Acquisition, Persuasions, Conversion

There are typically 3 broad stages to any customer engagement:

• Acquisition
• Persuasion
• Conversion

Acquisition – is how you go about getting your website visitors in the first place, whether that be through Search Engines, 3rd party links, direct referral, marketing campaigns or some other form of referral. Without potential customers Persuasion and Acquisition are impossible.

Persuasion – will be the site’s effectiveness at getting the visitor to stay. With recent research suggesting that a decision is made as quickly as the first 20th of a second “"Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors” (Dr Lindgaard – Journal of Behaviour and Information Technology).

Once you’ve persuaded people to stay, that’s not an end to it, you then have to convince them that you have what they want and it’s worth their time looking further.

Conversion – this is the “clincher”. This is the point at which your visitor turns from a passive visitor in to one who is going to do something. This could be:

• Buying something
• Making an enquiry
• Signing up to a newsletter

Not getting in touch (in the case of information sites such as Microsoft, MacAfee or Norton, where the last thing they want is for you to get in touch with them. In this case a successful conversion is a visitor who finds the information they want and go away again - happy)

Typical scenarios

The “martini glass” funnel

- Acquisition

- Persuasion

- Conversion

This is where the marketing of the site is attracting the traffic; however it is immediately obvious that the site has either misled the visitor or doesn’t appeal and as a result, whilst lots of people are visiting, most are leaving right away.

The “cocktail glass” funnel

- Acquisition

- Persuasion

- Conversion

This is where the visitors come in to the site and are interested, some are persuaded to look, but in the main are not persuaded to do anything on the site.

The “wine glass” funnel

- Acquisition

- Persuasion

- Conversion

In this instance, the site is attracting the visitors; it’s persuading them to do something and is then losing them at the conversion stage. Typically because the checkout is over complicated or confusing, the visitor doesn’t know what to do, they have to “sign-up” before they do anything etc.