Recently, my erudite buddy Bryan posted a comment on an e-consultancy forum. His observations included a brief discussion of the value of Persuasion Architecture – which, as you dear readers know, is our synthetic philosophy for creating and managing your online presence. Bryan got a comment from a fellow named Chris, who said,”I can’t help but think of persuasion architecture as one of those multiple choice ending books that I last read twenty years ago – ‘turn to page 121 if you think A, turn to page 84 if you think B…’ etc. There are a number of scenarios on each page and a persuasive writer would be able to channel readers towards the right decision.”

Now, we all know reading a book isn’t exactly the same thing as working your way through an ecommerce Web site, but Chris’s insight is a remarkably clever metaphor for exactly what Persuasion Architecture hopes to accomplish: helping your visitors to achieve their goals (not always The End and absent the connotation of right or wrong) in the ways that suits them best.

Remember. Everything you do is about pulling your visitors along, motivating them to take the next step. It’s not about pushing them, or requiring them to accommodate your master plan of what they need. Until you present your entire conversion system from your visitors’ points of view, you aren’t really being as persuasive as you could be. And that means you will always be experiencing lower conversion rates than are possible.

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Folks have made a habit of emphasizing the home page of your Web site as the Sacred Portal through which your visitors enter the cyber-structure of your business. As if all other avenues of entry were blocked, and the process could only start at Square One.

Yeah, right. Everyone knows the process can start at any square that is readable by the search engines. And you can directly influence the starting square through pay-per-click advertisements and email campaigns. It is possible your visitors can arrive and start digging deeper into your conversion process without ever bothering over your home page.

They’ll arrive on a landing page – something very much like a focused mini home page – and how successful you are at catching them will depend on what you do with that page.

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Read the entire newsletter: Volume 88