However, personalization is about more than creating unique product offerings or different pages for specific users. The tone and language you use on pages are also important factors of personalization. For example, what might be familiar and casual in the Northwest could be offensive in New York.
Even the simplest of home-page greetings or the content on a particular landing page can either turn visitors away or welcome them and create life-long customers. For instance, there are many trigger words that are potentially offensive to certain groups of people, but there are also trigger words that might cause a visitor to leave your site right away. In fact, there are extensive lists of spam words that you should avoid using on landing pages, in email messages, and elsewhere.
At the same time, there are positive trigger words that will keep visitors on your site. These are often trigger words that appeal to visitors who are ready to buy. They include words such as alleviate, bargain, best, budget, cheapest, comparison, discount, fast, order, renew, and so on. Common trigger phrases with appeal often include the word for, followed by the name of whatever group of people the visitor belongs to—whether that is women, kids, children, or seniors.
Using such trigger words increases the chances that the first impressions your Web site makes will turn visitors into customers. Plus, not using spam words will help you avoid high bounce rates.
You’ll never get a second chance at a first impression. Wherever a visitor lands on your Web site—whether on a landing page or on a blog post—both the excellence of the content on that page and its effective presentation are vital to making a great first impression.
Staying Power
While first impressions do matter, be sure not to neglect any other aspect of your Web content. Great content inspires loyalty and gives your site staying power. The longer visitors stay on your Web site, the more likely they are to become paying customers—either during their current visit or at some point in the future.
So how do you get visitors to stay? Great content is the key. Creating great content is about much more than ensuring correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation—although this does play a role. Great content is also about clear communication and engendering enthusiasm and engagement.
Your content needs to tell a story—with a beginning, middle, and end—and convey meaning. A story’s meaning is the point you want to get across to the visitor on a particular page. Meaning can derive from anything—from general information about your industry to specific information about your product—or even just a simple call to action. Calls to action can have many purposes—from encouraging a customer to purchase a product to getting a visitor to subscribe to your newsletter. Good, meaningful content compels readers to remain on your site and, ultimately, to become customers.
Because good content tells a story, it needs to have the elements writers use in creating other types of stories, including a hook, some conflict—the customer’s need or want—at least one try-fail cycle—you’ve tried X before, but it did not work—and a resolution or conclusion.
The story you tell is what moves the reader to action. Words that fail to tell a story are just fluff and result in Web-site performance that’s just average or worse rather than spectacular.
