The Salesman vs. the Order Page
October 25, 1999
Whether you have online ordering or not, many of the issues
discussed here are the same. The difference is that if you
don't offer an online order form, then the goal of your site
is to get people to pick up the phone, or email an inquiry,
rather than to click on a button. Once that inquiry is made,
of course, another step in the process begins, one that
should also be measured and analyzed.
What's a good conversion rate? I won't even hazard a guess,
as it's subject to too many variables. One thing seems
certain, however. The conversion rate for even a well-designed
Web site is bound to be lower than that for a good salesperson
who gets a chance to close a deal in person or on the phone.
Experienced salespeople know how to read potential customers,
and figure out the right buttons to push to make them buy.
With a Web site, your ordering page is your "closer," so try
to build as much intelligence and salesmanship into it as
you can.
Personalization is a good word to ruminate upon. One of the
advantages of a real live salesman is that he can tailor his
pitch to match each individual person. The potential for
doing this kind of thing on the Web is huge. The more
information you can glean about your visitors, and use to
tailor the content that is shown to them, the better. If you
know that they are logging on from California, show them a
blurb about how your lawnmowers conform to the most
stringent air-quality standards. If you know that they bought
a mower before, and now they're shopping for a grass bag,
show them a special offer for a free trash can with the
purchase of a bag...or whatever. You get the idea. The
possibilities are endless, although a sophisticated (and
expensive) content-management system would be required to
take things as far as the preceding examples. See the articles
Highly Targeted Marketing on the Web and
Web Banners Eat St. Louis!
for more detailed insights about this type of laser-beam
marketing.
Most online merchants don't have access (yet) to the kind of
sophisticated tools that actually let you target pitches to
individual visitors in real time, but many make use of
visitor registration and/or online surveys to try to
custom-tailor their sales messages. Information provided by
visitors when they register can be used to target individual
visitors, and information about your site visitors as a whole
can be a valuable source of ideas on how to improve
your site, especially if you ask good questions.
Don't try to collect information if you have no immediate way
to use it. Visitor registration, surveys and the like are
basically pains in the neck that will drive away a certain
percentage of visitors. No e-commerce site should ever
require registration - it should be optional, and rewarded
with a tangible benefit, such as a discount. And take
demographic information gathered from online surveys with a
generous helping of salt. Such information can be very
valuable, but an optional survey, or even registration
information, is far from a scientific study. Personally,
I always enter fictional information when I register on a Web
site, and I suspect many surfers do the same.
A Separate Order Page
They're lookin, but they ain't buyin!
Some Specific Ideas
|
