Wizard of Ads Clay Campbell

10 Steps to a Better Website - #6 Relationships With Your Customers

A good website will help you build ongoing relationships with customers to develop repeat business. Most of the time, people like to do business with people they like and trust.

In trying to keep an ongoing relationship with a customer it’s good to remember that there are two kinds of customers. Transactional and Relational.

The Transactional Customer:
• Thinks short term.
• Cares only about today’s transaction.
• Enjoys the process of shopping and negotiating.
• Fears only “paying more than they had to pay.”
• Is willing to spend lots of time investigating.
• Considers themselves the expert.
• Hinges every transaction on price.
• Is a good source of word-of-mouth advertising.

The Relational Customer: • Thinks long term.
• Considers today’s transaction to be one in a series of many.
• Does not enjoy comparison shopping or negotiating.
• Fears only “making a poor choice.”
• Hopes to find an expert they can trust.
• Considers their time spent shopping to be part of the purchase price
• Is likely to become a repeat customer.

The goal of the Transactional shopper is for you to make no profit on them.
Transactional shoppers will go to whichever store is advertising the lowest prices.
Then they’ll brag to their friends about how they got it at such a deal.

Contrast that with the Relational shopper. She is happy for you to make a profit as long as she feels you are meeting her needs. Try to convince her with your website that you indeed will meet her needs.

It is very true that a customer can be a Relational Shopper in one product category and a Transactional Shopper in another.

I needed a multi media projector and a laptop. I was very transactional in the manner I shopped for those. After doing a lot of looking, I finally bought at Tiger Direct, because they had the cheapest price.

On the other hand I like godaddy.com and I buy my domain names there and use their services. I get a newsletter from Bob Parsons and I like it, and I always read it. It has good content that is helpful to me as a business owner. I have godaddy.com on my list of favorites. I know of other places that have the same services for less money, but I just like godaddy and I like Bob’s newsletters.

I also get emails every week or so with “very special unbelievable spectacular deals!” from Tiger Direct and always delete them. I don’t even look at them. I only bought from them because they had the lowest price and I don’t want their “Great Deals” emails. I almost view them with contempt.

So one website visitor may be relational and enjoy reading an “about us” page and your company history or getting a friendly newsletter from you. Another visitor may be transactional and could care less about you but may really like a page of discounted coupons or a monthly newsletter with “special discounted prices”.

You can have a better website and get a better bang for your buck if you understand better how the transactional and the relational shoppers think.

So, for this new year, here are some questions: Are you happy with your advertising? Do you need an advertising consultant? Are you wanting to attract the relational customer but your advertising is bringing you the transactional customer? Does most of your business come from relational customers, but most of your ad budget spent on the transactional customer?

10 Steps to a Better Website - #5 Design your site

I was explaining to my wife once how the internal combustion engine worked. After a while she said, “I don’t care about all that, and I don’t want to know or learn about all that, I just want it to start and run when I turn the key”.
Small business owners sometimes that feel that same way about a website; they usually don’t want to know about all the technical stuff. They just want it to be functional, work right, and make a good first impression. In these 10 Steps I am just passing on things I learned that were helpful to in the beginning.

The home page of your website must capture the attention of visitors, drawing them into your site within about 2-3 seconds or your visitors will disappear as quickly as they came. The page design and navigation have to be clear and direct to keep them there.

You’ve heard the saying, “one picture is worth a thousand words,” but have you really thought about that? A good graphic design and pictures can communicate, but along with those, you must also have the right words regarding your business, if you to come up in the search engines.

Search robots don’t read graphics and pictures, so you will need alt text under them. Many times I see a home page that has lots of graphics and flash, and very little text or no text at all. That is great for humans, but if you want to rank well in the search engines, in the organic search, you need text as well. Plan for that in the design of how it will look.

Get the visitors’ attention quickly. Tell them who you are and what they will find on your site. Make it easy to find information. Site navigation plays a big role in how long visitors stay and explore.

The first time visitors will quickly glance over the content and then look around to locate the information they searched for. Put the important part of your site within two clicks; don’t make potential customers drill down through multiple layers of links to find your important information.

A clean layout that uses a lot of white space improves legibility and encourages visitors to read the content on your website. Keep the number of fonts, font styles, and colors to a minimum. Younger visitors are OK with really small print; older visitors find small print difficult to read. (medium size about like Arial 12 is usually about right)

The focus should be on the content. Over done Flash is an aggravation. Use animation sparingly. A lot of different fonts, styles, colors, and animation will only project an amateurish image anyway. You should design each page to be under 40k in size. Use graphics, Flash animations, and scripts only as really needed because they make it take longer for the visitor to download it. Design pages for easy viewing on a typical 15-inch computer monitor.

Your website, just like your store location, is judged initially on its appearance. Whether it is a website or brick and mortar store, the first impression lasts a very long time and may never change.

I like to look at a mock-up or storyboard of the designers’ ideas before starting to build out the site. Make sure your happy with that first. Have several people you trust to give you’re their honest opinion on the design mock up before it is built out. Then you’ll be happy with your design when you see your site live online. There are millions of websites but probably only a few that would be your direct competition. Design your site to look as good or better than those.