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Simplify Your Marketing
When I started in SEO, I worked for an affiliate marketer with over two hundred sites. Most of his sites looked horrible. White background, a couple of centered images and unformatted text at 100% width. I couldn’t believe that anyone would make a purchase decision after finding them selves on one of his sites. If I had clicked on one of his sites I would have felt very wary about ordering from such an unprofessional site. But people were. A lot of people. Naturally, when I went out on my own, I assumed that professional web 2.0 looking sites with engaging graphics and pleasing design would garner tons more sales from folks like me who would normally be turned off by sites like my former bosses. Boy was I wrong. Its the simplicity of those sites which were their asset. I looked at those sites from a web developers viewpoint instead of a marketing viewpoint.
I thought of this hard won lesson while reading an article on NicheGeek.com. Titled Seven Lead Generation Sins, two “sins” stood out for me; number 2, “Content” Websites and number 4, Boring and Hard to Read Copy. These two sins are SEO traps, especially for those of us who come from a technical rather than a marketing background. When building websites consumer psychology is far more important than site design. A visitor who finds your site by performing a search or clicking on an ad has an intention and your job is to focus that intention into a decision to buy. The easiest way to deflate that intention is by offering too many choices or confusing your visitor with dense copy. Funnel your visitor towards one simple objective, such as “call this number to order” or “click here to order now”. Cluttering a visitor’s mind with options - whether it’s product features and packages or ordering methods - creates doubt. Doubt creates time. You do not want a consumer spending a long time on your site. Your goal is to quickly push intention into action. The longer a visitor spends on your site the more likely they are to start having thoughts like “well, am I sure these are the best deals” or “I’m not sure which options to go with, I’ll check some other sites” and before you know it they click the back button and move on.
A recent anecdote from a colleague reinforced this very point. In a conversation about all of his sites and how widely they varied in sales, he mentioned one particular site of his that performs consistently without fail. That site has a very minimalist design and little content. Basically it does nothing more than tell a visitor to call a number to order. And yet this site continues to have regular, steady sales month after month. Don’t make the mistake of trying to offer too much to you customers. Stay simple and watch sales grow.
April 9th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Being from more of a web design background, I think more about making the site pleasing to the eye and informational. I hadn’t thought about it in terms of sales. It makes perfect sense to give the potential customer limited choices and just enough information to help make the sale. Too many choices, too many things to click on will cause them to end up somewhere else, instead of buying from your site.