To Sell or To Contact?

Recently, I created a website for Lori G Bird, a genealogist who specialized in danish family history (www.danish-genealogy.com).  We initially created the site to sell them right up front.  We gave them all the information they needed and the purpose of the page was to get them to purchase X number of hours of Lori’s time for her to do genealogy work for them.  Over a three week period, the page just didn’t convert.

We then placed a form at the bottom of the page that said, “What Do You Need?”  The second visitor to the site after upload submitted a form, so did the sixth.  Since then, nearly 1 in 4 visitors have submitted a form explaining how they need all their genealogy done.  Mrs. Bird has been able to email them a couple times, explaining what she can do, explain her pricing, and then direct them to the same link that was found at the bottom of the original page where they eagerly purchase X number of hours of Lori’s time.

So, the question is…should the main point of every web page be simply to sell?  Perhaps, certainly a large online retailer would have trouble building a relationship with each of the thousand or so visitors to their site each day.  However, with autoresponders, a site can capture contact information from interested parties (perhaps lured in by a freebie of some sort) and then send a casual, comfortable frequency of messages to the prospective buyer to build a relationship, establish credibility, and then sell.

Trust is a huge factor in internet marketing.  If your visitors cannot trust you, they rarely will buy from you.  Trust is more easily built through communication than a static web page.