By Catherine Parker on 2004/12/14
Most business owners would never invest in something for their business without being sure of the return they would get on that investment. And yet when it comes to the Internet, it seems this principle falls away. If your business has a website, ask yourself: is it worth the money you've spent on it? More specifically, is the amount you paid to have it designed an developed and the amount you're spending each month to maintain it justified by all the new customers it's bringing you?
If it's not, you're not alone. It seems that in the panic to secure a presence online, many businesses don't ensure that their website effectively converts site visitors into new customers. At the end of the day, what matters are not hit rates but conversions. After all, a visit to your site means nothing if that visitor leaves without purchasing anything or at least turning into a potential lead. No matter what your website's goal is, whether it's to sell a product or encourage newsletter subscriptions, you need to make sure your site is effective in achieving this goal. If it's not, you may as well be throwing money into a black hole.
The first step in improving your site conversion rate is to have a long, hard look at visitor behaviour on your site. This can be done by examining in detail your site stats. These stats can then help you pinpoint potential problem areas of your site. For example, click paths through your site can show you where most of your visitors are entering and exiting your site and how they are moving in between. Entry pages show you what page your customers are landing on first when arriving at your site. By knowing this, you can put a site visit in context and see whether you have enough information on this page to help the visitor reach your predefined site goal. Exit pages are also interesting: if there are pages on your site where a huge amount of people are exiting, perhaps the problem lies on this page and can be fixed accordingly.
Once you've determined how visitors behave on your site and fixed any specific problem pages, you can start looking for ways to make more visitors reach your goal page. Some major points to consider are:
Navigation
Is your site is easy to navigate? Put yourself in the shoes of a first time visitor to your site and ask yourself whether you can find what you're looking for, and easily. If your site structure is too complex, your visitors may leave in frustration without proceeding further - straight to another competitor.
Click Paths
Following on from the above, how long does it take to reach your goal page? The goal page of your site is where you would like your customers to end up - whether that's an order confirmation page or an email subscription confirmation page. Make it as quick and easy as possible to reach this page by minimising the number of clicks it takes to get there.
Call to Action
Does your site communicate a sense of urgency or definite path of action that you'd like your visitors to take? It's amazing to see the increase in a site's effectiveness if you tell people what they should do next. For example, sentences like "Now that you've read about us, click here to contact us" can do wonders in increasing the amount of enquiries from a website.
Don't make the mistake of investing huge sums of money in a website without making sure that the end product adds value for your business. By improving your site's conversion rates, it can be a vehicle to leverage your present rate of customer acquisition and so justify the money that's been spent on it.
Quirk offers Return on Investment consulting services to make sure your site is an effective sales tool. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you make your site outperform your wildest expectations!
