Redefining Your Business With A Persuasive Website

January 07, 2017

Business has changed and so have the ways for promoting it. A research statistic in Hinge’s Annual High Growth Study states that around 80% of consumers first check the company’s website before making a purchase and around 30% of the consumers drop a purchase decision if the website did not impress them. This proves that it is very imperative for any business to design their website appropriately to ensure that it resonates well with their customers.

Apart from the regular service and product information, a website For Small Business should also cater to a customer’s information and interest pursuits. Value content, blogs, SEO content, educative and interesting trivia has become an unavoidable part of website designing.

By default, the human brain is designed to make choices based on what the societal norms are. It is very important to give the potential customers, a reason to think about a brand or product differently. For this, the business must ensure that they know their target audience before designing their website.

Knowing the audience would mean that the developers would have knowledge about the audience’s preferences, their decision-making rationale, and what their auto-pilot or impulsive preferences. This is essential to develop the right strategy required to persuade the clientele in making a decision to choose their business over others.

The art of persuasion is not something new. It has been practiced for a long time by salesmen, through a series of structured communication which tends to control the order in which a conversation unfolds and how the information provided is comprehended by the customer. So what changes when a business takes the help of web design services for small businesses to design a persuasive website?

The answer is very simple. A persuasive website changes or alters the way customers look at a business and their products. It enables “neuromarketing” or the marketing done for impulsive buying that is based on desire and not requirement.

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How does a Persuasive Website Impact the Business

This technique is effective on buyers who have impulsive buying habits. Every customer has an impulse which he/she cannot resist and businesses can successfully take advantage of this to persuade the customer to buy their product.

We have often seen salesmen making their sales pitch and noticed the way they steer the conversation, alternating between being controlled and then controlling the decision-making process. He may start with understanding the customer’s interests and preferences and then steer the conversation towards the products which he feels caters to the preferences. He may use a variety of methods to put forth his arguments and depending on how successful he was in influencing the customer, will get the sales completed.

A persuasive website would also work in the same way as the regular sales pitch by a salesman. The process of persuasion and the technique involved is slightly more challenging as there is no live salesman pitching the sales and the web design should be responsive and intuitive enough to understand the psychology and preferences of the consumers.

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Answering the Basic Questions

One of the most important aspects of a persuasive website is the ability to answer the basic questions which a new customer or a prospective user might have. Some of the common questions are listed below:

Is this site relevant to the user?
What does the website have for the user?
Is the user looking for the products/services it has to offer?
Why this website? Why should the user choose to purchase from your website and not from the competitors?

Clarity

This is very important for a Website For Small Business to be persuasive to its users. A clear website is one which describes the business with a combination of relevant, clear and persuading texts and images.

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The picture shown above clearly gives the message about the product sold by the website and the values held by the brand. This will also alter the consumer’s perspective towards a certain brand and would compel them to reconsider this brand.

Persuading with what they See

Let us consider a chocolate commercial. It is quite common that every time we view the commercial, it makes us want to grab a bar of it and consume it in one go. Now, that “Want” is very crucial for a business to run. When a user visits the website for small business, he/she must be made to look at all the right things to trigger his/her desire to buy something from the website. How about a huge discount offer or a particular product which the viewers ought to see? Whatever the content maybe, a persuasive website is one which ensures all those trending and “must-see” things are the first few things the users see when they visit the website.

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The Art of Storytelling

An important thing a person who is visiting a website would be interested in is the business and its story. The story is what would differentiate a business from its competitors and connects the business with their audience in an effective way. It also makes the “why you” over the bigger brands, an easier choice to make as the audience has a deep bond with your business.

The Centre Stage and the Special Focus

Any web design services for small businesses would state that the best website for small business is one that knows which item needs to occupy the centre stage and where the prime focus position should lie. Ideally, it would be the product or service the business is popular for, its latest designs or attractive discounts. What is shown is not as important as how one shows it. Displaying a picture of the product just makes the business similar to the others, but showing it differently and in a catchy and visually appealing way is certain to differentiate the business from the others.

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Saying What the Buyers Want to Hear

Probably one of the worst things any website can portray is “False Promises” and “Fake Promotions”. It is never right to say that a business delivers the best of products without supporting evidence. It is better to focus on Unique Selling Propositions which the business actually possesses. For example, in case of a pizza shop, the 30-minute delivery is something worth mentioning and for a watch manufacturer, the engineering or the uniqueness of their designs can be the persuasion.

Visual Appeal

Persuading a person on the basis of what they see is actually easier than convincing them without an image. Showing an actual picture of a product with a zoom-in feature is possibly the best way to convince the consumer to buy the product. The business can provide very accurate description, features and may even write pages about it, but unless the customer sees the product, he/she would not would not be convinced to buy it. Let us consider a car brand, which has just launched a luxury car. The customer might have heard of the design and features as well as the boot space, its engine and the other unique features it possesses.

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However, the picture displayed above would surely seal the business and this is where the website actually would succeed in persuading the customer in buying.

Therefore, the website for a business can influence people’s behaviour and choices without using any words by utilising persuasive web design. Making the website visually pleasing and appropriate for the right audience can work wonders for increasing the sales numbers of your products.