Effective Online Persuasion: Do it Quickly

by Rico on March 20th, 2008

Most people don’t realize that they have so little time to attract attention online. According to a recent study by Marketing Sherpa, the majority of web surfers decide to leave a website within one-fifth of a second. Whatever your message is, effective online persuasion requires that you do it quickly.

Load Your Website Quickly

Web surfers are impatient by nature, so if your site takes more than a few seconds to load, you can expect to already lose some prospects. If you use online applications like Flash, you have to make sure that they are not crucial to the operation of your website. In other words, visitors should be able to understand your message even without the help of these tools.

State Your Point Quickly

Even if your website loads quickly, most visitors will leave the site if they don’t see anything interesting immediately. This means that you have to state your message right away, preferably before the surfer sees anything else on your website. Here’s where effective copywriting comes into play.

The Visitor Must be Able to Read Through Quickly

Have you encountered a long body of text and decided that it wasn’t worth reading? Marketing Sherpa asserts that over 90% surfers don’t like to read. But you still have something to say, so you should make the reading experience very easy. Breaking up your copy into sections with prominent headers (as I’ve done here) makes it easier for the visitor to understand the different aspects of your message.

Answer All Inquiries Quickly

Most interested prospects will inquire before making up their mind about a product or service. If you don’t answer their inquiries quickly, they will have more reason to move and look for something else. In other words, why will they follow through if it takes you days to do so?

The internet has always been a fast-paced medium. It can bring prospects quickly, but only if you’re fast enough to take advantage.

b5media.com

Contract Worker - Freelancing Experiences