In a lot of ways, your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page is like an insurance company. It’s there should you ever need it, but if you’re careful to do everything you can to adequately inform your customers, you won’t. In fact, if you find you have too many questions on your FAQ page, you need to stop and rework the content on your site. It’s leaving too many questions unanswered.
With that said, if you’re wondering, “Does my site really need an FAQ page?” the answer is, as is so often the case, it depends.
Ideally, You’ll Answer Every Question with Content
Here, you’ll face a bit of a conundrum. If you can think of the question, it should already be answered somewhere on your site. This might make it difficult to set up a substantive page right off the bat, because you’ll have to wait until customers start asking you questions. With that said, you can use the FAQ page as tool for overcoming customer objections in the interim by anticipating resistance points and addressing them there.
Given Time, Customers Will Ask
Over time, you’ll start getting questions by email or direct messenger. Even as you work to ensure the basic content deals with them, posting the questions and answers in one place can assure your shoppers you pay attention to their needs.
Product and service questions can be fertile ground for FAQs. Make it a point to document all such questions, review the content on your site to see if they’re answered readily and make the needed corrections.
Support requests will also be a rich source of material. If a significant number of people are having trouble figuring out how to get your site to do something, or to get a product to function properly, it should be addressed on this page. And yes, your site should also be subjected to some added attention to remove this pain point for your patrons.
Ask Customers What Else They Need to Know
Covering everything shoppers could possibly want to know is going to be an impossible task. Nobody can anticipate everything. However, even if you’re using a free website template, you can include a section on your FAQ page to ask them what they want to know. “Didn’t find what you were looking for? Ask us here.” This serves dual purposes: in addition to telling your customers you care about their experience, you’re getting them to tell you what you may have overlooked. Again though, if you’re seeing a lot of the same responses, it’s time to fix that issue on your site to optimize your user experience.
Is an FAQ Page Really Needed?
Theoretically, you’ll eventually answer every possible question your customers will have by tweaking your content in response to the questions they raise. This might indicate the need for an FAQ page will eventually subside. However, even if you have all the questions answered somewhere on your site, some people don’t want to bother with wading through your content to dig out the answer. In these instances, a carefully curated FAQ page gives them a centralized place to find quick answers to the most often recurring questions.
Bottom line, if you’re wondering if your site really needs an FAQ page, the answer ultimately depends upon how well you want to service your customers. A big part of being successful in ecommerce is anticipating shoppers’ needs and fulfilling them before they know they have them. A well-sorted FAQ page will help you accomplish just that while moving your site’s visitors ever closer to conversion.
