Effective Bait
by Ross R. Lasley
Regular readers of this newsletter know that we did some fishing last month down in Florida. During my youth I went fishing with professionals many times and as a result of my experience last month I now know that what we do here in New England is hardly fishing at all. Deep sea fishing is just trolling - set up the right bait and drive the boat around with the bait hanging off the back, drive over some fish, catch some fish. Florida fishing is casting, getting the fish excited, putting the bait in the right place - it is not easy.
This is quite a bit like website conversion - turning website visitors into sales. The traditional marketing methodologies are much like deep sea trolling - with the right gear pulling in the fish isn't much work at all. Internet sales is like Florida fishing, the fish are much brighter and often difficult to catch.
Site owners often miss the point with a website home page - they keep scooping the net through the water, unaware that they haven't hooked the fish yet. People that are ready to buy jump right in to the net, creating the false impression for the site owner that this strategy is working.
Good websites don't put 6 or 7 different offers or 'click here's' on the home page - too much bait in the water at once and the fish will run. They know 200 minnows do not suddenly appear out of nowhere. A website is much like a billboard - one page, one message. Effective websites are designed to take the visitor through a sequence that leads to the final sale. KISS Computing performs literally hundreds of different services and lots of them are pretty complicated. It is very tempting to create this huge list of stuff we do on our homepage, but that is a sure fire way to make no sales at all. The current design (of course a new one is in the works) divides the world into three groups - those that have a website, those that need a website, and those that want to know what the heck a website is anyway. As our customers get drawn through the site they find out more and more about what we do and (hopefully) give us a call so we can close the sale.
This strategy is much more effective than what we used to say - if you've ever seen it anywhere on the Internet we can build it for you.
Rubber Meets the Road-Client Spotlight
To give you an example of the kind of practical impact all this can have, consider the experience of one of our clients, Absolute Tickets. Matt is a ticket guy - he can find you impossible seats for concerts, sports, theater, whatever. He has long standing relationships with most of his clients - offering those special seats for an anniversary, birthday, big client, anything. Tell him what you like and he'll keep you in mind and even call you when those seats you have been aching for come in to his hands. This man is obsessed with customer service and amazing seats.
Recently Absolute Tickets launched a new website - www.getmyseats.c om
The site doesn't really talk much about all that Matt offers, it doesn't discuss the personal service you'll get, it doesn't say that the business is being run by a ticket maniac. The home page of the site does of course have a navigation, links to more info, all the usuals - but the site has focus - just the tickets, nothing but the tickets.
Check out the ticket selectors, each one lists his events. That is the major feature of the site, secondary (but still on the same theme) the right hand side of the page has Hot Tickets, with dates and prices directly listed. This site is a great example - you can have lots of things to click but a good homepage has just one focus.
A small plug for the development department at KISS - the backend of this site is pretty nifty. (Matt can add his inventory and the site does everything else dynamically, this is a pretty slick custom system.)
Absolute Ticket's Website
Kiss News
The results are in - and every one of our readers agrees. Amy caught the bigger fish.
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