Conversion101, Part 2: Know who you’re selling to

Imagine Harry on a school visit to the zoo. On the way to the zoo, Harry’s pal George tells Harry how much monkeys love sandwiches. At the zoo Harry makes a beeline to the monkey cage and offers the monkey a sandwich from his lunch box. The monkey ignores Harry’s sandwich. Why? The monkey hates sandwiches. What the monkey would die for is a nice fresh banana.

The key point here is that the customer (the monkey) is being offered something they simply don’t want. Getting to know your online customer is critical. Harry’s friend George could be your sales manager, who has told the design team exactly what his customers are like and what they need. But more often than not, the online customer is quite different from the people we know about in the physical world. Take retailers, for instance: the people who buy in-store are very different from those that buy online — they have different needs and different characteristics.

Unfortunately, many business owners are unable to accurately describe the people that would be the main users of their website. They tend to work from assumptions, which can be very dangerous. Imagine asking an architect to design a perfect family home without telling her anything about the family who will live in it. The results will be average at best: there’s no way even the best architect could come up with a perfect result without that background information.

Another important thing to understand is that your customers can wear a number of hats: they can be explorers, hunters, trackers or transactors. Each of these roles has very different requirements that need to be fulfilled.

The simple message here is to find out as much about your online customer as possible, and only then think about your website design and marketing strategies. You can only do this properly by talking to your customers. Try to find out about their personalities, their preferences and the jobs they are trying to do. By jobs, I mean their underlying goal from a personal perspective. For example, think about a customer buying arthritis health supplements: the job they are trying to do could be ‘stop my joints from hurting’.

Knowing more about your online customer and the jobs they are trying to do will always lead to a far more effective website. Once your website is working well for your customers, it’s time to think about how to get more visitors in the door, which is what we’ll look at next.

Conversion 101

• Part 1: Getting the website foundations right
• Part 2: Know who you’re selling to
• Part 3: Drive prospective customers to your site
• Part 4: Optimise your site to increase conversions
• Part 5: Test your site with real prospects
• Part 6: Identify and remove barriers to growth