The Blog on Branding

Achieving the Highest Conversion Rates: Your Website at Its Best

Any website ultimately has a goal: bloggers want people to read their blogs (and often sign up for a newsletter), search engines want people to search on them, online communities want people to join and ultimately e-commerce sites, or e-tailers want people to buy their products.

Having people perform the set goal and take action is called a conversion. Getting people to perform the specific action that you want them to is not as simple as it sounds though. Before people decide to sign up for a newsletter, join an online community or buy a product, they go through a process. Some of these processes are more intricate than others.

“Most people aren’t too keen on jumping through hoops.”




Tim Ash wrote a series of articles describing the process people go through when buying a product from an e-tailer. The process can be summed up in four steps:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

This article is the first in a two-part series in which I will take you through the first two mental steps people go through. I will also give you tips for how to capture your audience through these steps in order to maximize their chances of reaching the third and fourth stages of the process.

Awareness

Getting people to buy a product from your website is a method of seduction. It’s a lot like getting someone to date you. In order to do that, the first step along the way is even being aware that the person exists.

In order to get people to buy from your website, they first need to know it exists.

“Save the flowers for later, though.”



Awareness is very similar to attention. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming number of advertisements people are exposed to per day (estimated at 3000 per day by the Union of Concerned Scientists), people have learned to tune advertisements out.

In order to combat this lack of attention, marketers have come up with several strategies. One of the least invasive of these being permission marketing, named by Seth Godin’s book, as a way of giving visitors more information if they request it on a specific product or type of product (e.g. signing up for a fashion newsletter if you are interested in fashion).

During the awareness stage, commitment is really low, as it is if you are trying to pick someone up. Being aware that you are present hardly means that they want to go home with you (despite what some would believe).

When people are at this stage, they are looking for reassurance. They want to know that the website will recognize their need and give them a clear path to follow in order to satisfy it. Just as in courtship, giving them something that catches their eye might make them want to explore further.

To give the people what they want, follow these simple rules in designing your landing page:

• Make sure your visitors can easily find things.
• Pick one or two items to emphasize, or else they’ll all lose importance.
• Ensure there is no delay or your visitors will be frustrated.

One thing to note about awareness on your site is that it’s important to not have pop-up or banner ads that distract so much that users cease to be aware of your site in the first place.

“No one wants to sort through that clutter!”



Unless your business model is primarily supported by these ads, it’s best to radically tone these ads down or even get rid of them altogether. Especially avoid entry pop-ups, ads that pop-up at the beginning of people reaching your site.

Remember, at the awareness level, commitment is still very low. People may click away at any second and even such a small distraction as this could be enough to deter them. Think of obnoxious pop-ups as the hotter people at the bar, or even someone more forward. That hottie you are trying to catch might be distracted by these people and forget about you in order to pursue the hotter person or the one who seems like a sure thing.

Interest

So now that the object of your desire knows you exist, the next step is to create interest. Just like awareness, interest is fleeting and commitment is low. Any sudden movement could dissuade your crush from their interest.

The same is true for Web pages. In the words of Ash, “Interest can be viewed as a transient pull and concentration of the attention on a particular object.” Interest often spurs from a split-second decision to click on a site. If you pay enough attention to it, you are eventually going to get curious enough to click on it, and that’s when interest steps in.

The key to driving interest is creating an effective website that focuses and reaches out to the visitor. To do this, it is important to know who the visitor is and know what they are trying to accomplish.

There are two optimal ways to reach out to your audience:

• Through self-selection, where you give them categories in the landing page to choose who they are (think of a college Web page where you choose from being an alumnus, a current student, an employee, a prospective student, etc.)
• Or through need identification, where they give you different tasks to choose from (think of an e-tailer where they give you an array of different actions to take and things to shop for eg. shop for toys, shop for beauty products, contact us, etc.)

Stay tuned for my next article where I tell you how to create levels of desire and finally cause action in your Web page visitors, as well as in your courtships.

Nicole Carretta Want content written for your Brand that shows up #1 on Search Engines and brings you new customers? Contact us.