Do Your Customers Know Where to Click?

I appologise in advance for my spelling in this article, it's late, this is free advise so take it or leave it spelling mistakes n' all :)

So you've got your website and it's up and running, but only 1-2% of your site visitors are becoming customers, can this be improved?

Probably.

Getting a customer to interact with the page they arrive to your site at rather than their browsers back button is in most companies left to the whim of a site designer, or a web site programmer, or an over zealous managing director deciding what goes where.

In a profitable online company however everybody designs pages... Not because they have an eye for design, but because everyones ideas should be tried, tested, and measured.

Let's quickly cover some jargon before we bust this topic properly open.

• Landing Page
  The first page a visitor arrives at your site, usually the homepage but sometimes a dedicated page linked to an adword compaign or other inbound link.


• Conversion
  Traditionally speaking a conversion is a sales lead (or site visitor) who becomes a customer but for the purposes of dealing with a landing page there is also the second goal of getting a customer to interact with your landing page rather than leave the site.


• Conversion Rate
  The percentage of customers who visit your site who are converted.


• Call to Action
  Your "buy now" or "more information" button, whatever it is that you want your customers to click to proceed with their purchase.


• The Fold
  A natural break on your web page design seperating the content visible when the page loads to the content that becomes visible once scrolling down. The area above the fold is your prime area.

Improving Conversion Rates - Adwords

Adwords are a great tool to get a site off the ground, organic search results take time to build but with adwords you can invest a relatively small amount of money and get straight to the top of the search results. But how do you convert somebody who types a search term into google in to a customer?

Firstly make sure that your adword advert has the same keywords that were typed, this will make your advert more rellevent and increase your click through rate. I'll talk more about adwords another time, but I mention this now because repeating those keywords on your landing page is also a useful trick to maintain interest. If this means creating multiple versions of landing pages for different google adword campaigns then so be it.

Make sure your keword-advert-landing page path is rellevent all the way, and you'll get more conversions.

Improving Conversion Rates - Trust

Webizens are a skeptical breed. There are a lot of cowboys out there so make sure you reinforce trust on your landing page with testimonials, hackproof logo's and so on. Testimonials is simply a matter of asking your happy customers for comment, trust logos and industry watchdog logo's are a case of paying the fees to the issuing body - but in most industries it's worth doing.

Improve Conversion Rates - Relate

I've said this before, and i'll say it again: It's not about you. Nobody visiting your site gives a damn about you.

If you're a small trader try to avoid sound big by saying "we" instead of "I" - it's impersonal and customers dont like it.

If you are a large company avoid saying "we" instead of "I", find the person who can take responsibility for what your web site says, be personal, your customers will appreciate it.

Finally, avoid saying "I" and use the word "you", because if you talk about yourself nobody will give a damn, they'll get bored and the most interaction you'll get from the customer is them uttering "yadda yadda yadda" under their breath as they click back.

Never talk about yourself except when you have too, and even then try to talk about your customer. "I take returns really seriously and always do my best to get problems resolved" versus "If you are unhappy with your product we'll exchange or refund your purchase up to 14 days after delivery, no questions asked.". You decide which is more reassuring?

Improve Conversion Rates - Call to Action

This is my latest toy combined with the basic AIDA principles. Statistical analysis has shown sites with a single call to action above the fold convert better.

Customers dont like choice, they searched for something specific and they want to be taken to that specific result - your landing page is little more than an extension to their Google search so presenting choices to the customer will reduce the chances of them converting because it is a "poor search result".

Make your call to action stand out, put it in a different colour to every other button on the site - make it prominent, make it large, and avoid use of generic words like "More Info". Instead consider something along the lines of, "Tell me more about blue widgets", or "Send me Blue Widgets today for delivery tomorrow".

A single, highly visible, colour contrasting call to action is more likely to get a customer to interact with your web page. Once they have interacted they are then more prepared to interact with your site and see what else is on offer - just get that first item in the shopping cart as fast as you can.

Improve Conversion Rates - Don't Deliver Information Overload

Excessive text on a landing page is too much work for a customer to read. They've already done the hard work by typing in exactly what they want into Google. Don't confound them by presenting a load of information they dont need. Make additional information available, but dont fill up the landing page with it because you'll scare customers away before they'll bother reading it all.

It's for that exact reason I should probably have stopped writing this article several paragraphs back! So i'll stop now, I don't want to overload you too much :)

Becky

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