One of my favorite places to eat is Rain Forrest Café. The food is nothing special and is overpriced. In fact, each year before I take my family there to eat a small part of me thinks I am about to waste good money on a very average meal. And then I remember why we go…

Even before we arrive at the restaurant my family will browse around the store looking at many of the items for sale. My children laugh and beg for pennies – which ends up inflating to nickels, dimes and the occasional quarter when we run out of pennies – to throw at the giant robot crocodile at the entrance. When we walk through the seating entrance we pass under and through a large aquarium. This primes feelings of excitement and when we are finally seated my family will immediately leave our seats to explore the different areas. We talk about nature and what it would be like to live in the country and not the city. Since I grew up mostly in the country on small farms and acreages my children press me for answers to questions that are sparked by our current environment. We generally spend more than an hour listening to each other talk about our likes, dislikes, hopes and dreams of tomorrow.

Then we order dessert. We always get the “volcano”, which is a bunch of ice cream and brownies shaped like a volcano with a 4^th of July sparkler sticking out the top. Once the sparks dies out everyone takes a spoon and fights to get their fill.

I recently had a personal revelation – We don’t go to the Rain Forrest Café for the food and stay for the conversation. We go for the conversation and happen to order food while we are there. Conversation is the focus. Conversation is the draw.

I have a client that was experiencing low conversation rates on his ecommerce site. His site was professionally designed, had crisp bright photos and competitive pricing. The site copy  was also professional. Very corporate. It accurately described the products and was grammatically impeccable. The site looked very much like an ecommerce site with all the trust indicators in the footer – just where we have been conditioned to look.

Having done a lot of split testing I knew that with the type and volume of traffic that was coming to his site that he should be having more orders. So, I asked him to sell me a few of his products. I wanted him to explain to me why I should buy from him. I would pick a product and essentially ask, “What’s in it for me?” The man can sell. I was genuinely interested in a few products because he was so engaging. You could tell he really believed in what he was selling, he was obviously an expert and when you speak with him it feels like you have known him longer than the 20 minute conversation you were having.

I asked him, “Why does your site sound so different from you?” His reply started to explain a lot to me. He said he didn’t write his site, but that he hired a slick web development company to build his website and they had a copywriter on staff that wrote up his descriptions based upon manufacturer literature.

I knew we needed to get the owner to engage his visitors. If we could do that I was sure we could start building conversations which would lead to sales.

We added two things to his website. The first was a message from him that would be prominently displayed on the home page. He would choose this message and update twice per week with a link taking people to all the older messages. This was to be useful information written by his own hand – grammar problems and all. The second thing we did was to add a forum to his site and put graphical links to the forum on all the product pages. We wanted the site visitors to engage in conversation even before making a purchase. We made the purchase almost an afterthought to the conversation. Certainly, we were still trying to make it easy to purchase, but we really wanted people to communicate. I had the owner prime the forum with questions and answers that he had been doing for years through email. It was a goldmine of content that was easy to add to the forum. If a product had any discussion about it we linked to it from the product page. This was much more than the user review that we see on many sites nowadays. This was engaging in 2-way communication with a real expert that would be straight with you about any product he was selling.

His conversion rate more than doubled the first month. When all was said and done the conversion rate went up by 400%. People started coming for the conversation and ordering because of a relationship. The ideas that lead to his increase in sales centered on the conversation. This led to an increase in customer retention and built trust with first time visitors.

It’s about making the customer feel welcome at your site and being more than just a brochure that any hack can spin up.