Cre8tive Flow

Last post we looked at identifying visitor goals – what is your visitor’s purpose in coming to your site? The obvious next issue is, how you meet their needs while also meeting yours?

This is a great area to learn from the successes and failures of others. Pay attention as you browse the web. What is your purpose in visiting a particular site? How well has this site done in making it easy for you to meet your needs? What exactly works (or doesn’t work)?

Now put yourself in the shoes of the owner of this website. What do they want you to do? How well are they doing at influencing you? How are they blending your goals with their goals?

Let’s try a specific example. Bill (entirely random e-commerce site owner) wants to know “how do I get people to buy more items in a single visit”?

First step – think about your visitors and their goals. How can you present additional items in a way that help their goals progress? What incentives would be most likely to influence someone with a particular goal? What is the best time in a visit to present additional purchase options?

For example, many e-commerce sites put “related” items on individual product pages. This works well for some sites, but not all.

One site I know well sells jogging strollers - a high ticket item with less expensive accessories. They discovered that for most of their visitors, the primary goal was to select a jogging stroller. Showing accessories on product pages just cluttered the pages and got in the way of stroller comparisons (and didn’t result in much cross-sell). Instead, they moved the “related accessories” to the shopping cart - after someone added a stroller to the cart, they saw a list of model-specific accessories. At this point in their buying process (big decision made), jogging stroller visitors were actually quite open to considering additional items. By first facilitating the primary goal of their visitors, this site nearly tripled accessory sales.

It can take some pretty complex data analysis to tease this information out of your web visitor data. However, it only takes very simple analysis to see if something you decide to try is working. In the case of the jogging stroller site, the owner sat down and watched a few friends try to buy a stroller, and listened to their streaming commentary as they shopped. Several people complained about the “related items” clutter, so he came up with several other places to try to put this information. He tested three different options, and one was a clear winner.

It wasn’t easy emotionally for him to make this change - as the site owner, he wanted as many people as possible viewing all his products, to see the wonderful assortment of accessories he had available. It took a while for him to understand that this was interfering with the buying process of his site visitors. Moving the accessories caused a 60% drop in people who viewed the “related accessories” - but a three-fold increase in sales.

Come up with an idea on how you could increase average items sold per visit, or whatever other visitor behavior you would like to inflence on your site (pick a simple idea!). Implement the idea, and track your sales data, or whatever other metric you would like to see improve. How did it go?

Influencing visitor behavior in the direction you want is a big, complex challenge. It gets even more complicated when visitors arrive with several different goals. The trick is to test small changes to try to impact specific behaviors, and measuring to see how you did.