Drive the journey

Have you visited a casino?  Or perhaps a shopping centre?  These are good examples of places that intentionally drive your experience.  How?

They make it easy to enter but once you are inside they do a few interesting things like:

1. They never show you a clock.
2. They keep the lighting set in such a way that you can’t determine the time of the day. (In fact some the casinos in Vegas actually have fake day and night routines.)
3. They make the exits hard to find.
4. They place high volume transactional areas away from the entry to draw you past lots of distractors.

Why?

They want you to come deep into their spaces and then they want you to stay.  When you stay you keep spending.

What does this have to do with a website?  You can do the same thing as the casinos / shopping centres.  You can intentionally drive people into parts of your site that will covert sales.  Whether that’s a product or service or something else you know your customers value.   Generally though you want to do it by providing quick access rather than trying to make people stay.  But the theory holds true.

You just need to ensure the customer finds what they need quickly, efficiently.  You will get better traction and your customers will tell you your site is easy to navigate.  Try it.  Put a high sale item on the home page and see what happens.  Then try the same thing with a low seller and see if you can get it to sell more.

By the way… in the digital spaces Facebook and Youtube use the same strategies of keeping you on their site for as long as possible to sell you advertising space.  So this strategy works in the digital space.  So why not follow the example of the big players?  Not sure where to begin?  Send us a message and we will optimise your customer paths.