Remember the last time you stood in the middle of a store looking around, wandering kind of aimlessly even though you had an idea of what you wanted?

Then a pesky salesperson interrupts your reverie and asks, “May I help you?”

You, of course, respond, “No thanks, I’m just looking.”

After this one of two things happens:

First Scenario
This one is the most common on the Web – the salesperson says, “Let me know if you need anything.” and walks away. Never to be seen again. You wander, and you may buy something and you may not – but you leave feeling like you didn’t get help and without anything but a blah kind of feeling about the store.

Second Scenario
The pesky salesperson keeps being pesky and starts to suggest some things…getting out of you slowly but surely that you need to buy a gift but aren’t sure what to get. You walk out of the store with something that may not be what you intended to purchase in the first place, but you got out faster than you intended and with (probably) a better gift than the one you had in mind when you stepped in the front door of the store.

Obviously you want your Web site to be the salesperson that gets a little bossy. You know it’s for your customer’s own good because they wouldn’t be on your site if they didn’t need your product or service, right? That means don’t stop with explaining how awesome you are. Remind them on other pages. Use an accessible email address instead of a form along with our other suggestions for improving conversion rates.

Be the salesperson who keeps trying to help. Don’t ask once and wander away or you’ll find your potential customers are wandering off of your Web page without so much as a polka-dot scarf.

Jennifer Gniadecki is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.