Turning visitors into clients
If you want to use your site to sell, there are a few techniques which will give you an extra edge in the online marketplace.
Successful selling is all about helping customers to realise their goals whilst accepting that the buyer and seller may not have the same objectives, so in web design, the first step is to define the parameters of your Web presence - what is your site for? What do you want your site to enable you to achieve? And how will a web site fit in with the rest of your strategy - do you even need one? Whatever your objectives, you must allow your visitors to achieve what it is that they have come to your site for whilst guiding them to the areas of your site that you wish to promote, in the least stressful manner possible. These aims can often be achieved simply and concurrently.
B2C
Many B2C (Business-to-Consumer) sites act as an extra sales channel for the business by presenting the customer with strategically limited product choices, in order to both streamline and maximise the sales potential in each transaction. Too much choice and the clutter will obscure the sales message, and may lead to frustration or confusion in your visitors, which will result in a lost sale. Too little choice and your visitors will conclude that your limited product range doesn’t offer the freedom of choice that online shopping can bring, and may decide to go elsewhere.
The trick is to provide the right amount of options for your target audience, and here each business will vary. Red Letter Days, a B2C site, provide hundreds of individual options for visitors because the site is designed to appeal to people who are purchasing a gift for someone else.
The company has quite deliberately limited the top-level choices to only 12 options because by carefully organising their products into clearly defined categories, they ensure that visitors can find the type of gift they require without having to navigate an endless procession of menus and sub-menus, which will quickly lead to boredom and frustration. The initial choice of gift ideas is enough to appear comprehensive but is concise enough to persuade the visitor to click through rather than click away.
Forcing or persuading a visitor to navigate away from your site should be avoided wherever possible because it means a lost sale, a potential sale for your competitors, and the possibility that news of your site’s navigational difficulties will spread. Word of mouth has always been the best form of recommendation, and with social bookmarking sites publishing opinions and comments to a worldwide audience, it has never been easier for people to compare notes on the user experience.
Of course, visitors navigate away from sites for all kinds of reasons, although growing frustrated with your site or not being able to find what they are looking for in a few clicks should not be among them.
B2B
Businesses which derive the majority of their trade from other businesses (B2B, or Business-to-Business), are expected to offer a huge range of products to reflect market demand, and the emphasis on selling and marketing will not be as high as for a B2C site because experienced trade professionals use different parameters, notably supply sustainability and discount, to judge the effectiveness of a supplier.
PartsBase supplies the aviation industry and boasts the availability of over 50 MILLION items - a figure which would deter even the most hardened bargain-hunting consumer but is probably quite reassuring to a manufacturer or repair centre in need of a hard to find component. Again, the site is simply responding to the demands of the market, yet although this time the multitude of options is designed to encourage rather than discourage visitors, the site’s owners have made it easy for members to find exactly what they are looking for by providing an array of search tools and a constantly updated inventory system.
From looking to ordering
In the examples above, both sites make it easy for visitors to be guided to the right place, albeit by different means. The company knows the client is in the right place because they have reached the product pages. The client feels they are in the right place because they have found what they were looking for, and from there they will be able to go ahead and order. How the client proceeds to order, and even the total size of that order, can be manipulated to the firm’s advantage whilst still allowing the client to achieve their goal.
Consider Dell computers. Dell’s advertising (both online and in print) uses very low prices to entice visitors to their web site, and, specifically, the ‘build your own computer’ section of the site. Once there, visitors are guided through the many options on offer, most of which appear to represent excellent value for money. While the visitor is selecting components to build his or her computer, upgrades and higher specification equipment are advertised alongside the lower priced articles which attracted the visitor in the first place, which makes the higher priced goods seem more reasonable and the lower priced goods seem a little inferior. The higher priced good is often colour coded and its superiority reinforced with attention grabbing sensationalised text.
The site appeals to the online shopper’s sense of self-worth (”If I’m building this computer I want the best!”) and their eye for what appears to be a bargain (”if X is the basic price and Y is much better and only slightly more expensive, and Z is better still and only a little more expensive than Y, then I will choose Z”). We are encouraged to spend much more than we originally anticipated thanks to subtle prompts and the illusion of choice, yet at the end of the process Dell has (probably) succeeded in selling us a computer with a much higher specification than we originally anticipated (the company’s objective) and the visitor has been able to locate a computer which seems to exactly matches his or her specifications (the visitor’s objective) by exactly the same means.
“Upselling” comes in many forms, from the innocuous sounding “is that everything?” in chain pubs at the end of our order, to the more forthright “do you want fries with that?” at the drive-thru.
Online selling takes a slightly different approach, because the absence of any dialogue means that the company’s product offering must be delivered in clearly defined terms but carefully expressed in a way which avoids begging for custom.. By guiding your visitors to areas of your site which can add value to and therefore enhance their experience, you are effectively offering them something different to or better than the offerings of your competitors, whilst simultaneously increasing the likelihood that your visitors will buy from you or use your services.
Free toy inside
Foreign exchange xe.com provides a multitude of currency-based tools and offers a range of paid-for services such as brokerage and money transfer, yet it is the site’s powerful currency converter, one of the first useful dynamic applications on the internet, which ensures that more visitors use their site than any other site offering similar services. It is free to use, devastatingly accurate, and there is no limit on the amount of calculations users can ask it to perform.
The company invested a significant amount of time and money in perfecting the application because they believed its inherent usefulness would attract visitors from all over the world. Although it is by no means the only free to use currency converter, it was the first, and it remains the standard by which others are judged, not least because it uses constantly updated data taken in real time from the currency markets, meaning it is able to reflect up to the minute fluctuations in exchange rates.
Using an application or useful tool to attract visitors to a site can be extremely successful if it is implemented with the needs of the target audience in mind. Although it is a unique example, the BBC schools website offers a multitude of interactive content for children from pre-school to secondary school age, and also provides content for teachers and parents. Unsurprisingly it is one of the most popular BBC “mini-sites” and one of the most popular children’s sites on the Internet.
Google has taken mass appeal to a whole new level with the carefully timed introduction of a number of useful, powerful, and most importantly, free tools and applications designed to increase market share and to get people to turn to Google to perform routine tasks such as word processing, emailing and organising. This has the massive benefit of drawing attention to their core competency and greatest sources of revenue, advertising and search.
On a smaller scale, sites such as Diet Freedom offer a free printable chart to help visitors keep track of their diet goals, and a confidential ‘ask the dietician’ service. Whilst they may not be the most exciting developments in food history, they are designed to offer support and encouragement to people wishing to embark on a diet, and might even provide the extra impetus for visitors to subscribe to this site rather one of the many others that are available.
As with the previous examples, the site enables visitors to find what they want with minimum hassle, and encourages them to go a little further through tailored incentives that are designed to match the particular requirements of the market. In this case it is likely that the market consists mainly of people looking for dietary advice, but also for support, encouragement, and the inspiration to keep going. With its printable chart, confidential one-on-one service and wealth of dietary information, Diet Freedom is doing just that.
Responding to customer need can take many forms, and must be a consistent theme running throughout your site. Sites which promise the earth during a slick animated introduction are useless if the main content fails to deliver. Getting your visitors to the product pages requires careful planning but both you and your clients can derive maximum long-term benefit if you get it right.
Once your visitors are at the ordering stage they must be persuaded to convert their interest, and as we have seen, custom applications or judicious product placement can certainly help. How you implement such incentives depends on the nature of your business, the demands of your target market, and how far you are willing to develop the online side of your operation.
