Seven design characteristics that boost sales
Does your website have these seven trust-building characteristics?
More than 50% of web sales are lost because the visitor can’t find what they’re looking for.
When you make the customer’s experience on a website easier, sales can improve by 40% and the average size of sales orders by an additional 10%.
Obviously, focusing on your customer’s experience on your site can bring great results. Why don’t more sites, do this? Usually, it’s because the business owner has been so focused on the site as an end in itself that they forget the true focus of the site—earning the trust of your visitors.
Make sure your site succeeds in achieving these seven characteristics and you'll be amazed at your results.
1. Quick loading time
A first-time visitor comes to your site looking for something. They give you a chance to prove that you can provide whatever information, product—whatever—they need. If your site doesn't load within six seconds, you’ve already lost some of them. They’ll move on to some other site.
Check your load times. There's a great free load time tool that can alert you to problems Work to keep them under six seconds. And if you can’t, make sure you know how to design them so that your visitors will have something loading right away that can keep them occupied while the rest loads.
I've found the book Speed Up Your Site (to your right) overflowing with tips to help cut seconds off of any page.
2. Instant impact
Once your site loads, your visitor expects to see whether your site will fill their need. Give them an impression at a glance of what this site contains and that this site has what they came to this site hoping to find.
Make sure the top of your page immediately communicates to your visitors what your site can do for them. Everything that is visible when your page appears needs to reassure them that they're in the right place to solve what they came to solve.
If your logo or business name doesn’t communicate how you benefit your visitors, add a subhead underneath that identifies the chief benefit you strive to provide to them.
Put ribbon links near the top of the page that lead them to the pages that best serve the needs that your visitors came to fulfill. But never leave your visitors scratching their heads wondering what your company can do for them.
3. Understandable, uncluttered links
Once your visitors determine you might have what they need, they expect to find it quickly and easily. Use terms that your visitors look for, not the terms that you use.
For example, think of yourself as a visitor for a moment, looking for a pair of sheepskin slippers. You come to a site and see list of links that reads, Log In, Products, Catalog, Mail Order, Our Recommendations.
Do you feel confident that you’ll find what you’re looking for there? Finding what you want requires you to hunt through five generic links in hopes that what you want is tucked behind one of them.
If, instead, you found a link to Footwear, or Slippers, or Sheepskin Products, how confident would you feel that you were on the right site? Let your links be as specific and organized as possible and be in your visitor’s language, not in yours.
But as you provide specific terms, don’t just offer up a long jumble of unrelated links. Give your visitors clean, logically organized blocks of links that allows them to quickly skim your list to find the links that interest them.
4. Text that is easy to scan and skim
Make sure your text information is broken up into short paragraphs with plenty of descriptive headings. The Internet encourages a rush-rush mentality—so many possibilities, so little time. Give them solid walls of text and you’ll intimidate them and drive them away.
Make it easy to scan your text to quickly find what interests them. If you force them to read everything by burying it in solid walls of text, they’ll most likely read nothing—and move on to someone else’s site.
5. Clean, consistent layout
Keeping the same layout from page to page gives visitors a sense of familiarity. After a few pages they know exactly where they’ll find what.
Giving your visitors a sense of familiarity on your site will accomplish two things. It will make them comfortable and more willing to continue on into it to find what they’re looking for, and it will build your credibility with them as someone who is looking out for their best interest.
6. A human soul
Never underestimate the power of showing that there is someone behind the site who is concerned with helping them fill the need that led them to the site. The site must have clear and easy ways to contact a human being. And once they contact that human being, the human being must respond in a timely and helpful way.
Give them multiple ways to contact you—e-mail, phone, fax, address. The more open you are about who you are and how to contact you, the more likely they are to consider you someone they can trust.
And make sure they can see that other human beings have benefitted from your site. As your business grows, make a practice of posting testimonials from satisfied customers. Nobody wants to be the first to try out a new business. Seeing that others have found what they wanted and been treated well is a huge selling point for many visitors.
7. Respect and security
Let your visitors know you respect their privacy by putting your policies about the use of their personal information into writing. Let them know your desire to give them a fair deal by putting into writing your guarantees for quality, shipping, and returns.
If you sell on your site, make sure that transactions are secure and that your customers can reassure themselves that those transactions are secure. Let them buy in the way that feels most comfortable to them: online, phone, fax, mail or (if your business has these) in person at a nearby store.
Spell-check your site every time you make changes to a page. Maybe you think nothing of finding a typo on your site six months after you’ve launched a page, but for six months that typo has been sending a message to your visitors that you do sloppy work. And a message like that undermines your credibility with them.
Finally, make sure that everything on your site (links, images, scripts) show up and work just as you planned them to work. Nothing says “I couldn’t care less about you” more loudly than an error message.
Test your site
Test your site to make sure it has these seven characteristics. If you're too close to your site to assess it honestly yourself, have someone whom you can trust do an honest assessment for you.
Listen to what they say; don't fall into the trap of trying to defend or explain why you did things the way you did on your site. You won't have that luxury with visitors, so listen to and learn from your assessment.
Then fix whatever may lead your visitors to hesitate from buying at your site. They won't buy from you until they feel they can trust you. Build that trust and you'll build your sales.
Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.
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