3-30-3 Rule of Online User Behaviour

by Jamie Lee

Internet

Published on this site: January 6th, 2011 - See more articles from this month

With over 1 trillion unique URLs and 122 million domain names online, the internet has become a very crowded place.

An effective sales funnel design is instrumental to maximising conversion. According to Joel, an Internet Strategy Consultant from Conversion Hub (a Singapore based usability and conversion optimization consultancy), an average web visitor would give you a mere 3 seconds before deciding to press the "Back" button of his browser. If you succeed in capturing his attention, you gain an additional 30 seconds where he will evaluate your value proposition. Finally, you will have an additional 3 minutes to persuade him to perform a particular action.

This is also known as the 3-30-3 rule.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

You should have a specific goal that acts as a funnel to drive all incoming traffic into your goal. The sales funnel begins by capturing the attention of prospects. Some prospects are convinced to become buyers of the product or adopters of the action your website is persuading. The sales funnel continues to nurture the best customers, filtering out mismatches and refining the specific target customer, offering them more specialised products and services, often at higher prices. By the end of the process the funnel has identified the highly-responsive customers who have heeded your message.

Give your visitors exactly what they came to find and you will be edging them along the sales funnel. This includes an eye-catching design to draw your target audience's directly to the sales funnel, a clear marketing message communicating a strong and clear value proposition, and one or more clear, concise actions to take.

Measurement And Analysis

An integral step of developing a sales funnel design is measurement and analysis. Such action will tell you many things that will help you develop an effective sales funnel, such as which marketing activities are bringing in the right visitors, where visitors are losing interest and leaving your site, which chains of presentations and related visitor actions are producing your sales and so forth. Conducting measurement and analysis allows you to drop ineffective marketing activities and messages, determine which marketing activities are bringing the right people to your site, where they are dropping out of your sales pathway and in what percentages. All these means you can squeeze out more results of your marketing investments. An effective sales funnel is supposed to be designed to filter out the misses at each layer, so in that sense, attrition at a certain percentage rate along the way is both expected and good. This means that your funnel is focusing on the target audience you are expecting action from - the customers that have found a reason to stay on your site for that extra 3 minutes.

Developing your sales funnel or improving on it could be as simple as the creation of a new top banner or homepage restructuring to give your visitors a sense of purpose and the development of a conversion driven goal page.

If your strategies and messages are all over the place, find out how you can coordinate and synchronise your efforts with an effective sales funnel design. With 87% of visitors giving you a very unforgiving 3 seconds to make that first impression, and only 30 further seconds to evaluate what you have to offer, a successful sales funnel design could essentially be what makes or breaks your website.

Jamie Lee is a Consultant in Singapore's leading Search Engine Marketing Firm - Conversion Hub. She also actively contributes to forums on topics related to PPC Advertising and social media marketing.
http://www.conversion-hub.com/