Lower Your Bounce Rate With The Polinsky Rule of 3
Posted on Wed, Jun 09, 2010 @ 01:52 PM
The average homepage bounce-rate of a website is anywhere between 45%-70%. If your bounce-rate is at the mid- to higher-end of this statistic, your business may be losing out many qualified sales leads because of visitor confusion. As a digital consultant to many businesses, I have found a universal truth in what I call The Rule of 3. If you apply this basic strategy to your website, you will decrease your bounce-rate and retain prospects beyond your homepage.
There are three types of website visitors:
1. Info-seekers
2. Qualified Prospects
3. Buyers
Now this three piece segmentation may seem overly-simple, but go look at your website and see if your home page and the rest of the website effectively caters to these distinct website visitors.
Info-seekers are often not 100% convinced they have a problem. Often times info-seekers are not interested in your solution yet, rather they are looking to identify with industry issues or problems that are similar to theirs as a benchmark. This area of segmentation needs to focus strictly on content that frames the issue your company can solve, but without speaking specifically to your solution. Rather, focus on industry issues and challenges. This will help educate info-seekers and build trust with your company as your website becomes authoritative. This is a great chance to offer soft lead-conversions, in the form of downloads, whereby you get info-seekers email addresses in exchange for some unique and sought-after content your company possesses.
Now you have educated your info-seeker enough to possibly become a prospect. Naturally, as their voice of authority, the prospect will want to understand your company's value proposition; how you can solve their problem and what is the impact to them. It may be financial savings or increase in efficiency. This is your next opportunity to re-segment the prospect with the right information, so they can build a business case.
The next segmented bucket is your hard sell: the buyer. Most websites go right to this segment and ignore the other two, resulting in the loss of the visitors because they were not ready to make a purchasing decision or speak to a sales representative. Think of the buyer as a visitor that is the final hurdle to your sales funnel. Equip your site with the proper information that engages them in your value proposition, forcing them to recall your company when the need for your services arises.
Each of these home page segmented buckets should lead to a "sub home-page" that caters to each of these three types of website visitors. Following this website strategy will create more relevant content aligned to what the visitor may be looking for and provide a better navigational experience as visitors transition from the homepage to other website pages without having them bounce from your site. In the mean time, be sure to check whatever analytic tool you use, or Alexa.com to find out your site's current bounce rate.
By Stephen Polinsky, President
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