Gone in 2.5 Seconds, Unless…

Remember the “Gone in 60 Seconds” movie? Well, an average website visitor gives our websites and landing pages considerably less time that that.  Some believe that “up to 50 percent of visitors to landing pages will bail in the first eight seconds” [source]. My friend, Avinash Kaushik, believes they’re giving us even less time. In a recent article in The Vancouver Sun he was quoted to state that the average visitor “will give your website two-and-a-half seconds before they leave.” 2.5 seconds, ladies and gentlemen! What are you doing not only to retain that visitor, but also to facilitate conversion? No, not every visitor is destined to convert, regardless of what your boss may think [more in The Myth of Perfect Conversion article by Tim Ash], but some of them will never convert unless you have paid a close attention to each of the following 6 factors:

1) Value Proposition or “what are you offering in exchange for what you are asking?”

2) Relevance of your offer to the visitor’s context (their personal needs and wants)

3) Clarity of offer and call to action

4) Anxiety “or anything on the page that causes uncertainty” vs. Guarantee

5) Distraction of the visitor by too many choices/offers on the landing page

6) Urgency or is your proposition giving them a compelling enough of a reason to act, and do so now

[adopted from Chris Goward as quoted here]

The above 6 factors will have immediate impact on your website’s/webpage’s conversion (or lack thereof); but even if you have entertained all of the above, never stop testing and improving (replicating and polishing what works) your landing pages. As I was growing up, and we were improving our home, my father taught me that home improvement/remodeling can never be limited to any one task, but is rather an ongoing process. “You can pause it, but you can never fully complete it” – he’d say. The same is true about website improvement/remodeling. While we will never attain perfection, we can get closer to it every day.