Why Would Customers Pick Your Site?

Here’s an amazing fact: each time a customer clicks on your site they want to buy something from you. Yes, they chose you - maybe from your paid ad, maybe from your link in the organic listings, maybe from another source - and you have to repay their faith by giving them a solid gold reason to buy from you instead of from your neighbours on the search engine results page.

The internet’s added mobility means that searchers can click onto your site from anywhere. Unfortunately, the converse is also true and they can also click away from your site in a second. Quickly, while they’re there, how are you going to sell to these guys?

The first thing you need to do is sell! It sounds obvious, but a lot of sites online today give users all kinds of information, add-ons and graphics while neglecting to give users a reason to buy, click, subscribe or take any other kind of action. If your site can’t sell to the very people who came to your site to be sold to, then your site will never be a success.

How can you make your visitors buy from you? You have to stand out from the crowd. The chances are that if a user clicks on your site from the first time, he or she is researching a particular product, and will look at your site in comparison with those of your rivals. If other parameters such as cost and range are similar, then she’s likely to make her choice based on emotional appeal. If your site sticks out then you have a great chance of making the sale. If you look the same as every other guy in your field, then the user has to guess where to buy from. She might end up buying from you, or she might just as well go to Site A or Site B.

How do you stand out from the crowd? That depends on you and your marketing strategy, of course. Your USP has to be unique to you. Think about using price, add-ons, range (specialising or broadening) or whatever feels right. How you differentiate your company from your competitors is beyond the scope of this article, but whatever you do, now is not the time to stand still. Competition is growing in most online sectors; and in a world of identikit sites it pays to get ahead.

However you decide to set yourself apart, there’s one rule every site should follow. It sounds obvious but if you want your site to convert you need a clear, clean site that is easy to use. Most site owners are cottoning on to the virtues of simplicity at last, but there are still too many sites with long Flash intros, confusing graphics and Flash and Javascript files that take so long to load that many of your visitors will have long since left for one of your rivals.

There are two ways to stand out from the crowd. One is to offer your own USP to your consumers and provide them with something they can’t find anywhere else. The other is to be so egregiously bad that consumers click their back buttons before you even get the chance to talk to them. Make sure you fall in the former group.

Finally, please don’t forget to sell.