07/08/09Editor's note: This is part three of the Internet
marketing series. The previous articles covered behavior targeting and local searches.
Howard Kaplan, Vice President of Marketing, Future Now, was one of the speakers at the Internet Retailer Conference
and Exhibition at San Jose Convention Center on June 7, 2009. His topic: Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?
Conceptually, his talk is interesting because it maps the traditional sales process and buying
process onto a Web site. This includes the buying motive, buying behavior, and buying process. By breaking down the process, you can systematically put together step-by-step a method to guide a visitor (prospect)
through your Web site and lead them to take the desired actions.
The advantages of this approach are:
Increased the conversion rate
Reduced cost of sales
Instant feedback
Ability to track the actions and make adjustment
In offline sales, if you cold call suspects, you may get 4% of the qualified prospects, of
which you may close ¼ to ½ of them. This leads to an overall conversion rate of 1-2%. For online sales, the average conversion rate is about 1-2% as well. This means 98-99% of the leads leaked out of the sales funnel.
This seems like a very inefficient process.
Persuasion architecture consists of the following steps:
Buying Motives
For example, David is learning about diamonds. So he goes to the learn about diamonds page and read through the 4C's of diamonds, he then moves to the diamond settings page to learn
about how diamonds are mounted on the setting, and then goes to the page that explains diamonds beauty is in its brilliance, at that point he downloads brochure to study further.
Natalie, however, knows
what she is looking for. She is looking for a perfect diamond. So she goes to the perfect diamond page and looks for new, fund, and fab. From there she goes to the diamond settings page to look for the setting that she
likes and precedes to find a jeweler.
By utilizing the persuasion architecture, Leo Schachter gets 54% conversion rate in contrast to 0.86% before.
Buying Behavior
Buying
behavior is influenced by personality types. In offline sales, sales people are familiar with four personality types: competitive (driver), spontaneous (expressive), methodical (analytical), and humanistic (amiable).
This can be applied to online sales as well. For example, if the site is selling movies DVDs, competitives search by actor and title, spontaneous seek top sellers and new releases, methodicals find by
genre, and humanistics care about reviews. Therefore, the web site should provide choices so that all four types can find the preferred way to search for what they are looking for.
Executing Plan
The following seven pointers provide the guideline in architecting your web pages:
1. Product images tell visitors a story
2. Test headlines and copy to speak to your visitors
3. Calls to action – give visitors a reason to click
4. Point of action assurances make visitors feel better
5. Make it obvious and expected
6. Don't make visitors wait
7. Plan persuasive architecture scenarios with scent
Measure Actions
Using Web analytics tools, you can measure the results and analyze the navigation patterns. This would give you the information you need to validate your execution and assumptions.
Readers interested in learning more about the persuasion architecture can read the book "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark". The authors are Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.
