Your online presence is where conversion happens. Your website is your 24/7 marketing and sales force, representing your brand, presenting your offer and should be transforming your traffic into leads and sales. When you align your digital strategy to your marketing strategy, you significantly grow your online business.
Whether you’re building your first website or optimizing a current one, there comes a time for every entrepreneur to revisit what makes an outstanding business website that converts clicks into sales.
After all, you need your website to do it all: represent your business, capture leads, close sales, climb to the top of search engine results, and connect to all your other digital platforms seamlessly. And you—you have to do it all too: choose your content, write and design your pages, connect your marketing tools, test it out, and not spend thousands of dollars or hours getting from A to B to blastoff.
What you really want your website to do is take your audience through a journey on your website that will result in a conversion - ultimately a lead or a sale. You want to attract buyers and not just traffic - because traffic without sales means nothing, in fact, you'll be losing money.
Help your website sell more with these conversion driven website tips:
This is key in converting your website traffic. Profile your Perfect Client Persona to get really specific about who your audience is so that you can create a website that provides content that your Client Pesona can relate to, solves their problems and helps you create products and services that they want and not what you know most about.
Invest some time in getting clear on your business goals so that you can align our website goals and digital strategy accordingly. Starting with the end goal in mind you can plan all the steps, tools and resources you will need to take to reach those goals and create a roadmap for your business.
You will be able to make better business decisions, stay on track when running your business gets overwhelming, you'll be able to measure what's working and what's not, make changes quickly as well as anticipate what tools and website functionality you will need to support your business as it grows.
After you have developed the overall website goals and your digital strategy, the next step is making it easy for website visitors to find content. To do this, make sure your page hierarchy is clear. Bucket your content by theme and importance. Try physically drawing a plan as you create a high-level outline. Most people freeze up at this point so it’s important to visualize your website structure. Think conversion and not just information - what do they need to see in order for them to make a purchase?
Check out our article on Secrets of Website Conversions Revealed for more tips on critical website pages and what information drives conversions.
Website functionality is defined by the ease with which a viewer can navigate your site and obtain the information they are seeking. You want to make navigation simple. Simple design and text are essential to an effective business website. An overly complicated website with cluttered visuals and text doesn’t convert and too many page elements lead to website visitor confusion. Think user-experience and be pragmatic in your approach.
Clearly state what you want people to do.
Use phrases like, “Subscribe to our newsletter,” “Book your reservation now” or “Email us for a free quote today.” After you identify your page structure, sketch out your content sections and maintain well-defined CTAs, then layer in conversion opportunities like pop-ups and alert bars.
Some interesting stastics on mobile commerce to consider, according to hostingfacts.com:
By 2020, mobile commerce will account for 45 percent of all e-commerce activities globally and mobile e-commerce will be responsible for $2.32 trillion — or about 67.2 percent — of e-commerce sales by 2021.
The bottom line is that not only do you need to get online but your website has to be mobile responsive. Before publishing anything on the web, always consider desktop and mobile devices. Having a site that isn’t mobile optimized can drive away customers, hurt your SEO and simply looks unprofessional.
