What will the next generation of web sites look and act like? Advertising, SEO, and many other things can create traffic flow to a web site but only the web experience can transform traffic into customers. That makes the discussion of what the next generation will be critical to all businesses that use the internet to promote their business, deliver their services or products, or control their logistics.
SMS works with a wide range of designers and we see lots of different approaches. The evolution we are seeing is that successful web sites are becoming more intelligent and the web experience is more customized to the visitor. This is nothing new, industry leaders like Amazon and Dell have been working on this strategy for well over a decade. Dell is one of my favorite examples because from the second you land on their site they are constantly trying to figure out who they are talking to and route you to information that fits you. Dell has a complex product line but they do a good job of talking to the different types of customers. Not perfect but one of the better models out there.
Pushing back against this trend is the rising cost of developing more intelligent web sites. The struggle between content and results is alive and kicking. I would love to come down on one side of this argument or the other but the truth is that it’s a balance question. Great content is expensive to create but nothing other than great content can convert a visitor into a customer.
The next generation of web site is changing a dialog model. In the dialog model you ask questions and the conversation is driven by the answers. Dell, as the example, has done a good job getting started with this but they are still closer to logical routing without real dialog ability.
My Dream Web Site
My dream web site (DWS) works remembers everything I ever told it and never asks me the same question twice. It then uses this personal knowledge to advise me and give me exactly the information I need, nothing more and nothing less. My DWS also keeps me up to date with things that change that are important to me. Not just sales notices but things that actually matter to me. The system requirements to do this are not insignificant but the rewards of delivering this to your customer base could be incredible. Anyone who has worked with artificial intelligence knows that getting a system to a simple conversation level is not a simple task but it is the next level.
Even the longest journey starts with a first step
Let’s say for the record that 99.99% of the businesses on the web are not at my DWS level, because it’s probably true. It’s also fair to say that it’s unlikely that you will go from your current web site to this level in one jump. So what can most sites realistically do? The answer is plenty. If your traffic is coming from Adwords and your campaigns were built right you should be able to keep the path in line with what they have already told you. They are coming to your site using a search term and you know what that term is so, as they say, “Listen”.
The next model – People talking to People!
How do you handle it when a new person that knows nothing about your business asks what you do? Do you spew tons of details telling them about each individual product until you induce a coma? Of course not. You have a broad description designed to get some response from the person. Let’s call this response a clue about where their interests might be. Once you receive that clue you ask the next question as you filter the person down to the item that you can help them with. Just shut your eyes and listen to the phone calls in your business. This is a natural process of communication, yet for some reason on the web the person tells us that they are a small business and we present enterprise solutions that clearly do not fit. It’s a classic case of TMI (Too Much Information) or more correctly information that the audience just does not care about.
Walk in the shoes of your Customer
Conduct a search for a product and walk through the experience and see how you feel. Visit the competitors that come up in the same search and compare and contrast the experience. Who would you buy from? Was the experience intuitive? Was it consistent with the brand you are building? Then take it one step further and bring in a person who might reasonably be a prospect for your business and have them do the same thing. We recently did this with a new client web site and the test subjects failed to be able to order the product! The one constant in the internet marketing world is that one barrier and the prospect is gone in just a few milliseconds.
Test, Improve, Repeat….
To evolve your web experiences fix what you discovered and repeat the process. Do this on a regular basis and your web site experience will evolve and if my guess is right it will start to become more of a dialog and less of a presentation. There is nothing like watching a person who knows nothing about your business trying to interact with your web site. The experience can be enlightening.