Marketers still don’t quite get the web
The Internet has been around for quite some time now but businesses and marketers still don’t quite get it. Sure the impact is clear, you don’t have to search far to find stats from Forrester” The Web’s Impact on In-Store Sales: U.S. Cross-Channel Sales Forecast, 2006 to 2012 for information like 43% of all retail sales are expected to be influenced by or made on the Internet by 2012. or B.J. Fogg’s Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility that reports 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site. If all this data is available at the click of a mouse then why don’t marketers get that there’s more to the success of a company than just driving more traffic to your site?
According to Jakob Nielsen, the godfather of web usability, of the Nielsen Norman Group just by increasing the usability of a website the average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is 83%. This is substantially less than 6 years ago, but ROI still remains high because usability is still cheap relative to overall gains.
When usability is joined with the principals of persuasive web design the gains can quite often surpass the findings from the Nielsen Norman Group. The reason for such massive gains has to do with the way persuasive web design guides your specific web visitors, influencing their web behavior and motivating them to take action on your web site.
Marketers should clearly be concentrating on how they can make their web site more persuasive both visually and verbally across all of their unique web visitor’s goals rather than being fixated on bringing in visitors that just bounce.