Author: Liraz Margalit / Source: Entrepreneur There’s a reason the word “homepage” begins with “home.” For digital enterprises, a homepag
There’s a reason the word “homepage” begins with “home.” For digital enterprises, a homepage should bring to customers’ minds many of the feelings that an actual home does: comfort, relaxation, a sense of warmth and security. Home is a place where you don’t have to think too much — you simply walk inside and everything you need is waiting for you. A homepage should provide customers with a similar experience.
Shopping behavior has quietly evolved into a new era. Shoppers now are more likely to buy something online than in a brick-and-mortar store, and even those shoppers that prefer to make their final purchase inside a physical store will often begin the shopping journey online. As shopping behavior has changed, however, so have expectations. Customers today want things to be easy. They want to be engaged and rewarded online, they want promotions that are personalized and make sense for them and their lives, and most of all, they don’t want to have to work — or think — more than they have to.
In short, they want to feel at home.
In my work as a web psychologist and head of behavioral research at Clicktale, I work with numerous companies who are concerned with how their brand experience plays out on desktop vs. mobile, but this is short-sighted. For many shoppers, the device through which they interact is less important than the connection itself and its impact on the customer decision.
It doesn’t matter if your customers are shopping at home on their MacBooks or on the bus on their Samsung Tablets. What matters is how that individual customer perceives his or her brand experience, and how that experience feels. Brand loyalty is deeply personal and highly subjective. And the primary factor in how brand experience is internalized by a customer is — you guessed it — the homepage.
It’s time for enterprises to catch up with this new era of shopping, and the first adaptation that needs to be made is how we all think about a homepage’s purpose.
Until the early 2000s, homepages were just a signal that businesses sent to users. It marked an online presence. It offered contact information and a confirmation that the business was, indeed, online. Today, however, web traffic flows in so many directions, with users coming to sites from search, social media, email and beyond, that homepages are often bypassed. Customers on Facebook can click on a social link and find themselves directly in a product or category page, thus making the homepage essentially moot. It’s become so easy to navigate in and out of sites…
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