Do You Want a Signup or a Sale?
A few days back I wrote a post that was well received (thanks to those who emailed or commented) about the difference between selling things ("conducting eCommerce" for you MBA-types) and forcing, or "teaching’ users how you want them to perform on your site.
I’ve decided to write a bit more on each of these main topics I touched on earlier:
- Forcing email or ‘dirt’ address sign ups
- Refusing to us the power of Zip (Postal) codes
- Hiding Prices to Play a Game With Buyers
The main reason I think this deserves some more attention is that I have recently been to a couple more sites to try to buy things, and to several more sites to sign up as an affiliate for various products. There is really a common theme that runs across the vast majority of all these net commerce offerings.
Back when the earth was still cooling and IT was in the glass house’ with huge main frame machines and megatons of air conditioning to keep the tubes from overheating (yes, I was there), there were two types of people associated with computers, The elite ‘in crowd" … programmers, administrators, "tape monkeys", etc.
The "rest of the computer world" were that category of people the "in crowd" really wished would go away .. the "user" … often spoken with an inflection that indicated the speaker was trying to keep from spitting as she or he said it.
So much has changed since then, yet so much has stayed the same. Today the terms used my be customers or clients or readers, but the tone and inflection remain the same on thousands and thousands of sites.
Sign Up: A buyer sees something s/he wants to buy. Obviously you have a hand-dandy "Add To Cart" button, and a separate text link (in case they have graphics turned off) button, don’t you? Most sites do, but a surprising number insist on making people go through a signup ritual before they can even get going on the buying process. The last time you visited a brick and mortar store, did they make you fill out a form before you could go in an handle the wares? Of course not! Collect buy information when they check out … they will have to give you name, rank and horsepower to use their credit card, after all. Or make it even easier and feature PayPal, they can buy with one click. Do you want their email address, street address and phone number for some kind of misguided marketing blitz, or do you want the sale?
My advice for today is short and sweet. Get an unbiased, third-person opinion of your blog, your ecommerce site, your affiliate sales page or anything else you are attempting to make money from. Ask the evaluator to look for places your site seems unfriendly and for places where there seem to be restrictions in your carefully crafted ’sales funnel".
Put Google Analytics or some other program on pages along the path to whatever is a successful conclusion of the goal you are seeking and pay attention to where people "bail out". When they leave, they aren’t stupid or stubborn, they are sending you a message … are you astute enough to ‘read’ it?
And finally, do not make it your goal to force a user to leave data … aside from their credit card or PayPal data. Time enough to ‘back sell’ or ‘up sell’ after they have made a purchase and become your warm friends. Even ‘free stuff’ in the order page is stupid beyond belief. If you knew how many times I have been to a sales page, with the firm intention to buy some super-sounding solution to a problem I wanted to cure, and then left, without buying, because the seller offered to load me down, for free, with $207 worth of this, and $1997 dollars worth of that … for free … it might shock you. I want to buy a book, or a piece of software, or a secret decoder ring … I don’t want a bushel basket full of "free gifts", even if they are truly (which may gifts are not) free.
Sell me what I came for, do not send me through an obstacle course … we’ll both be better off.
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