Tuesday, July 18, 2006
More Business Lessons From IKEA
Last week, I talked about my visit to the local IKEA home decor store and the lesson it taught. It taught the value of connecting with customers by simply letting your unique personality show through in your business. There was more to learn from IKEA than just that, though.
Exposing visitors to the complete product line
IKEA funnels visitors along a winding path through the store instead of arranging so visitors go directly wherever they choose. A customer unfriendly move? It would be if they didn't do such a good job of getting visitors to buy into this unexpected experience.
But they do an excellent job at the entrance of convincing you that traveling the path they set for you will be a pleasant adventure. The end result is that they expose visitors to their entire product line instead of just a fraction of it. This encourages impulse buying.
Can you accomplish the same thing? IKEA's fun and irreverent personality helps them defuse their visitors' eagerness to get in, get what they want and get out. By convincing visitors that it will be fun to walk around the whole store they essentially get visitors to put themselves in IKEA's hands and let IKEA take them where IKEA wants them to go.
This is not easy. Simply saying on your site, "Hey, it'll be fun to wander my site for hours," will not do the trick. You need to understand your visitors and what will grab their interest. You have to make sure you regularly provide them with surprises along the way that maintain their willingness to trust you.
But even if you don't feel confident of your ability to do this right now, you can still capture some of this feel with well-thought out navigation. Make sure you anticipate and plan each path they may take to their goal. Make sure that each page along their path clearly leads them to the next.
As long as they feel they are following the "scent" toward their eventual goal, they will keep moving forward—and see more of your product line along the way. Just make sure you give them a path that THEY will feel comfortable following. If you send them chasing around randomly, they'll lose confidence in you and go elsewhere.
Anticipate what customers will need and when they will need it
Unlike many stores, IKEA had no shopping carts at the entrance. Instead, they assured you that you'd be able to find bags and carts right where you needed them along your way.
Sure enough, these were scattered strategically and discretely throughout the store. There were never so many of them that you noticed them—unless you were specifically looking for them. They blended right in, but were clearly evident to anyone who wanted one.
How do you do the same? Again, think out your visitors' path toward a sale. Figure out what information they will need at what point and provide it for them. Work into your pages links that answer their anticipated questions. Those who have that question will click; those who don't can move past it without having to wade through extraneous info that they don't feel they need.
Provide ideas and package deals that can lead to substantial upsells
One of the reasons IKEA didn't have shopping carts in the entrance is because the first quarter of the path took you past sample rooms they had decorated. And I'm not talking about displays of a sofa, a couple of end tables and lamps. I'm talking about entire rooms.
These rooms were of different sizes and shapes and listed the square footage. They were designed to help you learn and get ideas for decorating whatever size and space you had. They were part of the payoff for putting yourself in IKEA's hands and following where IKEA led. You felt like you were learning how to decorate those problem spaces in your home.
But those rooms weren't just for learning and they weren't just for display, either. Each one had a price tag on them. If so inclined, you could simply go to an IKEA employee, tell them which room you wanted, and they would have a duplicate of the entire display ready to ship off to your home.
It was a great way to upsell more products.
You can do the same. Find things that go together. Show how well they go together in informative tutorials. Offer them as a package. The person who came looking for one item may well leave your site with a whole package.
Make your products highly visible
One last thing to learn from IKEA was the way they made their products visible. Once you got past the room displays, you walked through large spaces where all the products were highly visible. Standing in any one spot, you could instantly spot a wide range of products.
As a matter of fact, products were so well displayed that it was almost impossible NOT to have something draw you over to it.
Again, a good lesson for online marketers. Look at your site. How visible are your products to visitors? Is your site laid out to maximize browsing, or are your products obscured by poor layout and design? You want to catch visitors' eyes and draw them along. You get no points for having the most logical site in the world if it doesn't catch and entice.
All in all, I found my IKEA experience a good reminder of what makes a good sales process. While we can't necessarily duplicate everything that IKEA does online (a big reason they can convince people to put themselves into IKEA's hands is because of the good word-of-mouth they already enjoy), there's a lot that we can.
Jeff
Last week, I talked about my visit to the local IKEA home decor store and the lesson it taught. It taught the value of connecting with customers by simply letting your unique personality show through in your business. There was more to learn from IKEA than just that, though.
Exposing visitors to the complete product line
IKEA funnels visitors along a winding path through the store instead of arranging so visitors go directly wherever they choose. A customer unfriendly move? It would be if they didn't do such a good job of getting visitors to buy into this unexpected experience.
But they do an excellent job at the entrance of convincing you that traveling the path they set for you will be a pleasant adventure. The end result is that they expose visitors to their entire product line instead of just a fraction of it. This encourages impulse buying.
Can you accomplish the same thing? IKEA's fun and irreverent personality helps them defuse their visitors' eagerness to get in, get what they want and get out. By convincing visitors that it will be fun to walk around the whole store they essentially get visitors to put themselves in IKEA's hands and let IKEA take them where IKEA wants them to go.
This is not easy. Simply saying on your site, "Hey, it'll be fun to wander my site for hours," will not do the trick. You need to understand your visitors and what will grab their interest. You have to make sure you regularly provide them with surprises along the way that maintain their willingness to trust you.
But even if you don't feel confident of your ability to do this right now, you can still capture some of this feel with well-thought out navigation. Make sure you anticipate and plan each path they may take to their goal. Make sure that each page along their path clearly leads them to the next.
As long as they feel they are following the "scent" toward their eventual goal, they will keep moving forward—and see more of your product line along the way. Just make sure you give them a path that THEY will feel comfortable following. If you send them chasing around randomly, they'll lose confidence in you and go elsewhere.
Anticipate what customers will need and when they will need it
Unlike many stores, IKEA had no shopping carts at the entrance. Instead, they assured you that you'd be able to find bags and carts right where you needed them along your way.
Sure enough, these were scattered strategically and discretely throughout the store. There were never so many of them that you noticed them—unless you were specifically looking for them. They blended right in, but were clearly evident to anyone who wanted one.
How do you do the same? Again, think out your visitors' path toward a sale. Figure out what information they will need at what point and provide it for them. Work into your pages links that answer their anticipated questions. Those who have that question will click; those who don't can move past it without having to wade through extraneous info that they don't feel they need.
Provide ideas and package deals that can lead to substantial upsells
One of the reasons IKEA didn't have shopping carts in the entrance is because the first quarter of the path took you past sample rooms they had decorated. And I'm not talking about displays of a sofa, a couple of end tables and lamps. I'm talking about entire rooms.
These rooms were of different sizes and shapes and listed the square footage. They were designed to help you learn and get ideas for decorating whatever size and space you had. They were part of the payoff for putting yourself in IKEA's hands and following where IKEA led. You felt like you were learning how to decorate those problem spaces in your home.
But those rooms weren't just for learning and they weren't just for display, either. Each one had a price tag on them. If so inclined, you could simply go to an IKEA employee, tell them which room you wanted, and they would have a duplicate of the entire display ready to ship off to your home.
It was a great way to upsell more products.
You can do the same. Find things that go together. Show how well they go together in informative tutorials. Offer them as a package. The person who came looking for one item may well leave your site with a whole package.
Make your products highly visible
One last thing to learn from IKEA was the way they made their products visible. Once you got past the room displays, you walked through large spaces where all the products were highly visible. Standing in any one spot, you could instantly spot a wide range of products.
As a matter of fact, products were so well displayed that it was almost impossible NOT to have something draw you over to it.
Again, a good lesson for online marketers. Look at your site. How visible are your products to visitors? Is your site laid out to maximize browsing, or are your products obscured by poor layout and design? You want to catch visitors' eyes and draw them along. You get no points for having the most logical site in the world if it doesn't catch and entice.
All in all, I found my IKEA experience a good reminder of what makes a good sales process. While we can't necessarily duplicate everything that IKEA does online (a big reason they can convince people to put themselves into IKEA's hands is because of the good word-of-mouth they already enjoy), there's a lot that we can.
Jeff
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