There is a lot going on in your prospects mind when he or she is surfing your site. A lot of what goes on in their head keeps you from getting a sale and most of it is the fault of your website.
Often times a website is designed with too narrow of a view of what design is. There are several people to blame for this, web designers, programmers, copywriters, marketers; the list can go on and on. Each making changes and decisions based on color or something personal. Everyone is usually focusing on a subjective aspect of the look of a site or page. The subjective look and feel is what most people call design, but very rarely is anyone thinking from the perspective of your potential customer.
Web sites need to be designed around the thought process of your prospect, not just around your brands color and logo. This is why using personas to design is so important. Design needs to start in the mind of your prospect and be built around their goals, fears and desires if you want your website to do the hard work of closing a sale.
Lets take a simple example of an e-commerce site’s shopping cart page. Your prospect has added an item or two to the cart, notice the visitor is still a prospect not a customer yet since they haven’t entered their credit card info, shipping address, etc and clicked the complete purchase button yet. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that design has stopped at this point, this is when design needs to do some serious work. If you don’t believe me just ask a few million abandoned shopping carts scattered around the web. - Forrester Research reports shopping cart abandonment rates at 25 percent. eMarketer’s research shows the abandonment rate at 32 percent. NetEffect and Greenfeld Online report shopping cart abandonment as high as 67 percent. Shop.org research goes as high as 75 percent.
There is a lot going on in the mind of your prospects at this point and the design of the process on your site is directly weighing on their mind even though they don’t fully realize it. Don’t worry your web designer and marketing team didn’t realize it either. Yet your web page has to carry the weight of this success or failure to your company’s revenue.
External factors and internal factors, both of which are the responsibility of your web design to correct, are at the forefront of your prospect mind adding anxiety to their purchase decision and keeping you from a sale. Your prospect is wondering about quality, reliability, price, and security.
One
way to reduce the anxiety your prospect faces at this moment is to use
trustmarks to reduce some anxiety in the mind of your prospect and
support their decision to buy from you. Trustmarks can include credit
card security seals (Is this a safe place to give my credit card
information?) Credibility images like a better business bearer seal,
Trust-e, Hackersafe, (Is this a legitimate website? Will there be a
problem before I even get my product or after?) testimonials,
guarantees, etc. These types of trustmarks all help to lower the
anxiety level of your prospect but it’s not enough to just have them on
your web page. They need to be designed into the thought process that
is going on in the mind of your prospect at the right time, when they
are concerned about it and in the right place. It doesn’t help to have
them stuffed in the footer of your site on every page or in an area
where your prospect needs to scroll to see them at the exact point in
their buying process when they need them. These trustmarks need to be
in close proximity to the area in which the anxiety rises. They need to
be designed not just into the site but into the buying process. A
single trustmark image at the right time and place can dramatically
increase your sales and decrease your shopping card abandonment rates
along with other cognitive psychological factors that should be at the
core of all design.
