The psychology of home page design

The most common mistake people make in home page design is leading with “what you do” or an intellectual discussion of how your product or service works.

Until you and a prospect share a common perspective about a particular problem they may be dealing with, you really don’t have license to speak with them, much less engage them on the home page of a website.

In order for someone to engage with you about why they should take the time to understand your business and potentially buy something from you versus your competitor, you have less than a minute to attract them within their reality (not yours!). And to do this means engaging someone emotionally first, and intellectually second.

If you achieve emotional engagement first, you earn their trust to engage at an intellectual level.

The next challenge, if you get the emotional reality correct, is to summarize what you do in 25 words or less.These two steps are tricky because everyone has an “opinion” about the emotional trigger and few people can write a truly engaging 25 word statement. But there are ways to test this on the home page of a website.

To set up a test, create this flow of engagement for the home page:

1. Make an emotional statement someone can identify with.
   • You need to be very clear on who your ideal customer is and dig down to understand what an emotional trigger might be for them. Often times, it has to do with time, money or people but stated in their reality, not yours.

2. Once you deliver the emotional statement, the follow on statement is: Which means that…
   • Here you bring the conversation to an intellectual level tied to what you deliver.

3. Next, summarize what you do in 25 words or less that addresses the emotional statement and the intellectual business problem.

4. Once your statements are simply stated, you conclude with the benefit statement that drives the need for your product or service.

If you are able to engage someone at an emotional and intellectual level on the home page in 10 seconds or less, you have earned their engagement. In their mind they are now asking “How do I that?” and only then will they be clicking through on your website to learn more.

Using Marketing CoPilot as an example, here are statements 1 through 4:

1. Are you completely frustrated by the time and money you spend on your website with little return to your bottom line?
2. What if there was a better way to manage your website and turn it into your best sales tool.
3. Marketing CoPilot has a simple and effective methodology for turning your website into something that helps you find customers and keep customers. Our digital marketing services are packaged to provide you with the strategy, design and development help you need to make your web presence work better for your business.
4. Find customers and keep customers: by turning your website and web presence into your best sales tool.

Applying the methodology to your home page design

Ready to set up a test?  Contact us and we will help you write and design a new home page to test and improve engagement and conversion on your website.

The post The psychology of home page design appeared first on Marketing CoPilot.