There are many ways to do business. Don’t try them all at once. Focus on your efforts on a few important ideas. Master that. Then expand at a reasonable pace. Don’t “kitchen sink” your customers with a gazillion ways to contact you, fifty-eleven varying (and some times unrelated) services and products and umpteen ‘call to action’ requests.

GLOSSARY:

Fifty-Eleven: A lot

Umpteen: A lot

Gazillion: A whole lot

The ending result to providing too many choices is generally NOTHING. People will walk away thinking “I. Just. Can’t.” …

• … deal with this right now
• … put too much thought into this right now
• … respond to ‘all of that’ right now.

Make It Simple by simplifying the following areas of your website:

YOUR SERVICES AND PRODUCTS

Unless you own Godaddy.com, you probably won’t get away with “kitchen sinking” your product and service pages. I don’t have inside knowledge of how often Godaddy.com receives phone calls from bewildered customers. However, many of my past clients that have used Godaddy for hosting & domain name registration have contacted me in a state of confusion immediately upon arriving to Godaddy.com. Given that Godaddy now provides an online “getting started” tutorial, I’m willing to bet that they’ve received too many calls from confused customers. How many customer service dollars are spent simply navigating customers through the website? Godaddy.com has a solid brand and tons of resources for providing technical support to customers. However, particularly if you are a new or growing business, you don’t want to risk losing a potential customer by confusing them with a laundry list of services and products that forces the customer to evaluate and click through multiple pages to determine the most appropriate option for them. Also, you don’t want to waste time (re)explaining your service line or troubleshooting website navigation issues with customers; especially if these problems can be solved simply with a more effective and succinct presentation of products & services. When organizing your product & service pages, think of the solutions you’re providing to customers and make solution-focused pages. Customers are well aware of the problems they are attempting to solve, so be sure that you present your services & products as solutions to problems. Also, don’t water down your brand by highlighting products or services that are not a part of your core business model.

YOUR PREFERRED COMMUNICATION METHODS

So you’re registered on all gazillion social media sites and you have created 10 email accounts (your hosting account allows 10 and you want to get your monies worth), do you really have time to interact with each of the tools? Are you merely attempting to “cover your bases”? It’s perfectly acceptable to register your business name on the social media sites, if for nothing else to reserve the name. However, you should choose a small subset of contact methods that you will advertise to your customers. When a customer is looking for ways to “connect” with you, they do not want to be presented with a laundry listing of options. It is more effective if you present the options that are most important to you and let them select the one that works for them. Be sure to indicate exactly where to contact you for customer service and support. Example:

For questions and technical support, please contact us online or by email at:

• Contact Form
• Email Address

Also, follow and network with us on:

• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/websmithgroup
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/kishau
• Facebook Page: http://companies.to/websmithgroup

You’ll reduce your chances of missing an important message and your customers will thank you for the simple & effortless contact methods.

YOUR CALL TO ACTION AREAS

Your website should have a clear “call to action” area. Call to action areas highlight the task(s) that you want your visitors to complete before leaving your site. Examples are:

• Purchasing a product
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Donating money
• Registering for an event

It may be appropriate to have multiple “call to action” areas, however, presenting too many is ineffective. If customers are presented with too many options, they may become frustrated and decide to do nothing until they can evaluate further (i.e. until they find the product or service elsewhere). Select the actions that are most valuable to your customers and the most critical to your success. Also, be sure that you are presenting the “call to action” at the most appropriate time. If your customer is viewing one of your product pages, do you really want to highlight a newsletter subscription request? No, you want them to make a purchase. Highlight the newsletter subscription request after or during checkout.

Make it Simple.

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2 Responses to “Fifty-Eleven, Umpteen, Gazillion Ways to Do Business”

1. Dan Waldron says:

   January 27, 2009 at 3:16 am

   I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work

   Reply
2. Domain Talk » Blog Archive » Fifty-Eleven, Umpteen, Gazillion Ways to Do Business says:

   January 27, 2009 at 3:36 am

   [...] Originally posted here: Fifty-Eleven, Umpteen, Gazillion Ways to Do Business [...]

   Reply
3. Kishau Rogers says:

   January 27, 2009 at 10:12 pm

   Thanks Dan! Your feedback is much appreciated.

   Reply