Make It All Easy For Them
Our main job on our websites is to influence the behavior of our visitors, whether this be in getting them to stay on our pages to read more, to navigate where we want them to go on our sites, and to ultimately click on our offers.
An important element in all of this is to make things as easy as we can for them to come to the decisions to do what we want them to do, and then to act on these decisions.
Requiring less energy often produces a superior effect
A big part of this of course is to make our site navigation as simple as we can. It is also to not clutter up our web pages, as I’ve spoken about at length already, and to make the messages that we present clear to them so they can readily discern them.
An example of web pages making it more difficult is those ridiculously long ones where you have to scroll endlessly to even find out what something costs. Some people are up to the task and some may not be. Those who aren’t will be missed out on, and at least some of these people may have been enticed if the presentation wasn’t so lengthy.
Visitors will have various degrees of effort that they will be prepared to make to get what they want, depending on their level of interest at a given point in time. It takes a certain level of interest for instance to continue on past the first glance, and therefore we have to make it count if we’re going to keep them on our sites.
Try To Capture As Many As You Can
Within this level of effort they are prepared to make, there will be some that will stick with it no matter how difficult we make it on them, but this is likely to be a small proportion of our overall traffic.
This will be distributed according to varying levels of interest from there, but one thing is clear, the easier we make it for them, the better we will be able to keep their attention. There are many objectives that we are out to achieve, and this is definitely an important one among them.
This isn’t just about the ease of use and of finding what you want on our sites, although that’s certainly part of it, and it sets the framework for the rest of the site. The less work people have to put into the equation, the easier they can find things, the more efficient they will be using their time with us, and time is money here.
The second part of this is how easy we can make their decisions for them. While the first element is one of layout, this second one is one of communication.
Making Their Decisions Easy
This is a whole separate topic in itself although I want to at least introduce you to the idea in this article. We have the ability to make these decisions that they will be making complicated or simple. The more complicated we make it, the less likely they are too choose the option we wish them to. The simpler we can make their decision, the more likely they will make it.
When they don’t decide the way that we want them to, the relationship generally comes to an end, or at least we fail to capture the action from them that we seek. There are two parts to this, and like electricity we have both the current and the resistance to account for here.
So the current would represent the reasons for them to want to make the decision, and the resistance, or lack of it in this case, would be their not wanting to do it. So when you can get both factors working in your favor then this gives you the best opportunity to direct them toward what you want.
Let’s take signing up at a poker room as an example, something that should be near and dear to our hearts. We give them reasons to do so, but in giving those reasons we may fall into the trap of making the decision more complicated than it needs to be. For instance we may have them weighing different reviews we have provided to them and deliberating on their choice way too much.
So this is something we need to stay as clear of as possible, as it leads to indecision, and we need to do the opposite, to lead them towards a decision as best we can. So we need to avoid this hopping around and give them everything they need to decide without any of that, and one of the things we can do is to convince them that it is to their benefit to try out several of our recommendations if they wish, and all are well worth trying.
Notice I am saying trying instead of signing up or whatever. This is important as well as it is once again taking the path of least resistance, and people are apt to be less resistant to trying something as opposed to something else which may imply more of a commitment.
This topic does merit further discussion which we’ll get to later. For now, pay close attention to making it as easy as you can on them and they will do it more often for you.