Lesson 1: "The Basics of Designing for Conversion", CLICK HERE

Lesson 2: "The Great Squeeze", CLICK HERE

Lesson 3: "Designing for Your Demographic", CLICK HERE

When building a web site to convert sales, one must establish comfort in the visitor and avoid the frustrating pitfalls that commonly plague online merchants. It is important to remember that keeping visitors on a site and guiding them through the sales process is just as important as getting them there. Several tips for visitor retention and monetization are outlined below.

Design

Aesthetically, a site should be clean, clear, and attractive to the eye, saving bright colors only for important sales process features such as the headlines, offers, important details and purchase links. Avoid offending visitors with vibrant animated gifs or flash advertisements. Not only are these disruptive of the sales process and may lead visitors away from your site, but they also distract and annoy the visitor causing them to leave prematurely.

Dimensions

Different screen resolutions require that you test your site to make sure that all relevant information is available at as low as 800x600 pixels. Make your site no wider than 750 pixels to ensure that no side scrolling will be necessary. A visitor that has to scroll for every line of text will likely leave. Use your space wisely. It’s probably better to have a small amount of empty space than to cram every detail into a small area. On the other hand, you don’t want to leave out any valuable information.

Load Time and Compatibility

Be sure your site loads efficiently and correctly on all major browsers through a dialup connection. Many novice site designers are reviewing their work over broadband connections. Just because an image is small does not mean the file size is small. It is recommended that you compress your images so that your site loads in under 5 seconds on dialup when it is not cached on your drive. Try using jpeg format for images containing gradients or many colors such as photographs. Use gif formatted images for buttons and text art containing only a few colors. Also, try to use HTML color whenever possible instead of images.

Sales Process

Clearly present an attractive offer such as a discount or free sample and establish a sense of urgency. Your offer is your hook. Make certain it is attractive or you have nothing to help you stand out against your competition. Accompany your offer with a testimonial or guarantee to establish trust and summarize the features and benefits of the product. You can provide more details about the product on a different page for those who want to know more, but it is advisable to keep the front page of your site simple and sales oriented. Purchase links should always be visible.

Purchase Process

Be sure your purchase process is simple. Remember, at this point you have the sale. You should be doing everything in your power not to lose it. A visitor should be able to get from your home page to an order confirmation in no more than 3 clicks. This may sound difficult, but it can greatly increase your conversion. A huge mistake that is being made in online marketing is the long and involved registering process and subsequent requirement of customers to login. The so-called benefits of this feature are to save customer information and acquire opt-in information. However, this process can greatly affect conversion. If you must have customers register, gather their information after they have entered their credit card number and avoid having them enter the same information twice.
Billing information should always be gathered first. Make the customer commit to the purchase prior to entering shipping information or up-selling other products.

Monetization

Monetization means squeezing additional revenue from sources on your site other than your primary offer. Unfortunately, many have misconstrued this concept to mean that one should place affiliate banners throughout the site through which commissions can be earned. This is a huge mistake. Try placing related offers on the order confirmation page or exit pop-under window. This way, you can sell your product and make affiliate commissions without disrupting the sales process. Additionally the purchase can be followed by auto-response emails with special offers or reminders on a periodic basis to retain customers.

You can also earn additional revenue or gather valuable information from a non-buyer. For example, if a customer does not have a cookie in their browser indicating they purchased from your site, a pop up could be displayed which offered them an entry to win a product if they sign up for a newsletter. This is an offer many can’t refuse. Choose something you can afford for your sweepstakes, and don’t give it away until you know that the information you’ve gathered is worth the wholesale price of the product. You can then promote your product in your newsletter and retain the ability to promote your offer in the future.

Monetization can also be achieved through the use of an up-sell. Up-selling items allows you to offer the visitor a complementary item during the purchase process. These items should require a minimal commitment on the part of the customer and minimal explanation on the part of the merchant. For example, if a customer were purchasing a snowboard online, a snowboarding magazine could be offered at the point of purchase. This should only require the customer to click off a single button indicating that they want the additional product. The information can then be fed securely from the form on the merchant’s site to the purchase form for the product on the partner’s site through an affiliate link so that the merchant can earn commissions and thus monetize the site.

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Affiliate marketing depends on several factors to be successful. Mainly, an experienced affiliate wants to influence the visitor to click on the banner or text link they have placed to refer traffic to the merchant’s site. Many factors are involved in squeezing the highest conversions out of an ad campaign. In this column, we will talk about the first point of influence over the visitor, the advertisement itself, and more specifically jpeg and gif banner ads.

The most difficult aspect of designing a banner ad is to wisely use the space you have to work with. If an advertisement is too vague, it is unlikely to convert. If it is crammed with to much information, it will never attract the attention of the visitor. With banner ads, one must strike a delicate balance between providing enough information for the visitor to know what the offer is while not cluttering it, and still leaving some information untold to entice the visitor to click and find out more. Even larger banners provide limited space to work with, and most likely the merchant would like to provide more information than is possible in the given space.

For a very simple way of determining what information one should include on a banner we can use the simple reference to “who, what, why and when”. “Who” refers to the demographic your banner is targeted to. Frequently, you can provide this information by simply including a picture. For example, an advertisement for a multi-vitamin for the elderly may include a smiling, healthy-looking older woman, where as an ad for a fitness supplement may show a professional cyclist. “What” refers to exactly what the product is that you’re offering. By providing the visitor with this information, one can ensure a higher conversion to the sale as the visitor knows precisely what the advertisement is for, and is therefore more likely to purchase following the click. It is also advisable to provide the features and benefits of the product or service that is being offered to create the sense of a clear advantage over competing products. “Why” tells the visitor precisely why they must try this product or service. This can be supported by testimonials, guarantees, and other supporting facts that give the product or service validity and value. “When” is simply a call to action, such as “click here” and can also include a sense of urgency, such as “while supplies last” or an expiration date for the offer.

The most difficult part of creating a banner with all or most of this information is doing it in a way that doesn’t clutter the given space while maintaining eye appeal and visibility. Try to separate unrelated text as much as possible. This can be done by sectioning off the creative with an image, or by changing the color of the text and its background color.

Now we will apply these suggestions to an example. Let’s pretend the merchant is a website containing answers to common medical questions. Firstly, we’ll consider the demographic, otherwise known as the “who”. For this banner, a good choice for this would be a picture of a doctor, or possibly a patient. The banner could then ask a simple question such as, “Should I get a flu shot?” For this example, we will envision this as white text on a black background. Considering the recent flu shot shortage, this headline would attract the attention of a very large audience. Just below the headline a call to action could be placed on the banner such as, “Find out who should be receiving flu shots, click here”. This time we’ll use black text on a white background. The contrast of colors will separate the banner into parts, making it easier to read, and more likely to stand out to the visitor. This banner could also make reference to the overall purpose of the site, such as “Search over 10,000 medical questions and answers”. Also, it is necessary for us to provide an offer related to the headline. In this case, we may be offering a “free guide to conquering the flu”. This creates even more incentive for the visitor to click on the banner.

It may sound difficult to include all of this information on one banner advertisement, and it is. Banners may seem simple in nature, but the difficulty comes in when deciding which information will be included, and which information can be saved for the landing page. If it is impossible to include enough information to entice the visitor to click, or if one desires to catch the visitors’ attention, animation may be used to present all of the information. Be careful though! Animation has the potential to sabotage your click conversion if it is implemented improperly. Be certain that you use your animation for only two purposes, either to capture the visitor’s attention, or to provide supporting features and benefits. At any given time, the visitor should be able to see the “who, what, why and when” and one should save the animation for additional benefits that add validity or value to the offer. This ensures that even if the attention of the visitor is only on the advertisement for part of the animation, they will still understand the offer, and will therefore still be likely to click on it. Avoid using rapid animation or continuously looping banners that do not utilize a pause of four seconds or more between cycles. Not only can these banners be annoying to the visitor, but affiliates are also less likely to deploy them.

Though the preceding guidelines are rather simple, they are of the utmost importance for producing advertisements that convert well. Even the most experienced designers can take this advice into consideration and should cross-reference all of their banner work with this simple advice.

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When designing a website, one must take the intended audience into careful consideration. Whether the website is business to business or business to consumer the design will require a format which caters to the desired type of visitors, and it must also guide them through the intended process as comfortably and efficiently as possible.

Firstly, take into account whether the target demographic is business or consumer oriented. In the business-to-business arena, and particularly in the business service industry, the primary goal is to establish trust in the prospective client. Business-to-business websites usually avoid the kind of hype and pizzazz that a consumer website may have. A highly sales oriented website promoting an immediate purchase is simply not appropriate for establishing trust to promote a sale that may require a large risk on the part of the purchaser. The prospective purchaser will perceive this risk as being higher when little information is given to back up any claims that have been made. It is best in this case to provide easily accessible information to the visitor to make them feel more comfortable with the offer before presenting any extensive hype about the product or service. It is also advisable to make testimonials and/or case studies available to the visitor as well as comparisons with the competition. In addition, a more visual tactic for establishing trust would be to present the logos and names of well-known, current and past clients. This provides instant visual references for the visitor and can help to keep his or her interest long enough to make the sale or to establish contact. If the product or service is complex or the value is not immediately obvious, it may be advisable to lead the customer to call and talk to someone one on one. Highly specialized services and products are likely to present a lot of questions in the customer’s mind. Most of these questions would be better off answered over the phone rather than having the visitor perform a tedious search through FAQ pages.

In contrast to business-oriented sites, consumer targeted sites offering low risk purchases should make the process of purchasing an item as easy and straight forward as possible. Clear presentation of a good offer immediately on the home page will help establish a different kind of trust in the visitor than that of a business-to-business site. This type of trust tells the visitor that they are receiving a fair price and quality service. A simple 2-3 step sales process will help retain the customer so that they come back in the future to make more purchases. In consumer-based websites, ease of use and good value mean everything for customer retention, and customer retention means everything for robust profit margins.

Knowing how much information to present about the product or service is critical in working with the attention span of the consumer. Firstly, one must take into consideration the financial risk that the product presents to the consumer. Obviously, a customer looking to purchase asset protection online, for example, would not jump into the purchase without knowing that he or she can trust the service. This scenario presents a huge financial risk on the part of the visitor. In this case, one would want to provide complete information about the service and comparative information regarding the competition. Presenting a low price point immediately in this case can actually break down any trust that has been established as it cheapens the offer and its reputability. The consumer may have many questions as well. For this reason, the entire emphasis would be to establish enough trust so that the visitor calls or acquires some form of consultation.

By contrast, a low priced item such as a magazine subscription can be sold with very little information because it does not require a large financial risk on the part of the visitor. Also, if a product is well known due to extensive branding, the visitor may not need as much information before being pushed towards the purchase. In these cases, the emphasis should be put on the value of the offer and the price point. Visual cues such as starbursts, bright red writing, arrows, etc. can capture the visitors’ attention just long enough to present the offer to them. Save these tactics for impulse buys and use the information you acquire from the visitor to promote other offers on your site through auto-responders and/or newsletters.

Lastly, one must take into consideration the wealth of his/her average visitor. Most sites are aimed at the majority, which in the US is a middle-income family. However, there are products and services that cater toward very high-end customers. If this is the case, price point is not nearly as important. In fact, wealthier visitors tend to directly correlate price point with quality. Because of this, a low price point may actually deter a wealthy visitor from the purchase. For wealthy visitors, don’t present the price immediately but make it available, and pay much more attention to the style and artistic aspects of the site.

Designing for the proper demographic is one of the more difficult aspects of creating a site that converts well. There is much to take into account including the audience, industry, the financial risk of the visitor, and more. The preceding suggestions are just the beginning as far as special considerations that must be made to ensure high conversion rates. Be as aware as possible of the mind state of the visitors. Jumping into the visitors’ shoes, so to speak, is the best way to really know what will work. In fact, a great way to do this is to simply research your competition from a visitor’s perspective.

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