November 5, 2007

Using Avatar's And Other Tools to Increase Online Respone Rates

While I still give seminars on the basics of "Building Business Class Web Sites", I'm speaking more and more about "From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0: Upgrading Your Web Site for Profitability".

Many of you already have web sites. You've had them for years and they sit as pretty beacons of information (with cobwebs here and there). They are digital brochures for your business. It's time to do more.

A digital brochure is nice, but if you want to grow your business it is so important to consider what you can do to increase action on your web site, boost sales and turn browsers into buyers.

Small Business Trends tested how to do this with Avatars.

Sitepal offers a service which enables businesses to add avatars (talking characters) to their web sites. The avatars are much more than talking characters but can also help answer customer or prospect questions and take answers for sales leads.

At it's most basic level though, the Avatar is an easy tool to add life and interaction to an otherwise static and boring web site.

For Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends web site, with a statistically significant sample size of over 11,000 people, Anita's Sitepal produced speaking avatar did 144% better than a static photograph of Anita in driving newsletter signups.

In other words, the Anita avatar helped to drive more than double the newsletter sign ups. "The avatar focused the attention of visitors on the newsletter and was successful in convincing visitors to take the extra steps to subscribe. The SitePal avatar exceeded my expectations," Ms. Campbell says.

Persuasive and Brief Messages Help to Drive Conversions By using a persuasive and brief message with the speaking avatar (including a call to action), site visitors are driven to specific sections of a page or site where they can act or in this case sign up for the newsletter.

The character is like a sales clerk for your site.

Your competition is only ONE CLICK AWAY. In order to to differentiate your web site and offering from theirs - an avatar is one solution.

Beyond avatars, enabling your customers to comment on products/services purchased; upload videos of them using your products and other ways to add interaction to your web site is critical.

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