When people are in the market for something, they come to your site, browse around, and have opinions. Since the fundamental question of the web is “why wasn’t I consulted”, it is necessary for us to understand what those opinions are and what we can do about them.
When someone has a conception of your business’s offerings that might hold them back from purchasing – and I mean purchasing, where money exchanges hands – we call that an objection. If the objection isn’t addressed right away, people are likely to bounce at the point of maximum interest in your product.
It’s our job as designers to understand what those objections commonly are, and how we can address them before they cause us to lose customers.
Before the internet, it used to be that you would more easily understand what the objections were – and how to head them off. People would come into your business, ask questions, and you’d use your own skills to answer them. Maybe you’d even adapt what you offer to meet their needs.
Today, for most businesses, this is a passive conversation. You try to guess who “the customer” is and what they might be thinking. You might use numbers to interpret this; if you’re a little more sophisticated, you might resort to heat maps, or the occasional anecdotal evidence, like an email or personal story from a friend.
This is a disastrous way to run your business for the following reasons:
- You’re not listening. Objections are impossible to uncover exclusively through quantitative data. You might think that you have clarity on what to do, but you really don’t until you talk to people.
- You’re not proactive. The concept of “unknown unknowns” is very real in business, where you don’t know that there are things you don’t know.
- You’re ignoring the biggest channel for deeper insight. By opening a channel to your prospective customers to understand what held them back before they bought, you’re learning more about how to message your product in the future.
And so the answer, of course, is to talk to people.
You can do this one of two ways:
- Survey them. Ask purchasers what held them back before they bought, if any. Ask non-purchasers what caused them to leave, if you can find them.
- Call them. Interviews are the most powerful qualitative research method, and they’re terrific for identifying objections.
What do you do once you know why people chose not to buy? You address it, head on, in your marketing materials, as far up the funnel as you can possibly put it. FAQs are great for this, especially on the home or pricing pages.
Doing these activities allows you to act with intention & clarity. You avoid those meetings where people keep asking about something they think they can’t find out. Instead, you take responsibility and learn the answer.