Marketers Must Focus On Site's 'Persuasion Architecture'
- by Mark Walsh @markfwal, March 12, 2008
That question was the focus of a webinar Tuesday hosted by Google and Future Now Group Inc., which specializes in site optimization, outlining key concepts and site components to test to help increase conversions.
In building a site's "persuasion architecture," Future Now co-founder Bryan Eisenberg explained that marketers must tailor sites to their users. He divides site visitors into four distinct personality types: competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic.
On a movie site, for instance, a "competitive" visitor might be looking for a specific title, while a spontaneous user goes right to the biggest hits, and a humanistic one prefers to browse by genre. So the site might include elements that satisfy those different types of shoppers, with a search box for finding specific films, prominent placement for the biggest releases, and a catalog of films by genre.
A site can aim to embrace all the basic online personality profiles or skew toward one or two, depending on its audience. "Know your profiles," Eisenberg said.
Another conceptual framework he described was a "hierarchy of optimization," based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, to determine which aspects of a site should be addressed first. Shaped like a pyramid, the optimization hierarchy includes factors such as whether a site is usable, intuitive and persuasive. Eisenberg lists the most critical needs at the bottom of the pyramid--starting with a site's functionality.
Problems affecting functionality should be fixed first, whether it's things like "404-Not Found" error messages or a broken shopping cart feature. Such obstacles almost guarantee that consumers won't convert.
At the top of the pyramid is persuasion--the high-impact elements that push a consumer to buy a product or service or take some other type of action. The other factors won't matter if the site can't close the deal.
Translating the conceptual into the nuts and bolts of testing a site, Eisenberg laid out several key steps for site owners. These include testing different product images and descriptions to best showcase a site's inventory. In addition to static images, video and Flash animation are other formats to be considered. "Product images are the most persuasive element," Eisenberg said.
Providing clean copy--whether in product descriptions, headlines or white papers--is also critical, but site owners can experiment with different approaches. That might include testing bulleted paragraphs against bigger blocks of text or taking a more formal rather than conversational tone in copy. "You can see big gains from this," said Eisenberg, who overall said that site optimization techniques can help marketers push conversion rates up to 10% or higher.
Eisenberg also recommended that sites focus on providing "point of action" assurances-particular features that help smooth the way to a sale or other conversion. These might include things like customer reviews, upfront shipping costs and in-stock message that anticipate customer questions and help clear any obstacles to online buying.
The shopping cart button on e-commerce sites itself deserves careful consideration, according to Eisenberg. Factors to be tested include the wording, shape, size, style, color and iconography of a button. The color, for instance, should be in high contrast to the background, which is why they're often red.
The presentation is one in a series of webinars Google has hosted to help promote its Google Website Optimizer product. The free software is designed to help site owners test-drive different landing pages to determine which designs drive the most conversions.
Google considers Website Optimizer the third leg of the Web marketing stool with AdWords dedicated to driving Web traffic and Google Analytics focused on measuring Web activity.
