Every person that comes across your website is different. They have different care-abouts, preferences, and buying behaviors.
Unfortunately, your website is either oblivious to these differences or may be trying to appeal to everyone at the same time. Both of these approaches can kill your online potential.
Think about how you like to shop online.
Perhaps you like to watch a video that shows a product demo. You may find that you are a more visual person, one that likes large images, videos, and graphics to help you make a purchase decision.
On the other hand, maybe you just want the facts and a long list of product descriptions suits your fancy.
Your customers likewise have differing tastes and preferences that ultimately impact how they trust you and if they will buy from you.
I recently read an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales” that highlighted some emerging technology and algorithms that lets your website learn from customer behavior and respond accordingly.
The article highlights how people can fall into different cognitive styles which indicate how they “perceive, think and solve problems.” People may lean towards being more visual or verbal and then more analytic or holistic when considering your product or service.
Why would adapting to customer behavior be important on your website?
Your website is your virtual sales person. A real-life sales person can adjust the tone, sales pitch, talking points, and invitations to match customer reactions.
The closer your website can intelligently respond to the individual customers, the more likely you will strike a cord with them and convert more visitors to customers.
Naturally, too much intelligence could be a little creepy to a customer. However, if you present choices, data, pictures, and descriptions a customer likes to see, it won’t seem creepy at all, but rather reassuring and natural to them.
Customers will be able to find what they are looking for, be confident in your product, and will buy from you all because you anticipated the style in which they wanted to receive that information.
This leads to customers having an emotional bond with your website and company, which is a very powerful relationship to have. Loyal, repeat customers aren’t mechanically returning to you, but want to do business with you again.