Chances are, if you are reading this, you’ve got a problem with turning site visitors into buyers. You’ve probably made one big mistake… It’s common, and almost all sites suffer from this to a greater or lesser extent. It affects shops, banks, consultants and pretty much everything that anyone tries to sell… And it seems so obvious, when you hear it.
You probably aren’t looking at your site the way that a possible buyer will do so.
If you put yourself in the position of a prospective buyer, you’ll kick yourself about the interface errors on your site. Here’s a few examples of what this means…
Assume The Position
Your home page explains that you are a quality supplier, and you offer free delivery, and a low cost or free replacement and repair service, etc and you have industry awards and customer recommendations. However, most new people who visit your site, probably do so from search, and many start their journey deep inside your site. They never see the home page. They never see the awards, the endorsements or your USP. Just a product and a price…
What’s the problem here then?
- DRIP!
Marketing communicators have an acronym that they use to check that every message (every web page) works.
- Differentiate
- Re-inforce
- Inform
- Persuade
If you don’t give your USP (Unique Selling Point) on your landing page, how will the visitor know why to buy from you, and that your price includes things your competitors don’t offer (or matches price, or whatever it is)? Make sure that your landing pages, especially your paid search landing pages, really DRIP.
There’s plenty of good treatments about what DRIP means, elsewhere. I’ll just draw your attention to it and move on to another example.
Never Made The Journey, Myself
Another classic error - your business assumes that all the pieces of information match up for the user. You may even, if you work for a large organisation, have deferred design to subgroups, who locally optimise their piece of a complex puzzle. Here’s an example from Online Banking that I’ve just (May 25th, 2007) encountered.
I bought something online. The secure payments processing system offered to set up a secure banking registration for convenience and improved security in future purchases (basically, they wanted my permission to set up a password for the credit card). I received an email saying that I was registered. In the email is a link to the Banks’ main page for this web security product, and a login page. However, despite being registered, I don’t have an account login name. The login page contains mechanisms to let me discover a lost password, but I only have the password and the registered email address - that doesn’t help me recover an account name that I never set up.
Clearly no-one from the Bank has actually tried to use the processes they’ve foisted on customers. If they had, they should be aghast at the sheer difficulty of as simple a task as registering as a user.
On trying to use the Banks’ complaints system, I discover that it takes a chunk of personal information, over a plain text connection - suitable for interception by someone wanting to use identity theft techniques. So I dare not complain about the service online, as I’d be offering personal information over an insecure channel.
It’s a poor brand experience to offer a service that then involves the customer in further failing systems, to correct the defective design of the service offering. I won’t be using that credit card online, again - it’s too difficult to register, and impossible to make a detailed complaint online without increasing the risk; imagine how hard it it must be to pursue a real problem?
The bank has clearly recognised a real issue, protecting credit card sales online, and they’ve taken the right sort of steps to tackle it. Each part of the effort is locally optimised, but between them, they fail to present a useful interface to the customer. I suspect that the problem is that no single department is responsible for the end to end experience, and the organisations’ methods are not adequate to have the multiple departments co-operate with the end user experience in focus. I don’t think that I need to explain much further why I don’t consider this bank (one of the UK’s largest) to offer an adequate online experience.
You can find a similarly poor experience with some online stores… Like the one that allowed me to fill a shopping basket with many items and when I tried to purchase the basket, asked me to register. After registration, the basket had been emptied. I’d spent hours selecting the items (a four figure purchase of networking equipment). So I bought the items elsewhere. Users will punish you for wasting their time.
Offering Stuff But Not Letting Users Buy It
Another similar problem is often presented to users. The company web site describes a product, but doesn’t offer any visible way to buy it. This is quite common with manufacturers who sell via other channels. If you’ve spent the money to rank on search, why make it hard for users to buy? At least offer a list of vendors who sell the product, ideally by the service areas that they cover… I know that I have found some products on the manufacturer’s site and had so much difficulty in finding a reseller that I’ve bought a worse product from a competitor, just because it was the only product that I could both find and buy. Manufacturers who make it hard to buy usually also make it hard to offer complaints and suggestions, so I’ve never yet made a complaint to one of these companies, and received even an automated reply. That’s just pathetic as a brand experience.
This “no way to buy” experience is common with businesses that set up two parallel sub-sites. One sub-site describes the products, and the other is the store. Typically the store has no or few descriptions, and the catalogue has no “Buy Now” buttons. This design appears to be a result of trying to overcome a poor CMS in the online store. So that product descriptions and photos can be offered, the company splits the data - but then can’t pass ordering information to the store. The result is that users have to navigate twice - once to discover what they want to buy and then again to actually buy it. The worst experience that I’ve had with a site like this, included a different assignment of items in the store - if you found the description of the product under “personal systems”, you’d have to dig hard to find that the store had assigned the same item to “small and medium sized business systems”. An exercise in frustration and timewasting that reflects poorly on the vendor.
Inexplicable Feature Packages
For paid search marketing to work, a key benefit should be captured in 95 characters. If you offer a bundle package or a collection of products… make sure that you can encapsulate why a consumer should buy this package, and then explain it on the landing page for the search marketing target.
Example? Let’s say that you sell and promote racing lawn mowers. You devise a package that consists of the “Racing Lawnmower Gazette” delivered bimonthly, discounts on tickets to races, money off vouchers on high performance mowers, and vouchers to buy third party products, such as the required purple paint that marks out your mower as the race machine that it is… How do you advertise this collection of bits, in 95 characters?
The problem is that a collection of items may be attractive to someone who knows the products, but may make no sense to a newcomer. If the collection only makes sense to a previous purchaser, then promo literature in sales packs and email newsletters are probably a more cost effective way to reach these people, than an unfocused search campaign.
But by reworking the offer, you can turn a collection of apparently random features into a single product, with a defined benefit, that you can sell in an advert. For example “Lawn Mower Racing Club/Gold Members Get Race Discounts,/Vouchers And Premium Newsletter” and a suitable landing page that ties the components into a single recognisable offer, will work better. If the advert is run without modifying the landing page, then the conversion rate will be reduced, even though all the features are present - because they aren’t explained in the same language as the advert.
The more complex the features that are combined, the more that you need to encapsulate the ideas as a single offering label, and identify the primary benefit and beneficiary. Then you can make a search marketing campaign with focus, which will work.
Summary
Every so often, you should pretend that you are a new user, unfamiliar with the business. Follow a purchase attempt all the way through from advert to delivery of the product or service and note the steps that fail to explain what to do next, and the parts where *you* know what to do, but it simply isn’t clear to a new user. Improve the process so that the natural questions that a user asks, are answered either on the page, or in an obvious link.
You should be prepared to experiment. Note that if your site works at all, then most changes that you try will make things worse. The better the site that you have, the more likely this is to be true. As Richard Dawkins said of mutation and living organisms:
However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are many more ways of being dead.
Competently conducted, a review and the testing of improvements will probably increase your conversion rates very significantly.
Material Disclosure
We do search marketing consulting and management. We find that we spend increasingly large proportions of our time advising on landing page contents and design, or web design, rather than on managing paid search. We’ve also hosted test landing pages to help clients improve their offerings without the difficulties of configuring complex CMS packages for short period tests.
