hidden fees like other competing services do’. This is a great highly contextual place to emphasize your UVP.

19: If using a homepage slider, make your first slide UVP focused
If you are using a homepage image slider – make much better use of it! Instead of just showing a random promotion or product in your first slide, a better way is to show a slide that mentions key points of your UVP, with a good matching headline, imagery and call-to-action. Better yet, test replacing the whole homepage slider with just a static image mentioning UVP, as ASOS.com recently had the great idea of:

20: Think outside of the box – promote UVP on emails, ads and more
And last, don’t just promote your UVP on your website – take a step back down your visitor journey and always mention it in all your ads, search results and all your email marketing efforts. Basically anywhere you can place a message in front of your audience, mention key your benefits and UVP. This way you can intrigue them to come to your website in the first place! Here is an excellent example of UVP in an ad:

Don’t forget to test to find the best UVP variations!

Just like any content or elements on your website, you should always test to find the best converting variations and page locations for your UVP. Use an A/B testing tool to find the best elements of your UVP, the wording you use, the style of them, and their location on your key pages.

And if you don’t have enough traffic, you can test using ways I discuss in my low traffic A/B testing article.

Wrapping up – how good is your UVP?

Your UVP always has room for improvement – particularly how you promote it to your visitors. So go ahead and try using some of these 20 UVP tips, then sit back and watch your sales or leads increase!