A spot on Easy Street { series: small business marketing tips for the home building industry }
SUMMARY The first step to a spot on Easy Street is making it easy for customers to do business with you. Honestly evaluate your website to see if your customers are falling victim to one of these four common mistakes.
Originally published in Toolbox Magazine [ Charleston Home Builders Association ], Jan 2009
By Tiffany Jonas
A small firm invested a fair amount of money building a website. Imagine the proprietor's dismay, then, when he found that most home pages have an abandonment rate of 40 to 60%—and his was no exception.
"Organizations spend a lot of time, effort, and money building their websites and conducting marketing campaigns hoping to drive traffic to their home pages," write Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, authors of Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads. "All this, only to have half of those who make it that far abandon the site without clicking a single link."
Such statistics are often the result of an innocent mistake: failing to cater to your customers' needs and wants. It's all too easy to view your firm from where you sit rather than from the perspective of home buyers. To increase the value of your website, first evaluate its ease of use. Have you fallen victim to any of the following?
Menu links that make sense only to you
"Many organizations make little attempt to anticipate visitor needs," write Loveday and Niehaus. "For example, many government sites have navigation options based on their organizational structure. This seems perfectly logical to the employees, who know that building permits are issued by the Community Development department. But it's a mistake to assume that the average person will make that association."
Foggy language
Have you ever come away from a website wondering exactly what service it promoted, much less whether it would meet your specific needs or fit into your budget? Too many web visitors have been treated to vague language frustratingly short on details. Many times, companies are hoping to keep their competitors in the dark. If so, it's working so well it's keeping prospective customers in the dark, too—some of whom may give up or turn to those competitors for help! Remember, to your customers, your business doesn't exist to play cat-and-mouse with the competition, it exists to serve them.
Interminable forms
"The more fields, the less its chance of completion," Loveday and Niehaus say. "A form may start out slim and unassuming with four tidy little fields. Then someone notices the form isn't asking for a fax number, or favorite color, or some other piece of remotely useful information, and the bloat begins." Ask only for what you absolutely need. Which would you rather receive: a completed form with four essential pieces of information, or nothing at all? If you must ask for personal data that seems extraneous, explain why you're asking. If users understand the reason, they're more likely to provide the information.
Thumb-nosing forms
You've finally made it through the automated phone system and after 17 minutes of hold music, a customer service representative answers the phone. You carefully describe your problem, highlighting only the most relevant details as you build your case. Then you wait expectantly and hear… silence. You've been disconnected. Ready to howl and bang the table in frustration? Ah, then you understand the feelings people experience when they search for and painstakingly fill out a long form on a website (often the only contact method they can find), never to receive a response from a human being. Make sure your forms work and that you've assigned someone to answer all of them.
Remember this simple rule: the first step to a spot on Easy Street is making it easy for customers to do business with you.
About the author
Aio Design founder Tiffany Jonas graduated magna cum laude from the Missouri School of Journalism, a top journalism school, with a degree in advertising. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and has taken coursework toward an MBA. She is a member of Mensa, an organization for those who have tested in the top 2% of the population on a standardized intelligence test, and is also a member of the American Marketing Association and the eMarketing Association. She has been the two-time recipient of an 11-state award for design, honored at the Chicago Book and Media Show, and the New York Times called one of her book designs "well-produced and elegant." In 2008 she was named one of the Charleston Regional Business Journal's Forty Under 40, an honor recognizing individuals who have achieved professional success while contributing to the Charleston community.
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