Find out how to stop the troll that is stopping your potential customers dead in their tracks.
For every website that has an online shop, getting customers through the sales funnel and finally past the buying stage can feel like a constant battle with very little reason as to why it happens.
E-commerce websites around the world are plagued by low conversion rates and it’s not until you take a step back and think like the customer, you begin to realise there’s a troll inside all of our heads. And that troll is the founder of conversion woes.
What is the troll?
Put simply, the troll is each dodgy salesman, broken product, overdrawn credit card and company that provided a sub-par service. The troll is the prospect troll.
Every single time someone has a bad ordeal with a product, service or company, they become much less likely to go through with a purchase. Whether this be one of three different troll manifestations: insecurity, mistrust or waste.
Insecurity
In a sense, the human brain has become less and less naive, less responsive to purchasing and much savvier online. 24% of fraud cases in the UK happen online (Citizen’s Advice Bureau), that’s almost 1 million people hit by online fraud every year. This makes us incredibly insecure about buying online.
More often than not, people who have been scammed or had a bad experience with an online product tend to go months without a further purchase. When looking at a product or service, this is where the prospect troll really hits home and lists everything that may be bad about the product…and convinces you that THIS product WILL fail.
Mistrust
We’ve all trusted someone who has turned out to be completely unworthy of any kind of trust. It’s human nature to, initially, trust everyone unless they give you a reason. Once enough dodgy salesmen and inaccurate product descriptions have gotten the better of you, you begin to remind yourself at the checkout of every purchase, when you’ve been misled before. So, you back out, unwilling to go through with the buying process.
An interesting statistic states that 57% of small businesses rely on brand loyalty and trust to drive customers to them. This shows how important customer trust is and how this can positively reflect a brand.
Waste
We all remember the time when we could have put that £30 to much better use or wish we hadn’t bought a certain product as it wasted a completely unnecessary amount of money. Now imagine you’re about to buy a product and the little troll tells you about all the products you’ve wasted money on before…now that purchase doesn’t seem as attractive, does it?
In the UK, more than 9 million UK households have no savings (The Money Charity), this means, for these particular people, wasting money on products that under-perform can be a particularly big issue. The ‘Waste Troll’ can be particularly present among people who are strapped for cash.
So how can you stop the troll?
It’s an interesting question, how can you stop the human brain from making a logical decision. And the answer? By giving it an even more logical solution – buying the product. To get the prospect troll to leave your customers mind…you have to convince the troll that it’s an amazing idea. It’s all well and good telling them you’re the expert, you have to show it.
How do I show the troll my product/service is the best?
Although this may seem like a vague answer, the way to stop the troll is by creating hard, factual, down-to-earth copy that resonates with your audience. More often than not, customers will look at the ‘About Us’ page on your website first.
The reason that potential customers do this is to learn more about the company that they’re purchasing from. They don’t care what your products are, they want to know whether you can provide a service that is trustworthy and worth investing in your service or products.
A list of things you will need to do to slay the troll:
Providing a cure to the conversion troll can often seem like an unnecessary part of business, but by making a few changes, you could significantly increase the conversions on your website:
- Providing thoughtful, genuine blog content – you need to become the expert and tell the customer that YOU are the expert.
- Put the company history and portrait shots of your employees on your about us page – put a face to the employee names and a history to the company name.
- Cut to the core of your product, don’t beat around the bush when it comes to what you do, tell your customer simply and explicitly what you do.
- It’s worth looking at the entirety of your content. Look at customer click-throughs and where the customer is dropping off the website. Have a look at the content on this page, see if you can secure a more professional and approachable feel.
