Website and Copy Design

Website and Copy Design

Website and Copy Design

As people visit your website, they expect to find answers to their questions and cure to their problems(or toys for desires). Each Visitor is at a different stage. You will get visitors who want to know "in-depth", who want to buy right away, "just looking" types and many more. In this article we talk about addressing different intentions.

Persuasion Architecture is the Art of:

Converting Visitors with Different Intentions
Converting Visitors with Different Qualifications
Converting Visitors with Different Levels of Understanding Your Field, Products and Your Company.

There are different types of visitors. Imagine Best Buy. John is 34 years of age. He is not tech savvy and wants a camera that's easy to use and takes good pictures. He doesn't care about megapixels, zoom, aspect ratio and other technicalities. He wants good pictures.

Sales Person: Hi how can I help you?
John: I want a camera that takes nice pictures and is easy to use.
Sales Person: No problem. This Cannon Digital Rebel has a 33mm lens, 8.5 megapixels, ISO rating of up to 1600 and 7 focus points.
John: Right. I just want something easy to use that takes good pics.
Sales Person: Here's Samsung PRO815. It has 15x optical zoom, Dedicated flash hot-shoe connector and Optional remote control. My Cousin has one, it's sweet

As you can see, John is pretty disappointed. He wanted an easy to use camera, but got technical jargon.

Another customer - Tom. He's done all the research on search engines, compared 5 different cameras, asked on forums and looked at reviews. He's pretty confident about features he wants, but not sure about the camera. He decided to purchase one, but only with the help of a qualified professional.

Sales Person: Hello Sir, how may assist you?
Tom: I am looking for a camera with 35mm lens, 8.0 million effective pixel, Orientation sensor and 8 point focus. Can you recommend me something?
Sales Person: There's a nice camera. It's quite easy to use and takes good pictures, my grandma has one....

Sales person failed Tom. He wanted a camera feature loaded, but got an answer he could receive from any non tech person.

You might say that this is too extreme, however, this the picture that visitors face everyday. Websites fail to address the wants and the needs of their customers.

Visitors who come to your website have different intentions. Some want an apple pie sliced, some want all of it and some aren't even hungry yet.

How do you get to all of them? How Do you answer all of their question and address their intentions?

The theory is called persuasion architecture. It is the design, writing and structure of the website that leads to one thing - your sale.

Since there are different types of buyers, each being at different stages of the buying process, you put devices that answer anticipated questions and try to guide each buyer at speed he is comfortable with. Basic outlines:

Ready to buy
Have some questions
Need some guarantee/proof
Maybe later
Why you?
Who in the hell are you?

By answering the questions people have you:

Capture as many prospects as possible
Leave people satisfied as you've answered their questions, more inclined to do business with you.

Each Click is a Question

Whenever visitor clicks - he is talking to your sales person and that sales person better answer the question to the point or burn like our imaginary sales people. In case of the website - sales person is your copy.

Whenever you think visitor might have a question, wrap it up in a link and send them to the page that details the concept/term/feature.

How do you know what questions people want to ask?

That's the job of knowing your business and customers. Ask your customer support to list some of the most frequent questions and requests. If you face customers yourself - come up with the list on your own. It's a matter of who is on the frontline with customers.

Who are the majority of your customers?
What questions do the ask? What other questions the have?
What are the concerns? List all of them.
What do they want most of all? .

List 5 problems your product/service fixes.
List the biggest benefits.

Once all finished - shoot the biggest benefits in their face. As soon as they come to site. This gets attention.

Once you've got the attention, try to break down visitors to different groups. For example, if you're in a mortgage industry your copy may have something like:

[links don't lead anywhere]

Mortgages is what we get you. Lowest rates and highest quality. For people with bad credit, for the self employed individuals and for people looking consolidate debt.

As your visitor reads the main copy, he quickly identifies himself with one of 3 choices. He may go on reading and explore rest of the site before clicking, but eventually, if not right away he will. Because this is his question and one of the links seems to convey an answer.

"As we scour about, trying to figure out how to frame and solve our problems, we become like bloodhounds. We try to pick up the scent of an associative trail that will lead us to the information we want. And when that scent evaporates, we begin to lose interest in the trail. If the scent dries up, we disconnect."

As you read above mortgage example you will see that the links convey an answer within them, giving a scent to the information your prospect wants to hear.

This is the process of breaking down visitors by intent groups. Read Next article to find out what to do after you break down visitors by intent groups.