surfer
visitor
customerenable your leads & customers to do the marketing
Visitors interacting with your site is one thing. Having them interact with others about your site & products is really sweet. Still sticking to our example we see:
- Mark orders 2 packages of diet cookies and is satisfied with the easy and smooth check-out process. After making the sale he subscribes to the ‘dog-feed’ (a rss feed giving instant access to all new articles appearing on the website). He receives the diet cookies quickly in the mail together with a ‘first time customer’ gift certificate that gives him 20% discount on any second order. He posts about his good experience on his dogblog. The post is read by 160 people.
- Beth receives an answer to her email within 3 hours. You answer her questions and point her to a forum where she can talk with other switchers. She signs into the forum (where 180 switchers roam) telling the others she was linked to them by you. When the moment comes for her to jump on the dog train, she’ll remember you when it comes to buying the food.
- Maria clicks on a link saying ‘special cookies for special dogs’ and puts the ‘good dog’ cookies in her shopping bag. She is thrilled with the website because she has had some bad experiences with others that weren’t as accessible to her screen reader. She ads your website to the ‘accessibility shortlist’ of the national institute for the blind which has 2500 members.
Most important lessons learnt:
- accessibility, usability & trustability are interconnected and together they can make or break your website.
- word of mouth is exponential on the web where 1 person can talk to many. Better make it a good word of mouth then.