One of the most frustrating aspects of web business is trying to figure out problems to customer response rates on your web site. Why are my customers getting lost online? Why are they not responding to my ads? Why are my offers being ignored?
The challenge of this puzzle is figuring out what parts of the web site need to be fixed.
Is it the offer itself? Are my navigation signals unclear? Is my offering price too high? Is my offer language boring or uninspiring? Is there a problem with my ordering system?
You see, it seems that there are an endless number of little variables that could be hindering sales at the web site. Often, trying to figure out where the roadblocks are is a difficult and frustrating exercise.
If you are not getting the kind of customer web site response you think you should have, there are a number of starting points that you should consider in order to get to the root of the problem.
- First, know your web site. Be aware of the traffic patterns of your online visitors. You can track where the clicks on your site are happening. You may find that your navigation is confusing - a real problem. Confused visitors are frustrated visitors who are not in the mood to buy anything. If your customer is confused about your web site, she might believe that your products will be confusing as well.
- Lead your customer by the hand into taking the action that you want. Tell them or show them where you want them to go next. The "call to action" is one of the most important parts of your visitor ordering system. There should be no doubt about the progression of your intended path through the sale.
- Make buying easy. If you have a long sales page, strategically place "buy now" buttons throughout the text. Sometimes the customer is ready to buy early on, sometimes mid-way through the offer, and often, not until the very end. Most of your clicks to purchase will come from the first and last opportunity, but your intermediate buttons will also get clicks. The point is, you want the customer to be able to pull the trigger when he is ready, regardless of where he is on the sales page. If he has to wait until the very end of the dialogue, there is a good chance the sale may be lost.
- Be dramatic and bold with your buttons. Don't leave any doubt as to how to respond to your offer or your direction to a resource or link. Don't hide these jumping off points in ordinary text or tiny graphics. Leave no doubt about where the prospect needs to click to get somewhere.
- Many web businesses don't take the opportunity to follow up on a customer action with an email. Whether it's a "thank you" email for subscribing to a mailing list or a "this is what to do next" follow up to a download, you need to take every opportunity to maintain and enhance your contact with the customer or prospect. So many businesses fail in this regard. Customers will notice your concern if you always follow up on their actions. This practice alone will set you apart from 90% of the competition. Yes, it's a little more work to do this, but the results will be more than worth the extra effort.
- Remember to offer options. Maybe your customers aren't buying because they would like to try something out before committing to high price tag. Can you give them a two-week trial offer as an alternative to the full price offer? Can you give them a price point that's significantly less than the regular price for a "lite" version? Sure, you want to try to get full price for a sale - but getting something is always preferable to getting nothing. And if the customer is pleased with his initial purchase, it will be that much easier getting her to come back to order the full version and even more!
- Always test, test, test. It is really surprising what a little testing will do. Sometimes simply changing a color, a button placement, a headline, or a little text will mean a 100% increase in a response rate. It's true! The only way you're going to know what little tweaks will help your conversion is to test one thing against another and track results. Of course you know that there is a proper and a wrong way to test variables. That lesson is for another day . . . but just remember . . . testing and tracking will often turn money losing offers into money winning offers. Likewise, good results can be tweaked into becoming outstanding results.
- Don't be afraid to up-sell or cross-sell once a customer has pulled the trigger. Don't be shy about taking advantage of the immediate time following a web site sale. To simply tell the customer "thank you" and leave him on a dead end page is to lose the opportunity to make additional money. The best strategy is to offer a very related product, a longer term, a deluxe version of what was just purchased, a greater supply of the product, a customer discount to an affiliated service, or membership in a "club" or user group.
- One good way to jump into the customer's shoes is to actually ask the customer for feedback on varying aspects of his web or buying experience. Ask if she has questions about a product or service. Ask if the price was the reason a prospect didn't buy. Ask if any of your instructions were unclear or hard to understand. Feedback on why a prospect didn't buy is invaluable because the chances are very high that other folks are feeling the same way.
- Have a path to follow for those that say "no." In other words, if a prospect is not ready to pull the trigger with your call to action on this visit, you should have an alternative path for him to get something else from you. Don't let the customer leave empty-handed. Surely there is some kind of value that you can give the non-buyers for stopping by your shop. It could be a free download of "tips" in your niche, it could be a trial offer of a product, or it might simply be direction to a related resource. Whatever you decide, make sure the customer feels that her visit was worth the time and effort. You want the prospect to have a reason to come by again.
- The internet is a great place to scan, but often a lousy place to read long copy. Given the choice, most people would rather read a physical book than sit at the computer screen and scroll through an online book. Think about it - when you come to a computer screen with lots of text, what do you do? Don't you tend to do a quick scan to see if there are headings or bullet points or underlined text so that you can get the jist of what's going on without having to suffer through reading everything? Most folks are that way, by far! I'm suggesting you cater your delivery of information to the style of the reader. Offer summaries, headings, bullet lists, shortened text, etc.
- Here's my last point for this installment: keep everything simple and brief. Don't force the customer to do too much. Remember "easy," "short," "simple," "summary," "brief," etc. When you ask for information, keep it to a minimum. When you give directions, make it simple. When you ask for a sale, make it happen in one click. When you want a question answered, give one to three options and ask which they would prefer. Remember what we said earlier: when a customer is confused or frustrated, he is not in a buying mood.
I hope you'll remember some of these suggestions so that solving the non-response puzzle will be easier and faster for you than ever before. Often, you will find what the problem is sooner than later and you won't have to scrap your whole project idea or offer because it's not converting.
