There are a lot of similarities that can be drawn between a buyer's journey on a website, and in a physical place of business, however, most businesses don't treat them the same way.
Imagine if you were walking down the street to buy something you were really excited about, but when you got to the shop, you found it was old and run down, or there wasn't anyone available in the store to help you with your purchase, or the people in the store were so hard to understand that end up with more questions than answers. How would you feel? Would you think twice about buying from them?
Now think about what you would do if there was store right next door that sells the same product. Would you go in there and see what they have to offer?
Similar experiences happen every day on the web where people search for a product and are presented with a list of places that they can buy it from. This list is just like a whole bunch of shops sitting next door to one another.
After deciding which website (store) to enter, unfortunately, far too often the website that they visit are old and run down, not optimised for mobile devices, don't have enough information, have too many acronyms and technical language, are difficult to navigate, and/or don't offer individualised help via live chat. Luckily, the visitor usually has ample choice and therefore simply pushes back on their browser and moves on to the next website. The question is, does your website offer the right experience to either keep visitors there, or to engage with them in some other meaningful way before they move on to one of your competitor's website?
If the answer is no, then it's probably worthwhile investigating what you can do about your website to help improve it, but where do you start?
Sometimes the answer is obvious, your website hasn't been updated in many years and just needs a refresh of content, some new imagery, or maybe introducing some new functionality on your website such as Live Chat. But other times you really don't know what it is that is going to help you. You might have done a recent revamp of your website, but you still haven't seen the increase in conversion you were hoping for. This could be due to the way the site is structurally laid out with important content being put too far down on a page or hidden within a complex menu structure. It could also be that the specific choice of words used to encourage people to take actions isn't hitting the mark.
In a physical place of business, you can sit back and watch how the people flow through your store, which shelves do they typically look at first and if they pick up something extra based on its proximity to another product or the point of sale? In the wonderful worldwide web people can interact with you from anywhere in the world, but you typically wouldn't get the same level of insight into their specific experience with your site. A large portion of businesses utilise tools like Google Analytics to determine how visitors came across your site along with the subsequent page visits and how long they spend on each page. However, most of those tools don't tell you what the visitor didn't see...
Customer Consulting Group help customers get valuable insights into their website visitors experience by leveraging Zoho PageSense. It allows us to determine how far your visitors are scrolling down each page on your website, and how often they are clicking on specific areas. But not only that, it allows you to create alternate versions of pages to test if changing the content and/or layout help increase conversions by running A/B testing. The below video gives a quick high-level overview of how this works.