Thoughts on Real Estate Marketing…

When you offer products in an e-mail or in an article on your blog, are you sending your readers to the proper page to buy those products?

I just read an email about making your own facial scrub, and it sounded interesting so I went to the website and found the recipe… so far so good.

In that recipe was an ingredient that I probably won’t be able to find locally, so I was glad to see a link to go purchase it on line.  And that’s as far as I got.

I followed the link, but it led only to the home page of the website. So… I looked around and tried to decide which category of products might offer this particular ingredient.

No luck there, but hey! There’s a search box!

No luck there either. I spent about 10 minutes searching that site and left without finding the product.

Could I have found it if I’d been more persistent? Perhaps, but as a customer I shouldn’t have to be persistent.

Determined and persistent are qualities we might demand of ourselves in our pursuit to succeed, but they aren’t qualities we should require of customers in order to buy from us!

So, even though it is easier to just add a link to your website’s home page, don’t take the easy route.

After you’ve gone to the trouble to “sell” your product, make it easy to buy. Take that extra minute or two to give visitors the link to the page where they can purchase.

The Internet is not like a physical store

Bricks and mortar stores can sometimes get away with making their customers search. In fact, they count on visitors seeing other items and buying more as they wander through the store in search of a sale item.

But it won’t work on line.

In fact, I was exhibiting unusual behavior when I spent so much time searching… most visitors will be gone within seconds if they can’t easily locate what they’re after.