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How to deliver an effective Business website and convert prospects into sales
Neil Tanner • Mar 11, 2020
Every small business owner understands that in today’s market they need a website which represents their business, but what many fail to recognise is how to create a website which works hard to create ‘business’ for them.
Just like an online dating profile, it’s all well and good having a sexy looking photo to attract customers, but what do those customers do once they have knocked on your digital door. Maybe they ‘swipe right’ [1] and call you or pop into one of your stores or maybe they ‘swipe left’ [2] , because they are just browsing and not ready to engage in sales conversations at all. It’s a tricky business getting it right, so follow our 4 key principles to delivering an effective website which converts prospects into sales.
Getting your online profile right
Your website may be the first touch point a customer has with your business so it needs to represent your organisation and your objectives perfectly:
- Ensure your website has a sleek design and represents your company in a professional way, whilst highlighting your key assets.
- Make it visual – we shop primarily with our eyes so image quality is crucial, as is video, but it’s also about the little things that make a website easy to navigate and use, such as speed and page load times.
- Keep your website content relevant and up to date; it engages your customer and gives them confidence that they are working with a thriving business who is ‘on the ball’.
- Show them how adaptable you can be - ensure your website is optimised for mobile, allowing your site to change its format so it works just as well on a laptop, tablet and smartphone as it does on a desktop computer.
Create social proof
Show customers that you’re not all talk (or a one-dimensional robot) and let other people confirm what a great person you really are! Social proof is the term used to describe convincing a potential customer that you are a genuine fully rounded and ‘normal’ person. In the new age of marketing, social proof carries more weight than it has ever done before, therefore it’s important for businesses to think about social landing pages. This may sound like a difficult task, but it’s actually fairly simple.
- Make it easy to share – make your web pages easy to share by adding social media icons, which allow your visitors to share and comment upon an offer, product or blog article.
- Add numerical data – add details next to your social icons about the number of times a specific piece of information has been liked or shared.
- Invite customer testimonials – Nothing is better for a business than real life customer testimonials. Make these pages relevant, with the name and picture of the customer in question and this will deliver a strong source of social proof.
Give yourself the best chance with all the fish in the sea.
The more ‘swipes’ you get the better the chance of success, so building your email list will become one of your biggest assets, as it provides the opportunity to deliver regular (authorised!) communications straight into the inbox of potential customers. With 81% of users researching online before they buy [3] , it’s important to capture as many of these prospective customers as possible. The easiest and most effective way to do this is to create an offering or service such as those listed below, which they can gain access to if they sign up and consent to provide an email address for you to send information to:
- A checklist
- Access to resources, for example white papers or blog articles
- An educational course or online tutorial
- An appointment with your team
- A free assessment for part of their business
The key is to ensure this offering or service has value and benefits the customer in some way. Once you start to build your list, feed it with a constant drip of useful information and content. Push products, services and updates to your base through regular email communications, blogs and offers. Always create trackable links and ensure these communications have a strong call to action and feed back to your website, closing the link and allowing you to measure success.
Understand who’s looking at your profile with web analytics
Imagine a dating app where you can understand which bits of your profile people like or dislike or which parts of your profile are read the most. Understanding how people visit, navigate and interact with your website is key to not only delivering an effective website, but also targeting prospects and converting them into valued customers. Web analytics tools allow you to track and monitor your potential customers’ journey through your website and to measure their engagement. These insights can be used to evaluate many things. For example, the success of a particular online campaign or understanding which products and services a person is interested in, thus allowing you to keep them up to date with your most recent offerings. Perhaps the best known example of this would be Amazon.com. With millions of customers browsing its product lines daily, they are able to build up a detailed picture of products their customers have viewed, liked and are interested in and in turn start to send them emails of products which they think may be of interest. Their analytics are far more complex than most small businesses, but it demonstrates the power of analytics and the key to understanding this data in a much more detailed way to drive success within your own small business. By the way, you don’t need Amazon’s budget to achieve this. An analytics tool like Google Analytics will do an awesome job of giving you this type of information, and it’s free!
So there you have it, before you embark upon your journey to capture the hearts and minds of potential customers, ensure your website is set up to be as effective as it can by following our 4 key principles.
- On a popular dating app, individuals swipe right if they are interested in dating or knowing more about the person
- On a popular dating app individuals swipe left if they are not interested in knowing more about a particular person
- http://www.adweek.com/digital/81-shoppers-conduct-online-research-making-purchase-infographic/
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