Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Is Your Website Selling Too Soon or Too Late?
Getting the balance between answering critical questions and prompting visitors to take action is a delicate process. Is your website is stuck at one of these two extremes…
Selling Too Soon
Pushing the flashing, red ‘buy now’ button in people’s face when you haven’t answered their critical questions (who are you? What do you sell? Why should I buy?) won’t work. By all means keep a clear call to action (a clearly and uniquely designed ‘click here’ button or link), but provide equally clear links and information that will answer a prospective client’s likely concerns.
If you provide users with only two options, buy or leave, you will lose a lot of potential buyers. If you want to use a hard-sell landing page, qualify clients first using display or search ads (yes you can do this).
Selling Too Late
Another problem that some websites have is getting too caught up in the glory of their brand or company history, waffling on and on about how wonderful they are or how professional their service is and how much they value each client, and lavish them with customer service that is second to none. These kind of qualities aren’t proved by you stating them, you have to demonstrate them so keep the ego-stroking to a minimum.
Provide a clear and concise and primary call to action (you’ve gotta figure out the point of your website first of course) as well as clear information (or links to further information) that will help users justify their eventual decision to take action.
If you do want to demonstrate how great you are, client testimonials work very well in place of a long drawn out ‘about us’ page or paragraph.
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