How Surveys, Calculators and Tools Increase Conversions
By Anna Johnson on May 25th, 2009Last year I worked with a company that sold a rather high-ticket, consumer item online. One of their mechanisms for encouraging people to buy was to allow them to answer a sequence of questions in order to find the solution that was right for them.
This worked very well and, for the reasons I give below, I would encourage you to consider implementing one or more ‘involvement tools’ on your site to boost traffic and conversions.
Involvement tools – including online surveys, quizzes, comparators, calculators and other such tools – are all great for both generating and converting traffic. They’re great for generating traffic because they can, in themselves, offer valuable information that people want. And they’re great for converting traffic because they tend to get people thinking through, and beyond, the purchase of a given product.
Similarly, when someone interacts with a carefully designed involvement tool on your site, you know they’re interested in your product or service. When someone uses a comparator, for example, to compare features and benefits of various different brands, products or variations… chances are, they’re in the market to buy.
Some marketers allow visitors to freely use their involvement tools while others provide access to the tool – or the results of the tool – only after acquiring visitors’ name and email. What works best for you will depend on your market niche, your target market, what kind of product or service you’re selling, the type of tool in question, and your own objectives.
In the case of the company I worked with, the target market tended to be so advanced in terms of their purchase cycle (i.e. they were buyers rather than information seekers) that providing free access to the tool tended to work best. In other cases, where your main aim is list building and most visitors are information seekers, you might be better off providing access to a given tool only if someone subscribes to your list first.
On the other hand, if you’re going to require people to sign up to use your involvement tool, the tool itself better deliver value! It might be preferable, for example, to let people use the tool e.g. a survey or quiz and then sign up to get their results.
In any case, there are all sorts of involvement tools you can try, and all sorts of ways you can implement them. So be sure to test a few different approaches. Above all, consider how you might use them on your site or in your marketing. You might be pleasantly surprised.
