Twelve o’ clock came. A twenty foot table dressed in white hosted steaming beef wellington aside a pile of cured meats and Quebecois cheeses. Puff pastries, powdered donuts and Belgian chocolates caused cavities from a distance. Hundreds of men and women in suits flooded out of the elevators, hungrily stacking their plates and, in another instant, disappeared. All that remained were the lettuce leaves that lined the buffet plates and a sign board that read, Free Seminar Today: How to Save Thousands by Outsourcing your Office Administration.
Web surfers won’t even eat your free lunch
We know the truth about free lunches – take the prosciutto and go. Leave your business card at best. Online we know even better. We approach the allure of “try nows,” “sign up for free,” and “learn this one secret” with caution. The dilemma is that we want to know more but we don’t want to get caught up giving more than we get, or getting what we didn’t ask for. A disappointing teaser can result in web death, read: high bounce rate.
The challenge today for selling web-based products or subscription services is preventing bounce rate (more simply, the number of viewers who surf away from your site) and capturing high conversion (the number of viewers who “opt in” to your program).
So back to the question:
When is your website not enough? Confession: this question bears more address than I can offer up in one post. For now let’s focus on two considerations: clarity and convenience. To illustrate, an example: an emerging online service presented us with the task of building a unique registration portal. The objective was to 1) introduce the product itself and 2) to drive signups for the free trial. We proposed a simple micro site with a clear positioning statement, reinforcing image, and call to action. More to the point, the trial signup could be completed in seconds letting the user begin experiencing the product immediately. By leading with the strongest product feature (clarity) and “giving back” an immediate user experience (convenience), the likelihood of high conversion rate is strengthened.
The fear of being direct
In the end the client opted for a different approach: a web portal-style site boasting advertisements, blogs and feeds, and a heavy focus on the features and benefits of the product – to which they preferred to mute the primary differentiating feature out of concern that subscribers would ignore the other features.
The fear of being direct creeps in when a confident marketing strategy is not in place. The philosophy behind “busying up” a site is that it will give viewers lots to engage with, hence increasing site traffic. While this may be true, more often the case is that a busy site almost always buries both the key message and the call to action. The result is site traffic without any conversion – the surfer’s proverbial free lunch.
Registration engines, well executed, can become a valuable marketing asset for any company with an end user in mind. Just remember that just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come, and if you do manage to captivate an audience – be sure to capture them.