8 Ways to Talk to Your On-line Prospects

Your website is the door to your business online. Just as you would have your company's offices well designed to appeal to your customers, you need to ensure your company website is well crafted too. This blog-post provides a few tips that you can follow to great a great website that speaks to your prospects.

1. Think Customer: Think from the customer or prospect's point of view when designing the site. Every tab, every image, every bit of content you put into the site, must be critically appraised from the customer's point of view.
   
2. Benefits: Make sure your highlight the benefits that the prospect will get from using your product or service. Tell them how differently you can help the prospects from ten others who do the same thing.
   
3. Content: Provide your prospects with value adding content. Your site should not be all about sales, but should also help your prospects take a smart buying decision. The site should provide useful information to the prospects, slowly nudging them towards your business, when they are ready to make a purchase.
   
4. Free Trials: This age-old trick still has its charm. Offer the prospects a free trial of your product or service. Chances are, once they get used to the convenience, they will probably want to buy it.
   
5. Monitor: Monitor your prospects on-site activities. Which pages they visited? Which whitepapers they downloaded? How much time did they spend on particular pages? Answering these questions will help you understand your prospect better and...
   
6. Profile your Prospects: Once you understand your prospects, you can profile them, and then develop personalized content and offers. This will boost your on-line conversion rates and subsequently, revenue.
   
7. Design & Re-design: Also, once you profile and understand your prospects, you should critically look at the site and make necessary changes to suit the prospect profile.
   
8. So What? Justify everything you have on the site. Consider this on a site that sells a software program that allows you to create marketing collateral. If the site says, "This product is iPad compatible"...ask So what? "That means you can create marketing presentations on your smart phone, even as you are traveling". Now the latter makes more sense from the prospects perspective, than the former. Putting yourself in your prospects/customer's shoes may be a little hard at times, especially when you are closely connected with the product/web-site development and design. At such times, it makes sense to ask one question--"So What?".