A standardized or generalized answer to this question (How to convert a visitor to a customer) would have been a holy grail for the business world. But alas, each and every customer walking on the face of this planet has different expectations, requirements and a completely different mindset. You cannot generalize customer management. What you can do however is ensure that you provide the bare minimum that each and every customer will look for and then let the customer decide from there on. And in the online world, almost every customer first looks for a quality informative website.
Here are three stages in sequential order that best describe the mindset of an average visitor reaching a website from a search engine or some other source on the internet.
- Hopeful
- Impatient
- Frustrated/Satisfied (Result depends on the website)
Firstly, he is hopeful of finding the information/product that led him to the website. But after spending a fruitless few minutes on the home page, he starts getting impatient for he has no time to browse through the entire website. A million other equally good, if not better, websites await his coveted attention. Quick copy and link scanning follows. Lastly (usually within a couple of minutes), he is frustrated when he can’t find the information/product that he came looking for in the first place. His mind, fingers and the little mouse in command scan through the page and move the cursor closer and closer to the ‘close window icon’ (The lil ‘X’ at the top right corner of the browser).
There, another sales proposition bites the dust. Chances are high that the same person will never visit the same website again. Oh yeah, all that you heard about internet visitors having a bad memory is crap. Internet visitors have a memory like an elephant. I still remember most websites that have pop under advertising (I hate them) and avoid them like a plague.
Stage 2 and the power of words
Hopefulness is a common trait in each and every internet user. They are all hopeful of finding a better deal, a nicer website, a cuter girl. It is stage two mentioned above that can actually convert an ordinary visitor to a customer. Picture this: You reach a website looking for ‘packaging and moving services in Kansas’. However, all that you find is an enormously large webpage that has about 8 largish paragraphs of text. There are no headings, no bulleted lists, and no highlighted text. Would you be comfortable to read through the entire webpage hoping to find some information or links out of it? Not for all the tea in china.
What a visitor needs
Every visitor coming to a webpage should be greeted by high quality personalized content. Content that is easy to scan through, is separated into small chunks, has powerful headings, is linked to other useful pages on the website, has relevant highlighted keyword phrases, is informative, original and written for human beings (but optimized for search engine bots) only. The visitor should either find what he is looking for, in the first couple of minutes on the page or should be attracted to stay on the website for a sufficiently long period to read through the sales copy and then make a purchase. Either ways, it’s the content that is going to make him do it.
Isn’t that what every customer on the face of this planet looks for and deserves?
Isn’t that the mantra for success followed by successful corporate for years?
Then why not employ it in your online business as well?
Like Nathaniel Hawthorne once said, ‘Easy reading is damn hard writing’. (Source: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/nathaniel_hawthorne/)
The power of content in the online world is evident from the success of blogging as a business tool. Today, there are bloggers who earn six figure incomes each month solely from their blogs. Why is the Wikipedia so popular? Why does Google scan through each website before deciding whether to list it or not? The secret lies in the content. The relevancy of the content to your website is not only important for the visitors, it is equally important for your site to be accepted for listing in search engines. Now that’s an entirely different topic. Browse through my articles on content and SEO to know more about it.
