Top 5 Tips to Increase Conversions
The top buzzword for 2010 is “conversions.” Why has this become such a hot topic? The reason is that your website is like a gigantic funnel, out of which pop a precious few sales or web leads. Most online marketing efforts have been focused on traffic acquisition (search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, banner advertising, etc.) up until now, because these efforts can be made without touching the sacred cow of modern digital marketing: the corporate website.
As soon as you cross over into the realm of optimizing your website, you start dealing with a host of different stakeholders, including IT, marketing, and different divisions within a company, all of which want to have their slice of the pie. For this reason, most companies have found it easier to ignore truly optimizing their website. But this is why this is your biggest opportunity to grow your website. My Portland, Oregon based website design company measures everything as carefully as we possibly can, and in no part of digital marketing do we see variances in the rate of return as great as in website conversion rates. We have clients with conversion rates that are over four times that of their competitors, allowing them to vastly outspend the competition to acquire traffic because they are so much more efficient at converting them into leads. A site that is truly optimized for conversion can be your silver bullet for beating the competition.
Credibility logos
Visitors are looking to quickly verify that your company is authentic and credible. There are two simple ways to do this: one, logos that act as risk reducers that address purchase, security or privacy concerns (Secured by Verisign, Better Business Bureau); and two, credibility logos that build trust with your company through known brands or awards (Featured on NBC, 100 Fastest Growing Companies, etc.). We find that our clients are rarely communicating all that their company has accomplished in a way that their visitors can quickly understand. If you are able to create a connection with your visitors through a brand they respect by using their logo, you will have a much greater chance of converting them into a sale or a lead.
Pre-answer key prospect questions on your website
One of the most effective way to drive conversions is sit down with a few of your sales representatives and ask them what the most common questions are that your prospects have or analyze your customer support call logs for pre-sales questions that arise. Work these into relevant content areas on your website and you will have more visitors purchase or reach out to become a qualified lead because you have addressed their needs. If you already have this content on your website, then make sure it is being linked to or included on relevant pages.
Choose a strategy for your website and stick to it
What do a pest control company, a car dealership, an industrial manufacturer of acoustic panels and a law firm have in common? Depending on how they are set up, it could be a lot more than you think. We realized this from watching a number of our clients obsessively try to match everything that their competition was doing, only to see their result fall far short. We realized that most of this failure stemmed from a lack of an understanding of the strategy being pursued to generate business through their website. It is far more important to choose the strategy that your company will pursue online and monitor websites that follow the same strategy for good ideas than to mindlessly watch what your competition is doing. The best ideas will always come from outside of your industry, and if you are emulating a competitor who is pursuing a different strategy, the results can be disastrous.
So, you may be asking, how do I find out what strategy I am pursuing?
We have found that our clients’ websites fit into one of five marketing patterns that, if pursued, will simplify and clarify what to improve on your website. Ask yourself a few simple questions and find out which pattern you belong to. We’ve summarized these patterns in our web design blog.
Write copy that is visitor-focused
One of the easiest ways to kill your conversion rate is to spend a lot of time talking about yourself. One of the most basic marketing ideas is to express all of your features (which only you care about) as benefits (which your visitors care about). The best tool that I know of to help you know how well your copy is focused on your visitors is by the folks at Future Now. Just enter the web page you are working on and your company name, and it will tell you how “me-centered” your copy is. Keep re-writing your copy until you are over 60% “customer-focused” in your language and watch your conversion rate increase.
Write copy that is understandable by a 6th-grader
Visitors online are extremely distracted, and do not have time to read content that sounds like part of a PhD dissertation. One of the greatest challenges that marketers have is that they are often very smart, and they often want to share this with the world. Unfortunately the rest of the world is busy and is looking for specific information that your complicated writing is obscuring. Check out the reading level of your website using Microsoft Word’s built in tool or this website: http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/.
This guest post is written by David Brown from Synotac Web Design, a web design company from Portland.
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