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Chief Analytics Officer at Kwantic Oy
27 January 2006 08:23am
It's a simple question with a lot of potential answers.
What methods do you have in place on your websites which persuade people to take the action you want them to take?
I don't mean the technology. I mean psychological triggers, hooks, reassurances that kind of thing.
So I'm not interested in answers which might be things like;
"We have a sign up form"
I'm interested in stuff like;
"We give away a useful white paper to our new subscribers".
I am interested to see any interesting ways in which people do things which we haven't thought of. Any and all ideas are good. Thanks in advance.
Steve Jackson
Conversion Chronicles
MD at Boo Marketing
28 January 2006 08:19am
People often focus on technical spec and online marketing but give lesser attention to the copy and this is where sites can make an impressive difference in response rates. Each page should have benefits highlighted.
People are motivated by self-interest so you have to focus on:
what's in it for them
what are the benefits they will receive
what problems you can solve for them
what improvements you can demonstrate
how you can improve their sales conversion rates
help them beat their competition
improve their turnover and profit
Successful sales strategies are the ones that focus on the client's needs and work from there. On my site I offer a a six page article called "Successful No Cost Low Cost Marketing Ideas for SME's".
To receive this visitors complete an online form - I get new contacts and they get something very useful that they can't turn down because everyone wants their marketing to be low cost and successful. People use the Internet to confirm, collect and clarify information, if you provide what they want, this assists in building visits and conversions.
Janeyp
Chief Analytics Officer at Kwantic Oy
30 January 2006 15:37pm
Thanks Jane, I agree with everything you said.
I was looking for specific methods and you've given me one good one there in the six page article. Here are some more ideas which I hope might spark a bit more discussion;
Testimonials
Has anyone found that they don't work? What context do they work best and why? Trust is obviously a huge persuasion technique. If your prospect trusts you you're 50% of the way to persuading them. What other methods of trust do you employ on and offline?
Free stuff (reports and white papers)
A big favorite. Jane mentioned she does this, we do it on our website and I know many that use this method. It's not just free reports/books it's free information. MP3 audio/video, articles, blogs, newsletters etc.
We all know this method works. Persuading someone to have something for nothing is always the easiest persuasive process you can have.
So after the initial contact and subsequent free newsletters, give aways etc, how do you then persuade the free subscriber to become a purchaser? What methods have worked best?
Complete money-back guarantee
Does anyone think it's high risk? Does anyone think from a persuasive point of view this is imperative?
Two levels of information
This is an interesting concept. It works for lead generation but not for pure play e-commerce. QVC for instance rarely give anything away and yet in 2005 had the highest conversion rate in the world (at 16.3% according to Neilsen//Netratings).
Top Conversion Rates - 2005
However the give before you get method also clearly works for lead generation when a skeptical prospect arrives, downloads, learns and then buys. So why can QVC and other big brand retailers do this when others can't? Is it branding alone (which is my theory) or are there other reasons behind this?
Or do you think QVC's conversion rate is low? Should they be getting a much higher rate? How do you think they could improve?
Offline
What about offline? Are there any offline methods that you use to persuade your prospect to buy that could work in any situation?
Business Development Director at October Development
30 January 2006 16:51pm
Not sure if this is the sort of thing you were looking for but...
I have been getting 50-60% of my search referrers landing on my framed results pages (My frame at the top, external content in the bottom frame). The top frame has my branding and links to the home page but I was getting a large number of 1 page visits because of this.
I added a little bit of code that looked at the terms the user was searching for on Google, and searched my site to see if I had any relevant content to show them other than the framed page, then added an extra frame at the bottom with sample content.
This has increased my pages per visitor from 2.9 to 6.
I also do this on a news site I run, generally Google has indexed my front page which has news headlines but this will be out of date rather quickly. I just add a link to the search area pointing the user in the right direction with their search terms automatically added to the link.
I think what I am trying to say is if you have more of what they want then make sure they know about it!