Turn Your Website into a Sales Engine

While there’s a lot of emphasis on having an attractive website that catches the eye of your visitor, excellent web design requires more than good looks. To maximize your company’s web presence, you need a website that’s attractive, functional, and conversion-friendly.

Internet users have notoriously short attention spans. They want the information they need, when they need it. This means your website must load quickly, be easy to navigate, and contain content that is easy to scan and allows your visitor to quickly gather key information. If your visitor can’t easily find the information they need, they’ll ‘bounce’ and leave your website. If your website’s bounce rate is high, it means your visitors are quickly leaving your website and not converting into customers. That’s a big problem if you want to run a successful business! (thenines.com)

To reduce your bounce rate, you need content that attracts visitors, and encourages them to stay on your website and learn more about your product or service. Your content should appeal to your audience, which mean you need to be familiar with your buyer’s persona. Your buyer’s persona will tell you more about your ideal customer so you can cater your content to their needs and interests. Once you know what interests your ideal customer and what information they’re looking for, you can place that information front-and-centre to catch their eye. It’s critical that the content on every page of your website appeal to your buyer’s persona to keep their attention.

Key points to remember when developing your buyer’s persona:

• Who are they interested in?
• What keeps them up at night?
• Where do they go for help or to look for information?

Once you’ve created content that appeals to your buyer’s persona and encourages them to stay on your website, you need to optimize your website to convert them into customers. There are several important steps you must take to ensure your website is conversion-friendly. You might already be familiar with placing call-to-actions (CTAs) throughout your site to encourage your visitors to take action and sign up for your newsletter, download an eBook, or purchase your product or service.  However, there are three crucial steps you should take to boost the efficiency of your website and convert visitors into customers.

Three steps to create a website that converts:

• Ensure your content is scannable and easy to read. The first two paragraphs should contain the most important information and entice your visitor to keep reading. Bulleted lists and infographics are examples of scannable content that will attract your visitor’s attention.
  • Heat map studies have shown us where your visitor is most likely to direct their attention by analysing mouse movement, click tracking, scroll tracking, and eye tracking. You can use this information to place your CTAs and most important information right in front of your visitor.
  • These studies have shown that desktop and mobile users browse and read websites differently. Desktop users read content in an “F” pattern and mobile users read in an “L” pattern. As two-thirds of Canadians own smartphones that they use to browse the internet, it’s especially important to optimize your content for mobile users.                                                                          Example of the “F” pattern
    
  • Consider partnering with a UX designer to ensure that your site is user-friendly, flows logically, and your layout follows the “F” and “L” patterns. UX designers take user behaviour into account when designing websites to create the best user experience.
• Tell stories that establish trust and create an emotional reaction. Good storytelling is a powerful way to compel your visitor to convert into a customer. Stories that appeal to your buyer’s persona can be more effective than colourful visual callouts or other interactive elements.
• Take a data centric approach when creating your website. Don’t design your website blindly – you need to keep your end goal in mind. Add items to your website that encourage people to come back to your site, such as downloadable content, shareable content, email opt-ins, and videos product demos. And once your website is finished, look at your traffic, bounce rate, and number of ‘request a quote’ emails, and continue to make changes to your site if you’re not getting the results you want.

Remember, with all the web templates and free graphics available, anyone can create a pretty website. It’s more challenging to create a website that encourages your visitors to stay on your site and become customers. Measure Marketing specializes in designing attractive, functional, and responsive websites with valuable content, call-to-actions, and optimized landing pages. If you need an attractive website that converts, contact Measure Marketing. We’ll help you maximize the power of your website to grow your business.