First Impressions Count
I was given the opportunity to spend twenty minutes or so with several major blue chip clients this week, at a conversion clinic held by Google, with the aim of providing advice and guidance on how to improve conversion on their sites.
While a twenty minute session can never do justice to a site, or highlight all the areas that could be improved, it did flag up the issue of the all important first impression. With the exception of all but one (major retailer) all of the sites I looked at could benefit in varying degrees from paying closer attention to the messages they are conveying to users in those first few moments. As a survey reported by the BBC in 2006 stated, “you may have as little as one 20th of a second to make an impression.”
The layout and design play an important part in those first few seconds. Does this site look trustworthy? Does this company have what I need/want? What is this company offering me? You can address these issues by having a clear and simple layout, with intuitive navigation, special offers and persuasive and motivational messaging. Remember also to include a short descriptive strap line near the top of the page that says exactly what you do. One of the job sector participants, for example, has the strap line ’Our job is searching for your job’. Perfect.
Your delivery costs, delivery time frame and returns policy all contribute to the user’s perception of your brand. Companies still appear to undersell themselves by hiding key brand and purchase proposition messages way down in the site structure. Yet these are factors that could make the difference between someone remaining a prospect rather than becoming a customer – these are all part of your USP, part of your story. A major brand retailer does this very well by showing their delivery proposition at the top of the homepage, as opposed to another company who provided free UK delivery yet buried this in the ‘About us’ section.
The language and messaging you use is critical to ensuring the user knows that they are in the right place and that you have the products or services they want. It’s important to talk in the language of your customer and avoid internal speak. Keep the language clear and concise and focus on the benefits your product or service provides to your customers.
Whilst this session with Google looked purely at front end improvements, it’s vital to look at your web analytics data to see what’s really going on and where to focus your improvement plans. Ploughing on with design and interface changes without looking at the data can lead to purely subjective changes based on personal opinion rather than from insight gained from the analytics. After all, you may end up changing something that’s already working really well! The combination of using the qualitative and quantative data can also be a good catalyst for convincing senior staff and board members that change is necessary.
Finally, no website should be considered a fait accompli. Keep brainstorming and testing different elements and messaging on your site. Got an idea for a different label for a button? Not sure whether one image will work better than another? By testing different elements and monitoring the results you’ll definitely be on the right path to improving your site.
