Failure factors generate anxiety. They create barriers. They undermine the motivation of your visitors and interfere with your ability to build a relationship. By slowing them down and forcing them to think too much, you’re tipping the conversion balance that leads prospects to click away from your site.

Success factors

Anything that makes your site self-explanatory, easy-to-use, and meets visitors’ needs based on their different motivations is a success factor. These include:

• Strong value proposition (why should I buy from you instead of your competitor?)
• Understanding visitors’ needs based on their motivation
• Benefits-oriented copy
• Easy navigation
• Obvious hierarchy
• Succinct copy
• Clear instructions
• Short, simple forms
• Scannable pages
• Incentives and credibility indicators
• Web conventions (i.e. make links look like links)
• Meaningful page titles and sub-headers
• Professional design

Success factors generate confidence and provide positive reinforcement. When visitors feel like they’re in the right place you’ve earned their trust and the opportunity to build a relationship. That’s the only way you can encourage them to read on, click to the next step, fill out a form or pick up the phone.

There’s one more success factor that doesn’t fit neatly into a bullet-point. Consider the mindset of your visitors and where they are in their buying or decision-making process.

It is important to provide content for different kinds of people; those who just want the facts please, those who respond to an emotional pitch, people who are visually oriented, etc.

Equally important, you want to provide information for browsers or people just doing preliminary research, as well as detailed info for visitors who may be returning to your site and are ready to convert.

Conversion is a process

Remember, while a conversion technically happens in a single step, it is not an isolated one. Conversion is the result of a series of small decisions and tiny steps. By minimizing the failure factors and maximizing the success factors you can tip the balance.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Design & Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.