subject: Helping Your Visitors And Sell More [print this page] Previously we talked about getting more visitors to your site.
They will need help getting from where they are now to ordering or buying your product. For more than a century, marketing experts have used the acronym AIDA to express a method of helping customers to make the decision to buy:
Attention Interest Desire Action
E. St. Elmo Lewis was the first person to come up with this paradigm, back in 1898. It still works today.
Attention: If you have something on your website that makes me click through from the search engine results to your page, and then to stay on your page long enough to read something, then you have my attention. You should always make a point of having your essential information - what you have to offer and how to get it - in the upper left hand corner of your homepage. This is where people usually look in the five to twelve seconds that they spend deciding whether to stay at your page or to go back to the search results. If you're selling football DVDs, you might have something like this in that corner: "Classic Football Matches on DVD Shop now" The words "shop now" will naturally link to your catalogue page. I can easily see that you have those DVDs, and I can tell what I need to do in order to buy them. If that's why I came to your page, I can get my purchases made quickly and easily.
Interest: But I may have come to your page to read your insightful and witty comments on last night's match at your blog. Or to see a clip of the game someone mentioned over lunch. You've got my attention, so now you need to get me interested in the product. If you're offering something good and useful to me on your website, then just telling me that there's more where that came from can be enough to interest me.
Suppose I'm watching your video clip and thinking, "What a great video!" Then I see a simple note that this clip is from DVD #4215, with a link to the place where I can buy it. I am quite interested in what i have seen so far, so Ill likely be interested in more of the same. Equally, if I've read something really interesting at your blog, I'll think of you as an expert with good things to say. I want more. All you have to do is mention that you've added commentary on this match to your DVD#1628, and I'm likely to be interested in that DVD.
Desire: Now that I'm paying attention and I'm interested, the next step has to be the kindling of desire for your product. Some website owners think this is the time to tell me all about the DVD. You want me to know how many minutes long it is, and how it was created with state of the art equipment and how you have expanded the offerings in your exclusive DVD collection. You want to tell me all the features that make your product so special. I don't care. If I'm thinking of buying your product, then I'm thinking about myself. I dont really care about the lenght of the DVD - I care about how I'll have a full two hours' worth of thrilling action to watch. I don't care what equipment you have - I care about how clear the picture is and what a great experience it'll be for me to watch. I don't care about your expansion - I care that you have the Egypt-Cameroon match my brother-in-law is always on about. I care, in short, about the benefits for me.
Action: Now I'm paying attention, I'm interested, and I want your product. You're not with me to say, "Shall I wrap that up for you?" Your website has to have a call to action there on the page. I shouldn't have to search round the page (or worse yet, the whole website) to find the place where I can order your products. I shouldn't have to call you or take elaborate special measures to find the item. I should be looking right at a phrase like this: - Buy now! - Order now! - Buy the Cameroon-Egypt match on DVD - Choose from 147 different full-length DVDs.
And whichever phrase I see should link right to the page where I can place my order.
