Show your customers a clear path

One of the biggest mistakes that any e-business can make with their website is to assume that their visitors are going to patiently work out what they need to do next.

The reality is that on average, visitors only take three seconds to decide if they want to stay around or not. Those three seconds are absolutely crucial for online retailers.

It’s important to understand where people are entering your site; these are the landing pages, therefore each page needs to be designed with very clear, simple objectives in mind. If you’ve got a large catalogue of products, it would be a big mistake to emblazon your pages with each product type or special that you have on offer. This just makes it really difficult for visitors to work out what’s there for them.

Highly respected marketer Seth Godin talks about showing the monkey (your customer) the banana. When the monkey visits, all he has on his mind is where the banana is. If you can’t show him clearly and quickly then the monkey will leave and go elsewhere. So what do you do if you have hundreds or thousands of product lines? All you need to do is provide a very clear ‘scent’ of the banana so that the monkey will follow the trail.

If the ‘scent’ is not strong enough, the monkey will stop following it and try to find another clearer ‘scent’. In other words, if a customer becomes confused by the route they are taking, it’s likely they will return to the search engine page they originated from and start their hunt all over again, with another company!

To avoid this situation, it is therefore essential to provide customers with unambiguous pathways that lead them to where they want to go. Otherwise, they become another web page statistic rather than the converted visitor they were destined to be.