1) Exhibit genuine interest in finding out and understanding your prospect’s inner motivations. This isn’t manipulation. Let him know that you’re working to find out what he wants and needs.
2) Establish trust. When working on the first step, your prospect will begin to notice something unique about you. You’re not trying to “technique” him. You truly want to help. Trust begins to develop naturally.
In this video Carl and I discuss the importance of identifying your target market or your ideal customer. Our experience has been that clients who spend the time identifying their target market achieve higher conversion rates than those that don’t. Targeting all of your messages to appeal directly to your target market gives a certain focus to everything you write – your blogs, articles, PPC ads – which means that your target market is more likely to respond – which means more conversions for you. We hope you enjoy the video.
If I could show you how to increase your conversion rate by 25%, would you be interested? If I could promise that you would receive detailed support throughout the process, that it would be easy, and that it would be absolutely free, how much would that increase your interest? You would be crazy to pass up an offer like that right?
In Always Be Testing, Eisenberg and Quarto-vonTivadar persuasively argue that nurturing a culture of testing, specifically using Google Website Optimizer, can achieve results like these or better.
I love the idea of instituting a culture of testing, because it implies that in order to achieve success, you must commit your business completely to the idea of continual testing over the long term rather than simply running a few tests to see what happens and giving up if you don’t see immediate results.
Developing a culture of testing also demonstrates a commitment to determining the best practices for your business as an individual entity. The term “best practices” can be deceptive, leading companies to believe that what works well for giant corporations will automatically work well for every business.
Your website’s bounce rate is an indicator of how your website impacts viewers at first glance – do they stay or do they go?
If your bounce rate is high, take a closer look at your website design, content, and usability in order to improve your user experience. As you make changes you’ll likely be rewarded with increased conversion rates as well as reduced bounce rates.
How do you really know what things are most important to your audience, and what will be the easiest and most appealing for them to use? You can find out about this through user testing. Testing will let you know what does and doesn’t work about your website, and what is distracting or misleading for your visitors.
Usability testing consists of showing your website to possible users and asking them to perform some common tasks while noting where they run into trouble.
From there, it is your task to try and fix the problems that testing demonstrated without creating any more—which can become quite the juggling act! For this and other reasons, testing needs to be an integrated part of your website planning and design. It is definitely not a last minute operation to try and eliminate all the usability issues that a website has. It is important to note that although things may seem perfectly obvious and navigable to you, you have been working on it since its inception. Your high level of familiarity with the site will make you a biased observer.
How do you test? There are a lot of different ways. With time and available funds, you can hire a professional to design and run tests for you. This is, of course, the best way to use testing to its fullest potential. However, oftentimes you may not have the resources available for this sort of testing. This is where quick and dirty form of user testing shines. It is a lot less thorough and precise than traditional testing, but it will work to identify the major usability problems present in your site.
Most of what testing takes is time and patience. You need to be able to watch someone attempt to use your website without interfering or giving directions. The entire point is to find out where they get stuck or confused, not to get them through the task of locating a product info page. You can feel free to avoid fixing minor problems that only cause a momentary pause in site usage; what you need to focus on are the big problems. These range from problems in navigation to something so basic as being able to tell from a glance what the site is all about.
User testing is an essential task of designing a website that is user-friendly, which avoids making anyone think.
Two very helpful websites, where you can learn more about usability, are: