The goal of getting customers to convert through the company website has been around since, well, we’ve had websites. But like most disciplines, it’s an art that’s always evolving. Marketing agencies and web design houses are forever cooking up new ways to help businesses extract business from the people that visit them online, and avoid missing opportunities to sell.
It should be pointed out at this stage, that a great looking website isn’t enough to product conversions. What’s needed are timely, and intelligent, marketing cues that help entice the customer to do what you want them to do.
Take a look at some of these design principles.
Avoid Choice Paralysis
End-to-end website development companies, like MBJ BERLIN , understand the importance of user friendliness. When a customer arrives at your site, they want to be able to quickly and easily find their way to the relevant product, without any fuss. Unfortunately, many businesses prevent this by unwittingly falling prey to a phenomenon that marketers call “choice paralysis.”
Offering customers choice is great, but problems often arise when customers are presented with a range of choices for a bunch of products that they’re not familiar with. According to Barry Schwartz, when customers are presented with too many options, they’ll actively avoid the thing that’s making them make a choice. This is a big problem for businesses who want to match customers up to the right product since, at any moment, they might abandon the decision-making process altogether.
A good way around this for most businesses is to use visuals to highlight the most popular product from a range, or to say that a particular product is “most popular with” a certain group of customers.
Image source Wikimedia commonsShow The Product
People find interpreting visual data a lot easier than they do reading text, and so it’s a good idea for businesses to show pictures of their product. If you’re an e-commerce store , selling children’s clothes, that might sound like a statement of the obvious. But when it comes to online services, it’s not. Most people are surprised when they find out that the majority of service companies don’t actually display images of screenshots of their core product. Instead, they rely mainly on stock photos from photo repositories to pad out their content. Being able to see the product is important, even if it is software, because people view the appearance of a product as a sign of its usability. Even if you think it looks ugly to screenshot your product and put it up on your website, do it.
Offer Trials
Almost all of the top up-and-coming businesses today offer some sort of method for their customers to try out their product, whether it’s a free trial through their website, or some other feature. It’s all part of the current trend towards “freemium” services , where users get to experience the functionality of the product, but where key useful features are withheld, unless the customer coughs up the money.
If there’s an opportunity to do this through your website, give it a go. Customers will learn how your product can help them directly, and you’ll get more buyers.
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