MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Great Tips for Increas­ing Online Con­ver­sion Rates — Edu­cate and Guide Your Customers

How Many Online Stores Kill their Con­ver­sion Rates by Adopt­ing Out­dated Catalog-style Websites?

For­get about dis­play­ing your entire inven­tory to your cus­tomer. Think of your store as a “guide” and not a “cat­a­log”. Edu­cate and guide your vis­i­tors to make the right choices and you’ll see greater boosts in your con­ver­sion rates. Here’s how…

In a pre­vi­ous con­sul­ta­tion we showed you how to make sales online by directly answer­ing your customer’s biggest ques­tions. Now we’ve just car­ried out a sim­i­lar con­sul­ta­tion on a client suf­fer­ing from a sim­i­lar misfortune.

Are you mak­ing the same car­di­nal sins that 90% of ecom­merce sites are?!

HERE’S A NEWSFLASH FOR YOU — Cat­a­logue style sales web­sites sim­ply don’t work on the Inter­net in many niche areas. Too much choice and too many prod­ucts on a page can actu­ally reduce sales.

Get out of the dark ages and step ahead of your com­peti­tors by edu­cat­ing them and guid­ing them on a jour­ney deeper into your sites. This Case Study explains how.

The Client

Our client is a spe­cial­ist in prod­ucts for feed­ing cats and dogs and wish to remain anony­mous, so for the sake of this post we’ll refer to them as Autopetcare.

Here’s their Land­ing Page…

This web­page actu­ally does ok when it comes to get­ting traf­fic … BUT their con­ver­sion rate is hor­rific. Of the 15,000 unique vis­i­tors they only get 70 sales!!

You do the math (OK, that works out at a minis­cule 0.046%)

The main rea­son for this …

THE PARADOX OF CHOICE!

A cus­tomer who comes to this site is look­ing for info on a pet feeder. They have a par­tic­u­lar breed of dog or cat and want to know what type of auto­matic feeder they should pur­chase. A typ­i­cal search query is “dog feeder” or “auto­matic cat feeding”.

Remem­ber — peo­ple search for INFO and not for PRODUCTS. Yet when the vis­i­tor arrives on this site what they see is lit­tle info and instead 11 prod­uct pics.

By hav­ing 11 prod­ucts, com­plete with pic­tures and vastly dif­fer­ing prices, on your land­ing page you’re offer­ing an abun­dance or  plethora of choice that  - in fact it has the effect of rais­ing more and more ques­tions rather than answer­ing the customer’s biggest questions.

The cus­tomer might see sev­eral brands with no dis­cern­able dif­fer­ence except price.

Feeder Deluxe — $148

Ultra­Feed — $127

But the cus­tomer doesn’t care about brand names! What they want is INFO.

Here’s what could be going on in their mind:

Are feed­ers dif­fer­ent for cats vs dogs?

Is there a dif­fer­ence between feed­ers for pets that stay indoors vs outdoors

If I have 3 dogs, can I get one gigan­tic feeder rather than three smaller ones?

When you present them with prod­ucts pics with­out answer­ing their ques­tion — here’s what they do.

They click the BACK but­ton, head back to Google, and do another query to learn more.

Raise more ques­tions in their head, and you force them back to Google and per­haps on to another competitor.

Think about it … Why not offer your cus­tomers a help­ing hand and sim­ply guide them into mak­ing the right choice from a host of products.

Here’s What We’d Do

We reckon the best way for this land­ing page to con­vert would be to serve up a cock­tail of emo­tion, answer­ing the cus­tomers’ biggest ques­tions and offer­ing them a help­ing hand to the sale … avoid­ing the para­dox of choice.

When a cus­tomer types in, for exam­ple, “auto pet feed­ers” they should be led to a page that is sim­ple, highly tar­geted to their needs and has excel­lent nav­i­ga­tion so that they are most likely to convert.

Here’s what we mean — notice how impor­tant the cock­tail is engage a cus­tomer and not give too much choice.

Below I’ve out­lined 3 Great Ways for them to improve their land­ing page:

1 — Estab­lish trust

2 — Answer the customer’s Biggest question

3 — Offer them a help­ing hand to the sale

 

 

 Increase Con­ver­sion Rate  …

1) Estab­lish Trust and Appeal to people’s emotions

Tests have proven that a cus­tomer is more likely to make a pur­chase, and also a larger pur­chase, when they make the deci­sion on an emo­tional basis rather than a log­i­cal one.

Autopetcare’s ini­tial page has no ele­ment of trust in it what­so­ever — there is by no means a con­nec­tion likely to be made between the cus­tomer and this web­site on a per­sonal level. By tin­ker­ing their site and adding a pic­ture of the founder with their dog this will instantly have a dra­matic effect on the con­ver­sion rate.

The text towards the left could read:

Hi I’m Jimmy, the founder of Autopet­care and this is my beau­ti­ful 5 year old Golden retriever Lucy. I also own a cat called Geof­frey and a Budgeri­gar called Tweetie. When it comes to keep­ing your pets healthy and well fed you couldn’t wish to meet any­one more pas­sion­ate than myself.

I’ve been in the pet feed­ing indus­try for the last 8 years and know every­thing pos­si­ble there is to know about which pet feeder is right for your pet …

This will engage with the cus­tomer on a per­sonal level, trig­ger emo­tions and in the process also estab­lish the founder as the expert in the field and an author­ity on the sub­ject mat­ter. This will develop great trust for your site in the process.

2) Answers the customer’s biggest question

We showed you the impor­tance of this in the pre­vi­ous post. When some­one types in “auto­matic pet feed­ers” into Google they are search­ing for infor­ma­tion not for prod­ucts. This new page gives the cus­tomer really good infor­ma­tion with­out bom­bard­ing them with prices and end­less prod­ucts. Instead, by answer­ing the customer’s most impor­tant ques­tion, in this case, whether they are a dog or a cat owner, it allows you to give them spe­cific tar­geted infor­ma­tion and prod­ucts deeper into your website.

3) Offer them a help­ing hand to the sale

By offer­ing gen­eral, author­i­ta­tive infor­ma­tion to cus­tomers you then have the oppor­tu­nity to lead them to the sale. The links on the new page allow you to tar­get cus­tomers once you have estab­lished a rela­tion­ship through emo­tion, trust and qual­ity information.

If they click on the dog own­ers link then they can be intro­duced to spe­cific dog owner prod­ucts and rec­om­mended items. The same goes with the cats link.

The para­dox of choice has still not been avoided!

So you’ve got a great land­ing page but the job’s cer­tainly not done there. The linked to pages of your site have to answer the fur­ther ques­tions your cus­tomer has and to tar­get and seg­ment them in such a way to con­vert and get value per cus­tomer, the best way to do this is to answer the ques­tions com­pre­hen­sively and make 1, yes 1, recommendation.

The Next Step — A Tar­geted Sales Page which deliv­ers all the answers and makes solid Recommendations

You need to con­tinue to edu­cate and guide your customer

If they’re a dog owner you still need to find out cer­tain ques­tions. The site could read like this:

“Wel­come fel­low dog lover! Before we see which prod­ucts are best for you we need to find out your exact needs, what kind of fea­ture you’re look­ing for  … Are you look­ing for a water or a food feeder?

Are you look­ing for an indoor or an out­door feeder?

What size of dog do you own? Large or Small?

How many dogs do you own? One or Many?”

 Only once you know the answers to these ques­tions can you make a strong rec­om­men­da­tion safe in the knowl­edge that they have all the infor­ma­tion at their fingertips.

Rec­om­men­da­tions

#small dog, water feeder, indoor — 1 rec­om­men­da­tion

#small dog, water feeder, outdoor - 1 recommendation

#large dog, water feeder, indoor — 1 rec­om­men­da­tion

#large dog, water feeder, outdoor — 1 rec­om­men­da­tion

#small dog, food feeder, indoor — 1 rec­om­men­da­tion

#large dog, food feeder, outdoor — 1 rec­om­men­da­tion

etc. etc.  I’m sure you get the picture.

What you’re effec­tively doing is show­ing off your prod­ucts, but you’re doing it in such a way that it is so highly tar­geted and spe­cific uti­liz­ing all the info from your cus­tomer that they are likely to convert.

The Key to avoid­ing the para­dox of choice:

• Use emo­tion to develop trust and a relationship
• deliver high qual­ity information
• answer the cus­tomers biggest question
• tar­get and seg­ment through guid­ing and educating
• then make 1 recommendation

 

Do you find it impos­si­ble to choose from the 100 dif­fer­ent brands and types of salad dress­ing in your local supermarket?

Find out more with …

- Is too much choice mak­ing us miserable? »

Read more:

• Tips for Increas­ing Online Con­ver­sion Rates

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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