NextStage's Joseph Carrabis lays out how to design your site for your current customers, and why it's crucial for the design to be different.
In my last column, we looked at how to turn a typical FAQs page into a series of not-so-obvious conversion tools. We're going to continue creating some not-so-obvious conversion tools, this time by figuring out if your site visitors are Tourists or Locals and designing for each.
Tourists ask for directions, locals give directions
I've written previously about the notion of a website Tourist. We're going to expand that definition to delineate it from a website Local.
Most people have been tourists at some point in their life. Being a tourist can be great fun or a great bore, depending on expectations, the tour guide, where you're staying, how knowledgeable the concierge is, et cetera. Most people using the internet have learned to deal with lowered expectations, "where you're staying" translates into how easy a site is to navigate and how well it helps the visitor achieve his or her goals. The tour guide is the website's taxonomy (layout), and, for most people, the concierge is Google or some other search engine.
Tourists don't know a lot about you or your site when they first visit, which means you have a limited amount of time in which to capture, retain and brand them before they go back to the concierge and ask for another recommendation. They may have asked for "vacations" when they really wanted "Walking Tours of Dublin, Ireland." You may be able to help them, but not until you know more.
They can be gone before you can learn enough to bring them in.
Locals, though, already know you'll fulfill their expectations, don't need a tour guide, know your website's taxonomy, and therefore can navigate it easily in order to achieve their goals quickly. Locals don't bother with the concierge because they know you can help them, so why go elsewhere?
Both Tourists and Locals can be vocal, but the real separator between Tourists and Locals is that Locals will tell you what they want and how to make things easier for them. Tourists have nothing vested in your making things easier, so if you hear from them it'll be when they close the door on their way out.
Here's an example: a pet supply company with a print catalogue started an online store. One of NextStage's usability wizards has been a catalogue customer for several years (she owns dogs, cats and horses) and was willing to make the switch to the company's website.
Until she browsed it.
She called them and finally got in touch with their senior web person, introduced herself, gave her background and credentials, and suggested two changes that would make the transition from print buyer to web buyer a snap. The company instituted the changes and sent her a wonderful thank you note... and bags of dog treats, kitty towers, catnip, chew toys, braiding combs, sweat scrapers and hoof picks.
This woman was a Local. She knew the company had good products at good prices. She also knew their website wasn't optimal. She was vocal. She told them how to fix it. They can't wait for her next call.
Designing for Tourists
Most companies already have Tourist-Friendly sites. Tourist-Friendly sites are designed to get information from the user quickly. Tourist-Friendly sites focus on qualifying, nurturing and closing visitors. The design belies the fact that the visitor might be on the site only once and that the visitor has to be placed in the sales cycle quickly in order to justify the site's existence. Typically, these sites require high traffic volume because the conversions numbers are low.
Designing for Locals
Local-Friendly websites aren't concerned with closing, nurturing or qualifying in the traditional sense. They want to help. Specifically, they want to help or offer more to visitors who have already provided value by purchasing, providing contact information, et cetera. Sales people will recognize this as a chance to create a continuous revenue stream. CSRs will recognize this as CRM and providing a channel with which to touch the visitor. All businesses that want to touch their website customers repeatedly can benefit from providing a Local-Friendly site.
Secrets of Local-Friendly Design
Local-Friendly site designs follow some simple rules in order to meet the goals of all parties concerned. First, they are generally smaller than their Tourist-Friendly cousins and are simpler to both navigate and create because they're designed to provide information rather than flash.
Keep in mind that a properly designed Local-Friendly site is a good offline conversion tool, too. Many companies' CSR staffs and offline sales people are told to direct potential customers to the corporate website before, during and after the sale. However, offline or telephoning customers are usually directed to a Tourist-Friendly site. Imagine giving a potential customer, especially one experiencing buyer remorse, access to a "backdoor" site that's A) easy to navigate and B) explains easy-to-implement, non-obvious and real benefits to using your products or services. Now you have a double-use marketing tool that goes well beyond its original purpose.
How to do Local-Friendly Design
- Write down to or three bullets that describe what you do or offer in very high-level terms. We both know you offer more than two or three things, and you need to make this short and to the point.
- Remember what it was like the first time you gained entry to an exclusive club? How about the first time you went out to dinner with your parents and you paid the bill? Put that feeling into words and pictures that are aligned with what you do or offer. This becomes your intro page for first-time locals. Your goal is to be Local-Friendly, which means expert, non-technical (save technical stuff for whitepapers) and both highly and quickly informative.
- Design the site to be very horizontal. A good rule is five pages across by one page deep after the welcome page. This means the Local-Friendly site is going to have at most 11 pages.
- Each page answers a question and offers a solution. The solutions are not your products or services. Instead, the solutions are what people can do with your products or services. They've already bought your product or service; now suggest uses that you know increase your value. For example, NextStage offers a real-time report detailing why people are abandoning client sites. One of our Local-Friendly website pages describes how to take that information and combine it with another report to stop abandonment. Nobody ever asked for that, hence it's not a FAQ. However, we often explain to clients how to use this report to implement these changes. Putting this information on a Local-Friendly page increases our value to the client while decreasing our support overhead.
- Keep a counter for each Local's return visit and reward them for their loyalty. The reward can be as simple as a personalized email that asks them their thoughts. Don't offer them yours, and don't use this to plug anything new or interesting on your site. This email has to emphasize their importance to you, not your importance to them. Include a two or three question survey that they can email back to you (no more than two or three questions, please). The next time they log into the Local-Friendly site, thank them and let them know their thoughts were heard, accepted, understood and acted upon. This allows you to rebrand them even when they're not on your site. The goal is to get mindshare and touch them 24/7/365.
Small businesses probably already have a semi-Local-Friendly site due to development costs of a traditional Tourist-Friendly site, and this is fine. Small businesses build their businesses one client at a time. Until they reach that critical mass of clients when they can advertise broadly, there's no need for a Tourist-Friendly site. After all, when you're a Local everybody knows your name, right?
Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truckdriver 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. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He's inventor and developer of Evolution Technology. You can download sections of Carrabis' next book, "Reading Virtual Minds," at www.hungrypeasant.com.