A Website Avatar Will Grab - And Guide - Your Visitors

Avatars — A pictorial presentation of a human in a chat environment— can improve your site visitors’ experience by not only putting a sense of you in your website, but by directing the site visitor to something important. Think of it as a guide or a salesperson for anyone who clicks on your site.

The avatar may point out site features, call attention to a special offer or do some hand-holding to improve the rate of conversion. Failure to convert when reaching checkout on an e-commerce site is a well-known source of frustration for companies that market their products online. This is where an avatar, or multiple avatars, could be beneficial. For example, TotallyFurniture.com uses one avatar to point out on-site features and another to provide assistance with shipping on each product description page.

One benefit of using an avatar is to better utilize the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section of your website. (People often don’t like to wade through FAQs; they prefer hearing the answer). An avatar answering the most popular FAQs up front, followed by a clickable FAQ, can help you eliminate a lot of questions formerly answered by phone, thus saving time and money.

If you believe that successful sales of products or services are a function of trust, whom your customer is buying the product or service from is as important as the product itself. This makes the use of avatars influential, because these proxy humans suggest the possibility of a conversation with a customer. Most importantly, an avatar’s demeanor, happy or serious, can elicit a similar response from the site’s visitor. Remember, there are no hard and fast rules in creating an avatar except that the avatar must be appropriate for your audience.

If you are ready to create an avatar for your website, you might want to try SitePal, a leading service provider of avatar creation. SitePal (sitepal.com) makes the price of launching an avatar on your website affordable (it offers three levels of service starting at $9.95 per month) and the implementation relatively easy. The “cut and paste” avatar creation interface is painless and you can test-drive the experience for 15 days. For an additional cost, send SitePal a photograph and it will create an avatar that resembles you.

SitePal also offers a series of suggestions on avatar use, including: Keep your messages short (under 60 seconds) and refresh your avatar backgrounds and/or messages frequently.

If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you might consider using CrazyTalk by Reallusion to create your avatar. CrazyTalk, unlike SitePal, is shrink-wrapped software available for purchase. While you can animate clip art avatars with CrazyTalk, you can also create three-dimensional, photo-realistic avatars using any digitally created photographic image.

Regardless of which way you choose to go, using a well-placed avatar to get your customers’ attention, help them understand your product’s features and benefits or guide them through the checkout process will create the impression that you are there to help.

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