The more SEO grows up and becomes part of larger disciplines like inbound marketing , the more sales metrics take center stage. Overall this is a good development as traditional KPIs like rankings and traffic are too volatile and prone to misunderstandings by now to be rendered useless in many business use cases. On the other hand an approach solely based on sales is limiting the perspective too.
Some websites are downright pushing people into the sales funnel while neglecting the overall user experience.
How can we improve visitor satisfaction in general so that not only customers leave our website happy and likely to spread the word or at least come back?
Can I help you? Depending on how well dressed you are and what the particular store employee has eaten for breakfast this perfectly innocent question can get a bit overzealous. Personally I tend to dress in casual attire and sometimes go even without a shave for a day or two. So when I enter a storefront I often get approached from the start with a mean look and the question above sounding like an affront with the underlying meaning of “what the hell do you want here?”. Lately this is exactly how I feel on many websites, especially online stores too.
Many e-commerce sites make you feel awkward and out of place.
Buy or Die?
They ask you to log in or sign up, they force a language choice on you, they lead you right down to the cash register. They want to literally trap you in inside that sales funnel. The landing pages are clinically clean and without distractions. The calls to action are big and colorful. The pricing is ever-present. The customer journey gets tracked and optimized as a whole too. That’s all fine, to some extent. Sales focused conversion optimization is not everything though. What happens to the people who don’t buy? Do they get treated like intruders?
Even on e-commerce sites it’s not just about the sales.
Counting Micro-Conversions
Proper conversion optimization focuses on several types of micro conversions too. You want to convince people to stay longer and view more pages. Visitors staying for 5 minutes or more can be counted as conversions for example. Likewise visitors who have viewed 5 or more pages are a perfect example of a micro conversion. Unless they are lost on your site and frantically trying to locate something they really like your site and are perusing items in large numbers.
So it’s neither just about the sales funnel nor solely the customer journey.
More Than Just Customers
On your site it’s about the visitor journey and you have to accept from day one that not all visitors will become customers. That’s not the point. You don’t need just customers. It’s not the real life store anymore where people who don’t buy either steal or stand in the way of real customers.
Online every visitor is a positive asset.
Some will buy, others will come back and buy next time while some will never buy anything but tell their friends instead or simply vote you up on social media. In short you have to make people
- stay longer
- view more
- return
- remember
- spread the word
Yeah and maybe buy the next time too. The more you are into luxury products or high end pricing the more you will have to take care of the not paying bunch. Just think about supercars. How many people spread the images and news about the latest Bugatti, Lamborghini and Ferrari and how many of them actually buy one? Do you want to close your site for all people other than the few dozens who buy in such a case? No, of course not. You need the support of the others too.
The trick is to make everybody feel welcome.
Embracing Non-Buying Visitors
On the Web it doesn’t matter that much whether a visitor buys something or not. Especially as for many sites the conversion rate for sales is like 2%. Are 98% of your traffic worthless? Only when you do not ascribe value to it.
So while you offer a clean web design that leads the few buyers who know what they want and are ready to buy to the shopping cart, make sure all the other people have plenty of choices and some additional incentives to browse through your site.
Amazon is of course the leader here.
You get one click check out but also a large array of products. Amazon remembers the items you have viewed last time and suggests you news ones based on your former choices even when you’re not logged in. Yes, cookies can add some positive user experience too! Amazon.com allows me to browse the American or British site while asking me whether I want to visit the German version (as I’m in Germany) without forcefully redirecting me.
Right there on the frontpage I see a “What Other Customers Are Looking At Right Now” row of products. On the top left beside the logo I have a “Recommendations” link. I’m curious so I “sign in”. Even though I don’t have any, after all I shop on Amazon.de usually I see something interesting there because Amazon shows me the “top sellers”. Ender’s Game is among them. I consider buying it.
Amazon hasn’t adopted the “buy or die” trend.
They are still rather into encouraging discovery. Plus they are keen on user engagement. They capitalize on user reviews like not other site. Do you encourage it too? Or are you disappointed when someone does not proceed down the sales funnel immediately and efficiently? Are you selling more than Amazon? Then you are doing it right. In case you sell less, you may want to reconsider your one-sided “buy or die” approach.
Creative Commons image by Ludovic Bertron
