How to get the best out of your website for the people who matter most – the visitors. How the science behind supermarket retailing can be applied to website navigation and metric reporting. A simple message from BrandBoost – The Digital Marketing People.
Your website is your supermarket. People visit it, browse the pages, choose to purchase or to leave. Everybody wants a simple, well signposted experience where they can visit, find what they want, check out and leave. People do not want complex. People do not have time for complex.
The signs in supermarkets are very, very clear. Bread, Cheese, Cleaning Products. The signs are as simple as they can possibly be because people do not want to spend time deciphering the meaning behind the message. They want to find things and go.
Complex signs are for those who already understand the meaning - simple signs work. A barbers pole. A sheaf of wheat. These have been around for ages and they still work for barbers or bakers everywhere because people do not have to work out what the sign means. We are conditioned to respond to these signs like Pavlov’s dogs to the ringing of a bell.
Calls to action on a website are signs telling people what to do. In the beginning of the digital age we saw the web as something extremely clever rather than just a tool, and we made up new rules. Now it’s time to get back to the rules that work. Web design and development has become simpler and easier. Anybody with a bit of basic information can make a website, so sites are becoming more normal, reverting to a simpler, cleaner, more efficient and more effective paradigm. Website owners are beginning to listen to their customers who need simple, clear and quick ways to get around a site. It is no longer rocket science; it has become simple psychology.
So – how to monitor the movement of visitors on your site? In a supermarket you can observe them as they move around and there is an enormous amount of research that goes into working out who does what and why, and how to divert the flow of people to the products in good supply and to limit the flow to areas where the goods are low-margin or stock is short. It is a constant ‘shaping’ of the behaviour of the shopper and the flow around the store based upon the goals of the shop and the current stock levels. Try walking into a supermarket in the UK over the next few weeks and not being faced with signs for cheap beer. It’s going to happen and people are going to buy it. It has been planned for as long as England have been qualified for the World Cup and there are going to be flags and snacks and other offers for those who don’t want beer. Try to avoid it – you will find it virtually impossible to do so.
How does this affect your website?
People are conditioned to follow signs and colours. Let’s get a bit psychological, shall we? You may have heard of Pavlov’s dogs. They salivated at the ringing of a bell because they associated the sound with being fed. You probably haven’t heard of Skinners rats *. They worked out mazes for rewards. We are conditioned, too. Traffic lights, sounds, signs. We react on a sub-conscious level. The Coke™ logo means a specific thing to each of us and it is not a big shiny office block in Atlanta. They have tried to condition us to respond to the logo by associating it with ‘The real thing’ or a whole variety of life-affirming images. They even tried to let us teach the world to sing once. We are conditioned.
We are conditioned to notice red so we make buttons red if they’re important. We notice big things, loud things, bright things. So why are the calls to action on websites designed to look cool and small when the signs in supermarkets are designed to look big, bold and simple? We think that the shops have got it right and that the web designers have got it wrong, but who’s going to argue with a bloke with a goatee beard, a black roll-neck and a beret?
So how do you test this theory? You measure it. Get some analytics on your site, get somebody who knows what they’re looking at and get them to tell you what the numbers mean in good old-fashioned English. Then test things – make the buttons bigger, make them simpler. Simplify the language, get the site right for the normal busy human being who has little or no time on his or her hands and just wants to get in, get what they want and get out again. There is so much talk about SEO that website owners believe this is the Holy Grail of digital media. Sure – it is really important to get as many visitors to your site as possible, but if they get there and they have no idea what to do so leave, all that money spent on SEO has been completely wasted.
Digital media forms part of the overall sales and marketing approach. You want people to want your product or service and the only way they are going to talk to you is if they find you and then get to the right place. Then and only then will they be in a position of making the decision to buy. So keep it simple, make it easy, don’t be fooled by the smoke and mirrors, and measure, measure, measure.
We’re BrandBoost and we’re really good at digital marketing. Thanks for your time.
* The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis, 1938. ISBN 1-58390-007-1, ISBN 0-87411-487-X.