When you go out and create a web site with an intention of selling products and services through it, you have no option but to be on
good side of buyer behavior. If you wish to succeed, that is. Funny enough, on web a lot of business owners forget that buyers do have a behavior, way they are accustomed to doing things. By now you probably have heard or experienced that just having a site, no matter how good it looks, won't convert your visitors into customers who actually buy something.Let us start with what we know about buyers:
1. Most sales are never made first time a prospect sees product or service. They are made on a subsequent encounter. Translation: it is a sure thing that unless you get that guy visiting your web site first time ever to return another day, he wont be buying anything from you. So you must make sure he returns.
2. The 80-20 rule. 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. Which 20% are these? These are people who buy from you a second and a third time and so on. It is easier to make more sales out of your current customers than new ones. Which means that your web site has to have features that, again, keep your customers coming back.
The above two facts should encourage you to think very clearly about your web site. If you have one of those sites that just advertise your product and offer no other features that encourage returning visits, you need to do some major redesign and add some features that do so. Now let us look at how buyers get to decision that they will either return another day or buy your product or service on any particular visit. First, something grabs hold of their attention. If not, they go - there are other better things to do. If their attention is taken, they have a quick look to see if they are interested. If they are interested, they spend some time. During that time spent on whatever they found that was interesting, they may develop desire for product or service or information. If they have desire, they will take action to fulfil that desire. That action is either purchasing or returning or doing something else related to either of those two. This process of attracting attention, creating interest, building desire, and getting action should be biggest - yes, biggest - driving factor behind your web site design and content.
There is a lot of ways to achieve this depending on your industry. A real estate site will not employ same methods as a parenting community. You will need to sit down and look at how you can do it best. You should visit some leading sites in and out of your industry and copy what they do (there is no point in inventing mediocrity when you can copy genius). You may also want to get a suitable consultant on this. For now, let us look at four steps in general.
Attention People will enter your site from any of your pages. Whatever page they enter through, you must make sure that headlines, design, navigation, etc grab their attention! No matter what page they get in from, they must know what it is about and get their attention engaged. Do not have those dull pages in your site just because your home page is great.
