Exploring Customer Routes to Conversion
Exploring Customer Routes to Conversion
Simply put, a route to conversion is the route a user takes to navigate through your site resulting in a conversion. Be that buying a product or submitting a contact form, whatever your business considers a conversion it’s important to ensure the user has an easy route to get there. Here we’ve given a few pointers on how you can start smoothing out this process.
What route should a user take?
Your first step is to figure out how a user will navigate through your site. Depending on your business, there may be a few potential routes to conversion. Take AFS Supplies as an example who are leading suppliers of health and hygiene products. There are two main routes users could use to convert for their services, industry and product:
- Industry – AFS Supplies have a range of products to choose from which could get very confusing if you are not familiar with exactly what you require. This is why we are currently implementing an ‘industry’ route to conversion on the website. Those users who are unsure about which products to start searching for can click the ‘industry’ dropdown, they will then be guided to every product that is available for their chosen industry. Making the route to buying a product just that little bit easier.
- Product – Then we have products. This route is for those who are maybe repeat visitors or those who are confident about which product they need. The product category dropdown options in the navigation enables users to find the sort of product they require quickly and easily.
The route a user should take is entirely industry dependent and it is important to remember, like AFS Supplies, there may be more than one clear route to conversion. So really dig into your target audience and put yourself in their shoes, what are they looking for when they click onto your website?
How do I make these routes clear?
So you’ve identified your routes, that’s great! But this raises the question, what next? Again, this answer may change depending on your industry but the next step is to make these routes to conversion clear, and one way to do this is by optimising with context appropriate content.
Let’s take Dust Masks Direct and their powered respirators (PAPR) as an example this time. Users can find powered respirators in the navigation bar but there are many types of powered respirators within this category. To help combat the quantity of products, filter options have been added to the top of the page, so that the list of powered respirators can be refined to ‘head tops’ as an example.
This is when your content needs to be at the top of its game, your product names should be to the point and easily distinguishable and once a user clicks into the product there should be a relevant and understandable description. It’s important to remember that not all customers will know what your product does or how it can help them. Again you need to step into your customers shoes and really think about what they want to know in order to get them that one step closer to your end goal… a conversion! Once you have identified the key selling points of your product, list them as easy to read bullet points. There’s nothing worse than a large paragraph of text to really overwhelm users…
On the topic of being overwhelmed with too much information, we’ll stop here! Of course there are many other ways that you can explore your customers’ route to conversion, but this is a good place to start. Need more help? We are more than happy to take a look at your website and optimise it to make your customers’ route to conversion simpler. Just get in touch with our team today via hello@nuimage.co.uk