Q4:05 Newsletter
Educate to Convert
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Do you sell a product or service on your web site? Forget e-commerce - that's too literal. What I'm asking is: do you sell your business online in hopes of enticing customers or clients into a sale, sign-up, or registration? If so, please read on...
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Studies are constantly being conducted by individuals, firms, and analysts, to understand what drives people to buy (or "convert") when looking at a web site.
One consistent finding is that people do not want to be sold to. Though this may not come as a surprise, take a look at most sales-oriented web sites and you’ll see that they are mostly structured as straight conversion sites. Point A to Point B - wham, bam, you're done. Such sites take little time educating or informing you. Instead, they get right to the point of offering product specifications and prices.
Superficially, one might think this makes sense. But these sites leave too much to chance, believing they will win business with their lower price, or that a customer will simply like their site more; but there is much more to the equation of successful conversions.
If Everything was as Easy to Sell as the iPod...
If you’re a technology store and you sell the coveted new iPod Nano from Apple, it may be true that you do not need to do much else than put the product on the screen, offer a good price, and have an obvious ‘buy’ button. Anyone interested in purchasing the item will not need much more persuading to complete the conversion (it’s price-driven).
If however, your site is B-to-B, large-ticket, manufacturing, services, or something similar, you need to find more innovative ways to get your audience to convert. Studies have proven the best way to make this happen is to educate the consumer.
This means you need to look closely at your site, take out language that could be considered “sales” driven and point people to areas on your site where they might learn something about a product or service that interests them. If you do not currently have educational pages, get busy -- they are critical for increasing conversions.
But why does this work? People have shown a tendency to research and educate themselves via the Internet. If they find a resource that “teaches” them about a product or service, gives tips, advice, tools, etc., then they become more interested in that particular site. More importantly, you build trust with your audience and display your company as an expert in your industry.
Knowledge is Power - Convert Them Through Education
By nature, people are hungry for knowledge. They can go just about anywhere to purchase something; but if you can supply the information they so desperately crave, you will have gained an active and truly interested audience – these are the visitors that are most likely to convert (and come back). Here's some tips:
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Have a Strategy. Depending on your business and your audience, you will want to devise a strategy to offer additional information, further assistance, etc. This can be a list of references mentioned in an article, a phone number, email address, web site, etc. -- anything that allows the consumer to take the next step.
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Provide the Next Step. For some sites, the “next step” may be a conversation with a sales representative. For other sites, the next step may be additional information on a product or service. However you are able to educate the consumer, it’s critical, at this point, to lead them towards a conversion without actually selling them anything.
In the end, you have taught something to a highly interested group of visitors, and you have given them empowerment to take the call-to-action step on their own, creating conversions by education.
Learn more about Pop Art Creative Services.