Always nudge

Always nudge your users toward making contact. If you want your website (or emails for that matter) to be more than a brochure, you need to nudge your users toward making contact.  That contact could be a form registration, an email, a telephone call or even a walk-up at a trade show.  matter what the form of contact is, it is almost always percieved as an expense to the person who is making contact.  Don't underestimate the cost of making contact.  Web surfers today know that if they make contact, you will market to them, and that is interpreted as an expense to them.  In exchange for that expense, they want to receive something.  Like any sales event, you only make the sale when the percieved value outweighs the percieved cost. You could be bold and simply try to close the deal right away:  "Click here to download our widget construction white paper". Nothing wrong with that, but the visitor might not be ready to "buy".  In that case you want to gently nudge them a little closer toward making contact. One company I worked with had a vast knowledge base of customer bugs and and unpublished repository of FAQs.  Instead of a simple website link calls "FAQs", we called it "Ask An Engineer".  On each answer page we gave the visitor an opportunity to submit their own specific question by email or to place a call directly to a pre-sales engineer.  Besides those links we also offered a related whitepaper or two behind a registration form. Furthermore, on web pages describing specific products, you can offer the same sort of thing.  Remember it's all about nudging the user toward making contact. Of course this requires some engineering on the part of your web team, but it is well worth the effort.  Do you have a good nudge story?  Use the link below and share it with us!