Hook, Line and Thinker

Issue 15

Bailing out

According to a recent nationwide survey* an astonishing 65 percent of consumers will not shop on a poorly designed site – even if it's the site of a favorite brand. And 30 percent even cease offline purchases from a favorite brand if they had a bad experience online. Thirty percent of consumers indicated that website design is more important that a great product and only 4 percent will shop on a poorly designed site – and then only if the price is rock-bottom.

Clearly, there can be significant financial consequences if you don't pay enough attention to user experience on your site. But how can you ensure that your website is not driving away your customers?

It is essential to keep looking at your site from the user's point of view. Invent different user scenarios and try to see your site with fresh eyes. Invite outsiders to test your site and give you feedback. Keep careful records of customer service requests.

One useful resource for analyzing your visitor behavior is the site usage report section showing where people are exiting. There may be one particular point where your customers bail out. These are typically sellable moments that you are not taking full advantage of. It's important to identify key decision-making moments and provide your customers with the nudge they need to move on to the next step.

For example, if you sell a product and find that people get as far as looking at product descriptions and then leave, perhaps adding product reviews or financing information right at that point might give them the information they need to decide to buy. If you provide a service and people are bailing after reading your service descriptions, perhaps you haven't provided a clear "next step." Clear invitations - especially qualified invitations that help the users see themselves in your site - make it easier to continue using your site. For example, a statement such as "if you are experiencing high employee turnover in your business, look here for new tools to improve retention" identifies a problem and points the way to a solution.

*The survey was conducted by Synovate eNation of Chicago for Genex this year.

FYI: I was just profiled on Seattle24x7.com, an online business community devoted to Puget Sound Internet news, analysis, lifestyle and opinion:

DotSongs: Redmond Dreamweaver Threads Online Tales into Tunes
Monsoon Teacup Rocks with a Web-ified Lyrical Beat - 7.11.03

Cash from Nigeria, Chat Room Romeo, The 'Under Construction' Blues. Each of these phrases could caption a screen-shot of the erratic events that transpire on the Internet each day. But penned by digital Web designer and singer-songwriter Jody Levinson, the idiomatic language of the Internet is being handily transformed into rollicking music and verse.

Gliding from her computer keyboard to her piano keyboard, Jody translates the word pictures that illustrate our Web lives into poignant and often hilarious lyrics. A top-flight Web weaver and Internet pundit, Jody has created online marketing domains for many of Seattle's high-tech elite through her firm TroutDream Graphics...

Read the whole article.