Things you need to know about your visitors

Just like in political elections, the people that visit your website can be split in the following categories: users who will never buy or engage with your website, undecided users and the users that will choose you, no matter what.

Your marketing efforts should be directed towards the undecided, converting as many of them in believers of your brand, mission and/or products. So, here are a couple of suggestions on how to tackle each of the above categories.

The not interested users

People who just aren’t interested in what you sell or provide don’t do you that much good. They are responsible for increased bounce rate and for skewing your analytics data by just clicking around without purpose. They are noise. Most of the times they get to your website by clicking a banner they didn’t understand, clicking on a link provided by a friend on facebook or many other reasons. All this is not just affecting you, but them as well: your website is wasting their time.

So, the idea is to avoid getting such visitors in the first place. Don’t spam. Be consistent and explicit through all your marketing actions. Don’t do banners or newsletters that just look nice… make them explicit as well.

When clicking a link, a user always makes an image of what the landing place should provide. If his image is different from reality, than you loose him. How to test this, it’s easy. before launching a banner, ask people who aren’t involved in your campaign: “Where do you think this banner will take you?“.

The undecided ones

I guess that it is no surprise to you that most of your users are from this category. They searched something important for them on Google and got to your website or they saw a review of your services or products and decided to check you up. They are interested but not convinced yet.

The experience they get on your website has to do just that: convince them so they convert from visitors to customers or people who decide to engage with you.

So how to tackle undecided users:

• focus all your web marketing efforts to get visitors that are interested in your products, services or content.
• different people have different interest. Try to cover all of their interests as well, not only your interests. If you sell products bare in mind that some people come to you just to check prices or specs. So offer them comparison tools between your own products and/or your competitors.
• be consistent with all your marketing materials. Talk about how you can cover your users needs and not how cool is your product or service.
• have the most intuitive to navigate website in the world… no, not easy, but intuitive. Make everything look like is exactly where it should be… for your users that is and not for you.
• don’t add noise

In other words you need good SEO, efficient PPC campaigns and a hell of a user friendly website.

Undecided users are the majority of your visitors. There is where you need to focus your marketing strategy.

The tribe (believers)

Well, if your product or service is really good and has a big impact on one of your clients, he’ll stick to you no matter what. This visitors will go around faulty forms, unusable websites bad internet connection just to get their hands on what you offer. They believe in you. Treasure that.

The following things get people to become part of your tribe:

• awesome products or services. Good quality that is.
• a shared mission. No matter what, Starbucks coffee will always be good. People believe in their mission. The same for Tom Tom shoes.
• a good reputation. People like to be associated with good examples.

Just as in politics use your tribe to communicate to the undecided users. It takes the cost down and it’s much more efficient. Not easy though. Give the tools and methods to your tribe in order to spread the word about the impact you are having in their life or business.

Seth Godin didn’t invent the tribe, but he sure talks great about how you can build one around you.

Conversations with your users

Believers want to be treated likewise and undecided want to be helped. Telling a person who waited 3 months to buy his iPhone what a iPhone is, just makes no sense. It makes a lot of sense, though, for somebody who just heard about it but doesn’t know what it is.

This is what we try to develop at PadiCode: a tool for websites that does just that. Enables you, based on analytics data, to talk differently to your visitors so they always get what they come for.

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