Most websites convert only a fraction of visitors into customers. According to Clickz, the average online conversion rate is around 2.3%, with the highest at approximately 9% (only a few websites go over the 10%-15% mark). In this article we focus on conversion rate optimization techniques and touch on the following topics: demographics, psychographics, unique selling proposition, performance gaps, website redesign, persuasion architecture, testing and conversion paths.
Knowing Your Customer
To sell better you must know your customers better.
Demographics:
Are your customers mostly females or males? Males tend to be highly logical and reason their decision with concrete facts. Women tend to be more emotional and rely on feelings for decisions, thus to influence males better your must have concrete facts and to influence females you must affect emotions.
What is their income/occupation? Obviously, the more your customers make the more you can charge them, especially if you’re in a position to command a higher price (think SONY vs unknown brand).
Education? Are they very intelligent?
Age?
Location?
Psychographics:
What are their personalities? Myers Briggs devised a psychological tool called the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, with 4 main character types and 16 different personalities. These 16 personalities constitute the dominant human operating systems, each one with unique preferences for relationships, decision making, work etc. Knowing all personality types and predicting their responses takes a few years of study and practice, so start off with the four basic characters. Wikipedia describes them, and you can also find out more here.
Customer Goals:
What do your customers want to achieve? If you don’t know what your customers want, how can you offer solutions?
What problem do they want to fix?
Other Questions:
What benefits are important to your customers? Knowing benefits allows you to advertise those benefits and spike interest in your prospects. Sometimes benefits can be below the surface and require some analysis. For example a person looking to lose weight wants to look good, but why? Perhaps to improve their ability to attract to potential partners.
What questions do your customers often ask? By knowing the questions your customer ask, you can address them right in the website copy or in the FAQ section. I found that having answers directly in the copy works better than putting them in the FAQ.
What are your customers' objections? People are going to naturally resist your product and look for justifications to disqualify it. Some of these may include a lower price offered by competitors, quality concerns, shipping, returns, etc. Bring up objections yourself, admit them and offer responses in order to disarm the customer.
What are their main frustrations with the problem or other products? If customers are frustrated with a competitor’s service, quality or other factors, use these points to upsell your offer.
What are your guarantees? Sometimes an unconditional 100% refund guarantee is required to make the sale (depending on the product). If you offer services, things get more complex, but direct referral to past and present clients work well.
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