Internet Marketing Tips - How Many Choices Should You Give Your Prospects?

By Steven Wagenheim

As a consumer, we love choices. Nobody wants to walk into a store and have only one choice of a product. What if we don't like that one? What then? So choices are important. However, at what point do choices become so overwhelming that we end up confused and ultimately end up without making a purchase. So, how many choices are too many? How many are not enough? Well, it kind of depends on what the situation is. This article is going to give a few examples so you can see that there isn't a right or wrong here.
Let's start off with a simple sales page that's selling one product. On the surface, it would seem that this leaves the prospect only one choice. Well, actually, that's not true. A sales page, at minimum, leaves the prospect with two choices...buy or don't buy. The reason I say "at minimum" is because a sales page can be setup to offer the prospect several choices.
For example, you could sell a product that teaches the prospect how to take advantage of a certain marketing niche as one choice AND...as another choice...offer them a membership that actually gives them information on a daily basis that will show them what niches they should target each day. This is actually the purpose of one of my products on Google Trends. So in this case, the prospect has three choices, one of course being not to purchase.
But what about getting into multiple choices? An example of this would be the review site. This is a site where we review several products that cater so solving one problem. Each product is rated on some kind of scale, say from 1-5, and then, the prospect can read each review and decide which product they want to purchase...or none of them at all. I've seen some review sites that have had dozens of products for one particular problem.
Okay, so the question is...how effective or ineffective is this approach? Well, the only way you're going to find out is to test it. Put a site up with multiple reviews and see what your overall conversion percentage is. For example, if you get 100 visitors and get one sale from product 1, two sales from product 2 and one sale from product 3, that's an overall 5% conversion for the three products. If you add more products and your conversion goes up, then keep adding products until conversion drops.
It isn't an exact science. But eventually, each person is going to reach a point where they are presented with too many choices and end up leaving your site without making a purchase. When you reach the point where your conversion drops to zero, that's when you know you've gone beyond the bounds of what the average person would consider acceptable.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
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