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U R R A D I C A L I D E A
Here’s our radical idea for satisfying your
Web audience:
Make their visits shorter – and sweeter
Service-oriented businesses know that the longer you make a
customer wait, the more likely that the customer will get frustrated and go elsewhere.
But on the Web, many site operators seem to believe the exact
opposite. They’re trying to increase the amount of time customers spend on their
sites, delivering more hits and page impressions per visitor. That usually means forcing
users to click through too much content before answering their questions and completing
transactions.
Web design firms often out complexity over simplicity.
They’d rather build a labyrinthine site no matter what the client’s business
goals are. "There probably is a tendency to make projects bigger in this business,
" says Marcel Zakrzewicz, Web Marketing Director of Allegro Resorts
Corporation.
Making goal-directed visitors happy means streamlining your
site, reducing the number of pages or clicks used. In effect, it means shortening the
distance between customers and the cash register.
" You’ve got to focus on solving
people’s problems. If you don’t, you won’t survive."
It takes a heretic in today’s Web climate to tell
your CEO that the less time customers spend on your site, the more satisfied they may be.
It takes a radical to actually do something about it.
" No matter how much you love your site,
users don’t want to spend all day going through it." But that gives you an
opportunity for first-mover advantage.
Companies that have abandoned the "more is more"
mind-set trend to focus on bottom-line metrics. |
