As weird as it sounds, it’s the norm for businesses with sales cycles that might be as long as several months to a year and that might involve multiple decision makers and influencers to utterly fail to take these factors into consideration when constructing their website or selecting an analytics package.

In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead…

...continue to read "Can your Website Handle the Complexity of your Sale?"

I was catching up on my reading from last week and noticed this gem from eMarketer. In it they shared some data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project study in February 2008 on the positive and negative attitudes of online buyers by age.

One thing jumped right out: Across the board, the percentage of those surveyed who had negative things to say about shopping online was higher among older shoppers, with one exception. Can you guess?

“Online shopping is still too…

...continue to read "E-commerce Still Too Complicated For Most"

Last week, one of our readers emailed Bryan after finding herself in a tough situation.

Her firm does content development for websites, so she’d never literally been at a loss for words — not online, anyway — until a new client hired her to write some search engine-friendly copy. For the first time, she questioned whether her client’s site actually needed Web copy to do its job. She was stumped.

The client sells new and used industrial drill rigs, augers, hammer grabs, oscillators…

...continue to read "Does a 100-ton Drill Rig Need Web Copy?"

B2C, B2B, impulse purchases, straightforward purchases, considered purchases, nonprofit, lead generation…Your ability to persuade depends more on your audience’s key qualitative factors than on your business category and, many times, audience demographics. If you understand all the elements that make up your unique persuasive process — a marriage of how you sell and how your audience buys — and if you understand your audience’s needs, you’ll be able to create persuasive copy that dramatically improves online conversion.

Selling and Buying: “I…

...continue to read "The Complexity of Closing a Sale"

It’s not about your business category or whether your sale is or is not a considered purchase. It’s about your persuasive path!

I recently overheard a fellow talking about “the simplicity of the B2C sale.” He was comparing it to the complexity of the “considered purchase,” B2B sale. I had to chuckle, not at the thought one sale might be more complex than another, but at the thought that B2C sales, simply because they are B2C, are inherently less complicated. I…

...continue to read "Conversion and the Complexity of Your Sale"

Think “personas” – grapple with the mindset and needs of your visitors to design a conversion process that satisfies everyone

A news clip just informed me: a phenomenal 80 percent of all purchasing decisions are made or influenced by women! I can’t actually verify that statistic for you (the talking head certainly sounded credible enough), but I can tell you that women - in one way, shape or form - are behind the majority of actions folks take on…

...continue to read "One of Yours?"

Robert DeNiro and your web site visitors are asking the same question. “Are you talking to me? I’m the only one here.”

It’s not just a line, it’s the essence of your relationship with your visitors. You think you’re talking to the hordes, ’cause you’ve got big numbers every month. But your Web site is not a lecture hall or a convention center. It’s an intimate little space where you and a visitor interact one-on-one. And there’s no such thing as…

...continue to read "You Talkin’ To Me?"