Building Website Conversion on a Steady Foundation
by Mat GreenfieldThe foundation of your strategy to convert website visitors to leads/sales should be rooted in two key elements: your specific goals, and your understanding of the target audience.
It's funny, but many of the companies I talk to have developed a website for no real purpose. Sure, at the time there was some sort of rationale "You need one these days, don't you" or "Our competition has one, so we must keep up." Unfortunately these reasons provide no guideline for the creation of a site. Nor do they contain any criteria for measuring success.
To compound the problem, they give no real consideration to the needs, desires, and characteristics of their target audience. In my opinion, this has led to the plethora of unnavigable, poor content, zero conversion websites that seem to be the standard for corporate America. Harsh? Maybe. But if you fall into this category, you'd better do something about it ASAP because the web is here to stay.
So what needs to be done? First, carefully consider and write down specific goals for your website. These goals should be written remembering that your site is a corporate resource that must provide an ROI, just like any other corporate resource. To simplify matters, there are 3 common goals that you might want to consider:
- To generate leads
- To generate on-line sales
- To generate qualified referrals
Now think for a moment, was your current site built with these any of these conversion objectives? How is it performing? (The typical website has a 1-3% conversion rate of visits to action.)
Typical secondary goals, include building credibility, establishing expertise within a certain industry, projecting a 'big business' image, etc. The web can also be used to provide cost-effective customer service for visitors (through the use of knowledge bases), create communities (such as chat rooms and forums), and as a delivery method for what used to be printed material (say goodbye to Kinko's).
With a clear understanding of your primary and secondary goals, you are ready to consider what you know of your target audience. Consider the demographic information of your visitors - sex, age, etc. You also need to think about their needs and desires. You'll use this information to craft emotional calls to action, and provide compelling offers.
Hopefully, your target audience is somewhat homogeneous. This leads to the creation of a highly targeted (and highly converting) website. If your target visitors are diverse, you might want to consider creating multiple websites, especially if you have different products that attract different groups. At first glance, this option might seem cost-prohibitive, but we have found that the difference between a 3% conversion rate, and a 25% conversion rate can often justify the extra expense of creating multiple sites, and provides a return-on-investment after just a few months.
With a well-understood target audience, you can go about creating a look and feel, messaging, calls to action, and offers that are comfortable and compelling.
In part two of this article, we'll discuss:
- Structuring your site for maximum conversion
- Writing effective copy
- Creating compelling offers and calls to action
- Improving your graphic design to create affinity and credibility
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