NextStage's Joseph Carrabis writes in with six steps to make your website a target customer's destination-of-choice.

Tom Connor is a consulting economist and we both belong to a professionals' lunch group. During one lunch we talked about how differently economists and anthropologists view the art of persuasion.

Tom said, "Either decision-making is not as well understood as once thought, or modern economies have developed the 'Art of Persuasion' to a level that economists have not explicitly recognized. Most marketers talk about developing a niche, so as markets become more granular it's probably going to be more important to understand and communicate with consumers by income range, sport team loyalty, ethnic group, age group, or whatever other niche is being targeted. Is there something about the way apple pie can be marketed that can persuade me to have apple pie over chocolate ice cream instead?"

Persuade visitors to seek their goals

The arts of persuasion are as old as humankind itself and all come down to two closely linked abilities; (one) recognizing and (two) capitalizing on goal-seeking behavior. Here are six steps to persuading visitors to seek their goals on your website. If you follow these steps you'll quickly be able to tell the difference between serious traffic and casual browsers, and this means that you can stop watching people kick tires and can start turning profits.

Step One: Determine visitor goals

We recently invited visitors to our website to take a survey. Two of the questions we asked were

• What do visitors use your website(s) for?
• How effectively is your site(s) meeting the visitors' requirement?

There most chosen answer to the first question was "Not sure." Consider that answer when I share that the most chosen answer to the second question was "Very effectively." That may seem a contradiction, but it isn't. If you want to ensure a bull's-eye every time, first shoot your arrow, and then declare whatever it hits as the target. The results demonstrated that few survey participants had a value proposition for their websites but most thought the website was doing a good job of... whatever.

There are the two reasons for a visitor to go to a site: (One), to purchase and (two), to research. Unless visitors click on "buy" they're doing research. They may want to contact you, to complain or to compare your products to a competitor’s. If they're not purchasing from you, they're researching you. And if their goal is to do research, you want to change that goal to purchase.

Step Two: Make the path to the goal obvious

A fill-in, on-site search option is not an obvious way to do research. It implies the searcher knows what they're looking for. A searcher looking for 32" flat-screen wide-screen HD-ready flat-panel TVs under US$1,000 probably isn't going to type that into the search field. If they do, they know what they want and your job is to get them to the "buy" button as fast as you can. Most people will start with "TV" and go from there. You can ask them to refine their search over a number of screens, but take note: the number of screens they'll navigate indicates how far along they are in the purchase process.

Visitors ready to purchase want to get to the price. That's their goal. They'll go through some work to reach that goal. Browsers and tire-kickers won't go to the effort.

An interface that includes a "Researching a Purchase? Click here" option is an interface that understands visitor goals. The visitor may be skeptical, but they'll also appreciate the honesty and want to be honest in return. Give a researcher this option and they'll click on it.

Step Three: Keep expectations in check

Visitors winnowing their search need to know when they'll get the results that they want. Something like "Page 1 of 5" with interim results on each page lightens the load on a visitor's mind, rather than leaving them wondering "When is this going to end?"

Once a visitor has committed to a course of action -- whether purchase or further research -- by filling out a form, a site should help the visitor achieve the goal of that action (complete the purchase, download a paper, whatever) in no more than five pages. Once that goal is rewarded, get another goal commitment in there fast -- you don't want them to wander away once you've started satisfying them. Several years of research have shown that five pages is the max the average visitor can address before losing sight of their reason for filling in the forms in the first place. This comes down to keeping expectations in check, and specifically the expectation of when the visitor can achieve a goal.

Step Four: Give visitors quick success

Keeping expectations in check is giving visitors quick successes, and people will keep on doing what they successfully did in the past. Visitors will return to and purchase from websites that make them feel successful -- even if the same product is less expensive elsewhere -- because success is a behavioral goal. Once you demonstrate that your site is going to make them successful, the visitor's ego kicks in. They'll say "I just like this site better" and won't know why.

Step Five: Make visitor goals site goals

Earlier I wrote that visitors come to your site to purchase or to research. Those are their reasons, not their goals. There's a difference.

A goal is something I don't consciously know about or recognize. A reason is what I tell myself and others when I'm attempting to meet that goal. Behavioral goals are easy to work with because they're fairly simple and direct: Ego (You'll look better driving this car), Shame (What happens here stays here), and there are many others.

Here the goal is ego-driven and simple: success. I want to be successful; you want to be successful; everybody wants to be successful. Make me successful -- even in something as simple as a product search -- and I will non-consciously tell myself that the way to be successful when I'm ready to purchase is to return to your site.

Step Six: Successful people are persuadable people

The easiest people to persuade are those with a feeling of success. They already feel lucky so they'll go for more. Visitors aren't coming to your site to make you money; they're coming to your site to be successful, to get something they want, to meet their goals. The happy by-product of you helping visitors be successful is that you make money. 

Changing someone's decision from just apple pie to apple pie with chocolate ice cream is easy.

Make it simple and easy and obvious for the person to get the apple pie. Let them know they're going to get it and they can have it. Right when they can see it and it's almost in their hands, which means they can already taste it and smell it and delight in it, suggest -- Suggest! -- that they try it with chocolate ice cream.

You'll be successful because they'll be successful, each and every time.

Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truck driver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthropology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychodynamics and psychosocial modeling - and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney among others. Currently Carrabis is CRO of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Analytics, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He's inventor and developer of Evolution Technology.