Treat Users Well, Even After the Marriage

One of my pet peeves is difficult to open product packaging. You know the kind I mean. The rigid, impossibly sealed plastic containers that electronics often are encased in. The product looks so appealing in its glossy synthetic bubble. It serves it’s purpose well. No ugly cardboard to get in the way of you and your desire – just clear unobtrusive product packaging at it’s finest. It’s perfect. Perfect, that is, until you actually want to get it out of the packaging. To me, this is the perfect real world example of forgetting the user experience once you’ve got them into the funnel.

Beyond conversion rates

A couple years back we redesigned a website with the goal of optimizing their traffic and improving their conversion rates. At first glance the redesign was a huge success. Our conversion rate site wide near doubled, hovering just under 16%! Our bounce rate was reduced by 40% and our number of page views increased as well. The new site was a machine at getting people in the door. There was just one problem. Once they registered on the site they didn’t buy the product. Despite the fact that the new site blew the old site out of the water in performance, users from the new site just wouldn’t buy. But why? There was one big difference between the two sites, and that was what happened after a user registered.

On the old site we gave them pricing on the service, we gave them a 10 page packet on the company as well as a demo to experience. On the new site we just gave them a pricing sheet. Our error in thinking was that the user just wanted to get down to business, get the pricing and make a decision. We were wrong. Even after we lowered the price on the new price sheet users still didn’t buy. They wanted to be pampered, to be treated better. To feel like the information they just gave us on the form was met with a fair trade and that the experience remained at the same caliber they’d experienced while we were pursuing them on the site.

Relationships take work

I’ve heard marketing compared to courting. In a sense we do court our users. We introduce ourselves to them, we share our world and persuade them to choose us, justifying our superiority over the competition. However, far too often once we get them to ‘tie the knot’ the treatment changes. If we want to be successful in the long run we have to continue to work at the relationship, and make sure that using the product is as appealing as the packaging.