Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [84]
I recommend businesses rank their conversions according to different methods. First, rank them by profitability. Which conversions make the most money for the business? Second, rank them by purpose. Which conversions are for new customer/member/subscription acquisitions? Which conversions are for current member or customer retention? When ordering conversion points by those two methods, the placement and prominence of the conversion on each page and in each section of the website becomes apparent. For example, in my business, I am not going to promote my Facebook page to a visitor who has never had any interaction with my business. What is the point of getting someone to like my business’s Facebook page if they have never experienced the business? My goal is to make them a subscriber to our newsletter or to contact us. On the other hand, I push the Facebook subscription to stay in touch as a retention and networking tool.
It is up to each business to decide how to use these tools but then to realize also how to best promote these tools at the right place and at the right time. Getting a visitor to call or contact your business should never be obscured by a call to subscribe to your Twitter stream (or any of the latest social media trends).
Close the Commitment
If a visitor to your site has to pick among multiple choices that define their needs (beyond the information they just read), they are less apt to go through the process once more. If there are multiple levels of membership, different types of products, or separate packages, then the commitment needs to be localized to the information.
This is seen in sites that try to define the customer by their business categories. These categories might make sense within an organization but not to the customer or prospect. I find this problem on the Dell website. From the choices of home office, small business, and medium business alone, I believe that I could choose any one of them (see Figure 7-21).
Figure 7-21: Dell defines its customer categories.
However, then I find out from my Dell rep that my company was considered a large company because of the volume of our purchases that year! That made no sense to me, because I would have never put myself in that category. However, these were Dell-defined customer categories and not customer-defined categories, which cause hesitation from the onset of using the Dell website. This causes muddiness in the water, because hesitation based on confusion is not the desired reaction of your website visitor.
In a similar business-to-business site, AT&T’s small business portal offers many options but very little direction (see Figure 7-22). In the Manage My Account options on the right side of the screen, there are four different options; all have a registration link, but there is no clear explanation which one is for the type of business, account, or program a small business should be in.
Figure 7-22: AT&T’s small-business account options
In an ecommerce setting, the closing process is often marked by overwhelming options within the cart pages and “pushy” product pages that go along with the process. By trying to push more products and more information to the customer while they are in the commitment process, you stand the chance of losing them entirely, either by their exasperation with the process or by critical “next step” links being overwhelmed by other page elements, causing the confusion for the visitor and the loss of a sale.
Take, for example, At-A-Glance calendars (Figure 7-23); the call to action is buried somewhere at the bottom of the page—one has to scroll down to see it, because it is “below the fold.” (This is a newspaper term for content that is below the fold of the newspaper page. The most important content is above the fold in the main headlines.