Don’t place a maze between your Ad and your Checkout!
There can be few things more frustrating about a busy shopping trip than not being able to find a shop assistant to help you when you need one. Especially when you were ‘just browsing’ in the last store and it seemed every one of them had your plastic firmly in their sights.
This is the same with the online world. You must have experienced it where all you want to do is find a phone number or address, search for a particular product, or simply buy something on a website. But the owners of the business have, in their wisdom, decided to hide these critical features behind layers of clicks, pages and tabs.
How do customers find your relevance journey?
From a technical viewpoint, this should be a simple fix on a website, but the truth is that very few people bother to consider the customer experience. It is not that the site is broken, just that no one has thought it through. The fact that you (the website owner) know where to find something on there doesn’t mean it will be obvious to everyone else. As marketers, it is vital that we learn to stand in our customers’ shoes.
If it is important when people browse your website, then how much more so if you are paying for traffic to arrive there. You have to make the journey from the Ad to the Call to Action as direct and relevant as possible. Whether it is Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, Banner Retargeting or other online traffic generating activity. It has to be relevant!
Assume that your customers are IMPATIENT!
They may not be. Your customers and prospects may well be the nicest people in the world, with all the time that it affords available to them… But I doubt it. We live increasingly busy lifestyles, and whether the people searching for your services are impatient or not, they probably won’t stick around if you don’t respect their time.
THIS IS IMPORTANT! Remember, the people that I am talking about now are arriving at your website because they have clicked on a specific advert that says certain things. Whatever your advert said (a specific product or a special offer) they will expect to find that exact thing when they touch down on your landing page. If they don’t, the chances are astronomically high that they will go somewhere else. And, don’t forget, it cost you money to get them there!
Clicking is easy… Connecting is the real secret!
So you turn up at Hampton Court, having been invited to a very special dinner evening. You are warned not to arrive late, or you won’t be allowed in, but the traffic is drastic and you turn up with 5 minutes to spare.
Then, as luck would have it, you discover that all of the main paths have been blocked off. It seems that the only way to your seat in the fabulously adorned, outrageously fine dining restaurant, is through the maze… Annoying, eh?
If you think that the whimsical scenario above is a little far-fetched, I urge you to think again. The analytics consistently show that prospects from Ads (paid-for traffic) that arrive at irrelevant landing pages, causing them to face a maze to reach their target, will not stick around.
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