Persuasive Momentum is the subject of Chapter 8 in Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, and I need a bit myself. So I’m going to include five chapters in this post so we can get into the meat of the Persuasion Architecture chapters of the book this coming week.

Since we now think of buying as a process, it makes sense to consider that each step in the process as a potential point of failure. The pages on our site, and the elements on these pages, are just links in a chain – and we need to find and replace the weak ones where visitors lose interest and abandon us. To do this, we’re told to consider who the visitor is, what we want them to do, and how they might gain the confidence necessary to take that action.

This is another of the ‘worth the price of admission’ moments in the book. Take the time to look at each page, and even each element on the pages of your site, and ask those questions. Pages and elements don’t belong there just because they’re part of some presentation you’re making. They only belong there if they help a visitor to move (or want to move) forward.

The most basic and common error in terms of maintaining momentum, are pages which lack any clear ‘next action’. Sites selling goods almost always move visitors from category groupings to item pages and then display a large ‘add to cart’ button to indicate the desired next step. But service firms often provide service descriptions, and then since there is no next online action, leave it entirely up to the visitor to navigate back to the home page, over to the ‘contact us’ page, or wherever in search of a next step. Think how more likely those actions are if the service description page instead clearly displays the phone number with an invitation to call, or provides a simple web-form to enable the visitor to request that a sales person contact them with a clear understanding of exactly which service they were interested in.

Consider the Dorney Park (an amusement and water park) website. If someone gets to their Admissions page you could assume they’re on the road to spending some money. Since the park offers online ticket purchases with ‘print at home’ tickets, you would think anyone looking at the price list would be clearly directed to take that next step and place an order. Once the money is spent and the tickets in hand, the chances of actually getting in the car and driving to the park are a lot higher than otherwise.

But the Admissions page makes no such effort, leaving the ‘buy tickets’ link only up in the main navigation bar where most people won’t be able to find it, or can easily ignore it. (click the image at left to enlarge it) How many more online orders do you think they’d get every day if ‘order now’ was a large attractive option near the bottom of the page?

This is the most obvious of examples, and one of the simplest of situations. Considering these questions (who are they, what do I want them to do, what do they need to do it) for each of your visitor types, across all of their buying scenarios, and at each step of the process is a large and difficult task. It’s becoming clear that we need a system to develop and structure our communications and provide a process that matches the buying process our visitors are going through. Chapter 9 and 10 make that point. Chapters 11 and 12 I’m going to just skip.

There, I’ve got MY momentum back.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.