Nicola and I were doing a bit of market research for a client the other day, talking to event managers about their process for choosing suppliers.
One comment we heard about a major company went like this.
“Oh, them, yes I remember them. I visited their website last year but thought it looked old and unloved so I went to a competitor”.
This was from an event manager who was spending tens of thousands of pounds on their event. Despite the big budget, the reason she chose to spend with one company and not with another came down to an emotional reaction to the look of a website.
Just take a moment and think about that.
It wasn’t a hard analysis of numbers, it wasn’t a personal relationship. It wasn’t in any normal sense logical. However the latest research into brain research is backing up what our event manager said. Psychologists tell us that emotional reaction is the key driver in decision making.
The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made headlines when his study of people with damaged emotional brain areas centres showecd that these folks found it almost impossible to make even simple decisions on mundane issues, such as whether to choose one sandwich filling over another because the vital emotional element was missing from their decision making process.
Damasio concluded that at the actual point of decision, even when we believe we are deciding on purely logical factors, decisions are arguably always based on emotion.
Therefore it is clear why the ‘first impressions count’ message must apply to websites as much as anything else. so,it is worth rechecking your own site to ensure it is delivering on the trust factors that make first time visitors have a positive emotional experience, stay and look around rather than head off to look at your competitors.
If you find you need a bit of help understanding what does and doesn’t work for visitors, why not give us a call. We can use tried and tested measurement tools combined with our many years of experience to suggest improvements to keep people on your website, decrease your ‘bounce rate’ (to use a horrible industry term) and in the end, help you make more money.
Chris