48. I’m a believer

How do you turn a visitor to your site into a consumer? Make them welcome, put them at ease, make yourself attractive, make ordering simple… oh, just read!

Your site is not there to look pretty; it’s there for a reason – to make money. Unashamedly pimp your site and don’t let your working pages go to sleep on the job, so to speak.

The Road To Damascus

If you want to understand why not every visitor ends up buying from you, remind yourself of your own surfing behaviour. Not everyone on your web site is going to buy, and there’s nothing you can do about it. First, there are going to be visitors to your site who really are just looking, for whatever reason. Secondly, there will be visitors who found you by complete accident (probably via a link on a search engine) and don’t know where they are going or why they are there. Some will scan your homepage and leave immediately, while others will have a quick read because something caught their eye, but they won’t become a consumer. With average conversion ratios of anything between 1% and 5%, how can you ensure that you are at the top rather than the bottom of this scale (or even on it at all)? Well, when you visit a web site, what dictates whether you end up buying? As we’ll see, a number of factors come into play.

Big Brand, Little Brand

Brand awareness will eventually happen over time, through trust (maybe of a parent company, or sympathetic PR) or because it’s bought through a massive advertising campaign with a budget that would make your eyes water. Branding does take time, but once your brand is established it will help users become consumers just because of what you are.

Giving It Up

A major complaint from users, when they’re not chasing their orders, is lack of information. Although it’s important to keep web copy to a minimum, there’s no excuse for not including basic information about the products you are expecting your users to buy with their hard-earned cash. If users are asking you for more information, you can be sure that only a small proportion are actually parting with their pennies. Most of the others, myself included, would be off to another site where the information is more freely available. Net result, lost business. All for not repeating verbatim what has been provided to you from the manufacturer or supplier. Very poor indeed – nul points.

Where Exactly Am I?

Users will feel a lot happier spending time on your site and buying from it if they can work out how to get around it. It’s back to ensuring that you have good navigation, and links and buttons that not only work but take users exactly where they want to go quickly and seamlessly. Improve your site navigation and you’ll see a rise in your conversion ratio.

That’s Illogical, Captain

The order pipeline and the buying process itself can scare a lot of users away, even though up until then you had them hooked on you and your products. It defies belief that organisations spend so much time and effort (and therefore cash) designing the ultimate site in terms of attractive navigation and well-presented products, only to let themselves down spectacularly with the final, most important step – the shopping basket and order pipeline. You should spend as much time and effort on the design and implementation of your order pipeline as on your homepage. Getting users to select products or services from your site and putting them into a basket or cart is only half the battle. You now need to get them to walk through the checkout without dropping the purchase and scurrying off into the distance with their purse clenched tightly to their chest.

How did it go?

Q. Our competitors have got the product information section of their site perfected. They even have a facility to let users who have bought in the past to comment on the products. Our IT department says we haven’t got the budget to add a similar facility to our web site. Any ideas how we can compete?

A. So your competitors have got it right. It does happen. But don’t give up. Instead, try to match their level of ‘this is how it really is’ by adding your own staff comments to products within the product description. This way, users will see both the official manufacturer’s blurb and, immediately below it, a few hundred pragmatic words from Jack in customer services saying how much he liked it. No expensive applications required (no offence, Jack). You have staff working at your company and they are all consumers… use them.

Q. Should we still allow users to phone their orders through? Our biggest competitor does.

A. Ah – this is a case of keeping up with the Phoneses! It depends on whether you can handle the contact time. More and more people every day are becoming familiar with e-commerce so there is really less need. A good tactic is to add a surcharge for telephone assistance to help ‘educate’ your users (and pay for the extra resources you have just thrown at it).

Here is an idea for you…

If you’re running an e-commerce store, make a direct comparison with your competitors’ or with the manufacturers’ own web site with regard to how data are presented. Are you really giving all that you can in terms of information and images? More importantly, are you adding to that information in any way by giving the users a chance to read more than the specification – will they enjoy this product, will it improve their lives, will it make them laugh? All quite simple, but add these features and you’ll notice an increase in your conversion ratio.

If you are selling services rather than products, have your copy checked over by an outside source. Is it absolutely clear what is being offered, how much it costs, how long the service will last and why buying the service from you is more advisable than from another source? If not, fix it and see your conversion ratio increase.

Defining idea…

‘The internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.’

Andrew Brown

Defining idea…

‘All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.’

Noam Chomsky