Be Excellent To Each Other … It’ll Help Your Conversion Rate
Next week, the Conversion Conference is coming to San Francisco, and I’ll be there soaking in all the knowledge. It will be two days of great minds teaching best practices on how businesses can convert more prospects into customers. While looking over the Conversion Conference website, it struck me that one important bit of advice on increasing conversion rates might get overlooked: being positive, or as Bill and Ted would advise:
Be excellent to each other!
What exactly does that mean? Well, remember the last time you went into a store, someone held the door for you, greeted you with a smile and asked if they could help you? Not in a pushy salesperson kinda way, but in a “hey buddy how’s it going?” kinda way. It made you feel pretty good right? You were put in a calm state of mind and thus more willing to make a purchase.
On Monday I walked into the deli down the street, the woman behind the counter greeted me with a smile and a friendly, “hello”, we had a brief conversation about the specials and next thing you know, I purchased a lunch that was $3 more than what I usually get. She made me feel comfortable and I willinging spent more money.
This experience can be mimicked on your website. Thank your visitors for being there and comfortably lead them down the sales path using easy to read, easy to understand copy/links and assure them that they’re making the right choice in purchasing from you as they go through the process(e.g. you add a green dress to your shopping cart and a message pops up that tells you that you’ll look great in that and then shows you accessories that match your new dress and how great you’ll look with them all together).
I’ll admit, this is all very high-level stuff (yes, I know marketing is more than just being nice), but the fact is …
being positive and friendly has become a rarity, and thus can easily differentiate your business from your competitors.
(See this great article by Brian Solis on how Zappos did just that.)
With all the attempts to market through fear (yes, I know there’s plenty of research that says it works, and unfortunately it does), being excellent to each other may be just the thing that takes your business success to the next level. It’s so simple, it pains me that it has to be said.
Check the blog in the coming weeks as I’ll have some write ups on my time at the Conversion Conference.
Cheers.
