Are you following the 9/90 Rule of Engagement?
Does the design of your website grab your visitor’s attention?
You may not realize this, but in today’s fast-moving world of shifting attention spans you’ve got no more than 9 seconds to get someone’s attention.
If your home page, social media post, email, or landing page is not interesting to your audience in 9 seconds, then they’re gone, quickly moving on to something else, and chances are they won’t be back.
A lost opportunity for you … and for them.
To make your online platform interactive and engaging, your job is to design it to engage your audience in one or more online conversations that are important and interesting to them. It’s important to do this a few seconds after they “land” there.
These are conversations they are already having with themselves about problems, issues, or aspirations that concern them. The first step in designing your online conversation is to ask yourself these questions:
- Who are my ideal website visitors?
- What do they want to do?
- What would I like them to do so that I can serve them?
In terms of thinking about your website visitors, get clear on who you serve and how you serve them. Identify the problems they are experiencing that you can help them solve, and then offer ways to serve them on their journey.
What is an online conversation? It’s just a sequence of web pages, forms, buttons, and emails that cultivate a relationship with someone you’ve just met.
An online conversation cultivates a relationship
These online conversations go by many names – funnels, campaigns, launches, webinars, pipelines, etc. However, at the core, they are fundamentally the same thing – a sequence of web pages and emails that carry out an online conversation.
Your job at each step of the conversation is to design your web page and email content (the “copy”) to elicit the next click to keep the conversation going so that they get what they want, and you get to serve them, a win for both of you.
A fundamental design principle for creating the content in of your all web pages and emails is to keep in mind the “9/90 Rule of Engagement.”
- You have up to 9 seconds to get someone’s attention.
- Once you have their attention, then you have up to 90 seconds to get them to take the next action in the conversation by clicking something – a link, a button, etc.
In writing your web page and email copy, your job with each sentence is to entice them to keep reading, and to take the next action with you, thereby making it an interactive experience.
The goal is to engage your visitor long enough in an online conversation to be able to actively follow up with them. This will typically involve you giving something of value in exchange for the visitors contact information so that you can follow up with them by email, text or voice calls. The online marketers call this a "lead magnet."
Your online platform needs to include not only public information pages, but online marketing pages and email systems so that you can interactively engage your audience in online conversations.
To read more about how to set up your online business platform, please download your FREE GUIDE: The 5 Steps to Accelerate Your Online Success.
