These days, a lovely new website just isn’t enough to entice a visitor into action. Whether that action is signing up for your newsletter, buying a product directly on your website or filling out an enquiry form, it needs to be obvious what the action is and easy to complete.
We’ve been in the website design business for years and we’ve put together 5 steps you definitely should be taking if you’re serious about your online audience:
Decide what your goals are
This may be obvious to you but it’s worth thinking about. Do you simply want more enquiries? Perhaps you need to build up a list of subscribers? Selling online? Or maybe it’s a mixture of goals? You need to firstly decide what your goals are, and write them down before continuing onto the next step.
Install visitor tracking software
There is little point in going any further until you have a way of monitoring your visitor behaviour. A great free tool is Google Analytics, with this you will be able to find out how many visitors you are getting, how long they are spending on your website, what pages they are visiting, and at what point they are leaving your website. You can also set conversion goals for specific pages (e.g. a thank you or success page) which will measure how many of your visitors are completing an action.
Add call-to-action sections
What you do in this step really depends on what goals you set in the first step. For example, if you would like to increase the number of subscriber sign ups consider moving your sign up form to a position which will be more noticeable, or making it easier to spot by using different background colours, or changing the text to something more interesting (e.g. “Sign Up To Our Newsletter And Receive A Free Guide”). Think in the mind of your customer, why would you sign up to this website’s newsletter? Add the tracking code to your success page so you can monitor the amount of visitors taking this action.
Assess the data
If you have just installed Google Analytics or another tracking tool, it might be worth waiting until you have at least one month’s worth of data. Once you have some visitor data, you can determine what improvements you should be making to your website to achieve the goals you wrote down in the first step. For example, did making the additions/changes to your newsletter form improve conversion? If so, what more can be done to improve on this even more?
Repeat
Improving website conversion is an ongoing task which follows a cycle of the 4 steps above. Your goals may change depending on the season, or if you have a new product, or if your business is taking a different direction. You should be regularly assessing your data and thinking of ways to improve what you are offering. After all, businesses are supposed to grow!
We hope you found the above advice useful! If you are in need of a conversion-focused website, get in touch now!