Copyright 2005 Liz MicikImpulse shopping in
checkout lane may be what drives grocery store profits, but chances are it doesn't do a thing for your business. Your customers are far more likely to need up to nine contacts from you before they trust you enough to buy from you.
Nine!
That's up sharply from when I entered marketing field lo those many years ago, and you should expect that number to continue rising over your career too. The good news is that there are some very simple steps you can take to eliminate some of those contacts, or at least shorten time span from initial contact to first sale.
The first step is to acknowledge that we've created our own monster in our efforts to build our businesses. On average, we’re bombarded by more than 3,000 sales and marketing messages everyday. That's 3,000 times a day someone waves something in our face, or shouts something in our ear in an effort to get us to buy this, do that, and spend rest now.
Next, think about how you react to this daily assault. As consumers (for ourselves or our company), we’ve all gotten very good at tuning ads out online. It's a basic survival tactic.
Like warriors on a dawn patrol in enemy territory, we'll jump from a site two seconds after we land there if we catch a glimpse of an annoying animated gif whosits or doodad in corner of page. We use weapons like search engines, popup blockers, personal portal homepages and newsreaders to filter out all but information we want to see right now.
But we do more than try to avoid them. We sneer at blinking yellow “security alerts” that offer to eliminate adware deposited on our computer when someone clicks on something like a blinking yellow security alert message. We roll our eyes at Hollywood style hype. And our response to claims of “new and improved” anything is a yawned, “yeah, right.”
We’ve become jaded, cynical, distrustful, and focused on nothing but fending off all distractions between us and information we’re online to retrieve. Is it any wonder we arrive at end of our day exhausted, with cramped hands, hunched shoulders and clenched jaws?
