The only way you can get your ideal customers to buy something from you is trust.
The person holding the credit card or checkbook, must not only like what you have to offer, but has to trust you.
They are about to hand over their hard earned money to you.
- Are they pondering?
- Do they keep coming back to your website?
- Do they keep emailing you questions upon questions?
- Why are they bothering you when all the information is on the website?
Let’s try this exercise. Now, no groaning, it will only take you a few minutes.
Load up your website on all your devices…computer, laptop, tablet and smart phone. Reset the browser to display at 100% if you’ve made adjustments to the zoom level. This is important.
Is your website guilty of:
- having tiny body text on your website…the kind that you have to zoom your browser over 125% to read? Can you read this?
- product or service photos being out of focus, very grainy and are too dark?
- being very messy with flashing ads and rainbow coloured fonts?
- not having clear and understandable product or service information
- taking forever to load?
- not having a shipping and returns policy (only if you sell products)?
- not having a Contact Us page…are you hiding something?
- not having an About Us page…are you hiding who you are?
All of these are barriers to your ideal customers. This prevents them from easily buying your products or services or at least figure out who you are, what you do and whether or not they want to get on your list.
There is so much noise out there, don’t make it any more difficult for your ideal customers to buy from you.
What do you do to fix this? It’s very simple. Do the exact opposite of the guilty items in the list.
- Have a clear styled font that is easy to read and at a good size. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just have all your body text set to Arial 14 pt.
- If you don’t have a good camera, have proper photos taken of your products or have a designer create your service images. Poor quality photos just shows the customer that quality doesn’t matter to you. You can also load up photos into Canva and apply filters to them so you can at least stylize the images so they look better…but only to a point. You should always start with good photos.
- Keep your website nice and clean. Keep distractions to a minimum. If you have a sales page, don’t have advertising banners or graphics that take customers off your website. Your sales page has one goal. To sell that widget or special service to your ideal customer.
- The mobile device is the most popular way people browse the web. If you’re images are not optimized, your web page will load very slowly and your ideal customer will give up and click the back button to get off that page.
- If you sell products or services, don’t make your ideal customer hunt for the information. Time is precious and if they can’t find the information fast, they will just click back and go to your competitor.
- If you sell products, be up front and honest to your ideal customers what your shipping and return policy is.
- Have a clear and understandable contact and about page. Make it easy for your ideal customer to learn who you are, why they should buy from you and be able to contact you with minimal effort.
Picture your favourite website where you go to buy stuff… what’s the one thing on that website that just bugs you? What would you do to change it?
Please post your answer in the comments below and I’d love if you shared this post… maybe it will inspire someone to take another look at their website.
I regularly check the loading time of my website with GT Metrix Gisele, including checking for broken links as well as do clean ups after new versions of WordPress are released because quite often things need to be tweaked.
My bug bear if one can call it such is to get interested in a product and then have to scroll down the screen forever to find the price by which time I am thinking – cut to the chase or else I’m moving on. 🙂
Hi Vatsala! I hear ya. I was on a website yesterday and I had to email the people to ask for the price. I don’t know why people hide the price like that.
Good thing I am not selling anything today, huh? lol. I agree with everything you said, Gisele: I hate small writing, but I really hate the million pop-ups to sell product when I’m looking at a site. One pop-up, I can do; however, by the third one, I exit the site and ban it from my list.
I’ve been told that pop-ups as annoying as they are, are the best way to capture leads. Sorry, not for me. I had a flip when I found out that my online chat popped up after 45 seconds. I switched that baby to 5 minutes.
Pop-ups that appear non-stop and interfere with my reading of a page, annoys me and is at the top of my list. In saying that, there is a pop-up called popupally which is supposed to be smart and friendly. hmmmmm 😉
We recently refreshed our site with a new logo & colors. we took everything you listed into consideration. I demanded larger & darker font- got it. Everything else was set to our satisfaction. Given we sell products we have had many conversations about when to list price, which platforms demand it up front or further down. Its tricky.
Right now our site is showing many sold items. In some ways that’s a good thing but I felt could be a frustration, so I requested and available items pop just enough to draw you away from the sold one next to it.
Product web design was far more detailed and requires many decisions compared to straight content or services.
Always a work in progress as is our designs.
and the website looks great!
What a checklist, Gisele. It’s amazing what clear direction – calls to action, appropriate language, services/products offered, great photos, easy maneuverability on site – can do for your biz. Thanks for a great post!
Thanks Deb
Personally I am not a fan of either “lead pages” or pop-ups. Both are irritating and annoying and usually I exit the site as quickly as possible. Sites that have a lot of “trashy” ads in the sidebars and under the posts, especially when they are unrelated, are a big turn-off for me too. I like clean and uncluttered sites. Too much information on each page, too many fonts and colours, for me at least, are just not well-designed sites. I would love to increase my font size on my blog, however, if I remember correctly, when we attempted this before it seriously messed up everything, everywhere on my site. Websites are definitely an ongoing work in progress! Thanks for the great post and the concise points to consider when either designing a site, or sprucing up an existing site.
popups annoy me…especially when you’re on the website for just a few seconds and boom… it pops in.
Hi Gisele 🙂
Awesome post ! Thinking about all of the above, I have to say that my site is doing very well, as I am careful to make sure that it loads fast that I have nothing really annoying that people want to get off lol
Great tips on what to do and NOT do!
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Glad to hear it Joan!
This is a great reminder of keeping my website where it should be. It’s now being updated for the New Year with a more focused approach and more clear calls to action. I always love to read your posts for ideas for my website. Thank you for reminding me what to do and NOT do – it not only helps me, it helps me to speak with my clients and better educate them too.
Thanks Tamara. Focusing on what works for your ideal customer is always the best way to go.
Great tips and a reminder to prioritize getting my website mobile responsive and enhance my buy button. I have much done in the background but it keeps getting bumped. So time to put it as an early 2016 objective.