It’s a sad fact that there are a lot of businesses whose websites are under-performing, leaving thousands of dollars on the table without even knowing it. When it comes to websites most businesses are frustrated with poor conversions, sales and the lack of qualified traffic the website receives.

If you are going to be investing in online marketing and using your website as means of building and growing your business, it is essential that you extract maximum value from your investment by ensuring your website is performing to its full potential.

Having the best looking site has NOTHING to do with whether it will bring you more clients, make more sales or grow your business. A fact lost on many organisations. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to have a good looking site, but the design element of your site should never be your first consideration.

The simple truth is this: the internet is one of the greatest business building inventions EVER, but you have to use it the right way or it becomes a huge black hole that you pour money into.

So how do you ensure your website gets the most from your online marketing efforts?

Here are 10 tips to help you get the most out of your website

1. Focus & Purpose. Your site should be built with a specific purpose in mind. If this is unclear you are going to be shooting blanks in the dark. Ensure your website is set up to achieve a specific outcome from the onset.
Some common purposes include:

• An extension of our current advertising (radio, newspapers, etc.)
• To educate customers and prospects
• To develop a list of qualified prospects
• To make/ increase sales
• To compete in the global marketplace

2. Show them the Value. If you don’t immediately show your visitor just how valuable your site is, then they will leave… QUICKLY. On the Internet you only have a few seconds to capture your visitor’s attention, otherwise they are gone… and they AIN’T COMING BACK! It’s a known fact that people will do business with companies or people they like and trust. Your website should answer these 4 questions in the mind of your key prospects:

• Is this what I was looking for?
• Who is this company?
• Can they help me?
• Can I trust them?

3. Beware of the glorified brochure syndrome. Your prospects are tuned into channel WIIFM, (What’s In It For Me). Your site needs to speak directly to your ideal customers and you need to show and tell them that you have what they are looking for and how they can get it. Visitors come to a site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or for entertainment value.

4. Function over form: Flash based sites look good but you will really struggle to get them to rank well in the search engines. So many sites focus on the design element and miss the point all together. Your website must be easy to navigate and designed in a way that makes it easy to find information. One of the goals of your website design should be to keep usability easy, and simple.

5. Let your business occupy their head space. Remember this: your visitors will only be on your site for a short time, and once they leave they are NOT coming back. Unless, unless, unless you do one very important thing…YOU NEED TO CAPTURE THEIR CONTACT INFORMATION!!!

6. Follow up: Once you have your prospects contact information you can then follow up and build a relationship with your prospect.

7. Basic SEO elements are missing. Good luck trying to rank your site if it is missing basic SEO fundamentals.  Before you ever lay down a byte of HTML code for a site you have to know and understand at least the basics of SEO and how it fits into the design. The number one aspect of SEO for web design is selecting keywords relevant to your site.

9. Keep your site up to date. Have you ever seen those sites that haven’t been updated in four years? Full of outdated material, outdated pictures, maybe even a copyright date that says “2001”?

Nothing will drive people away faster than a site that looks like a ghost town… remember, your visitors don’t trust you… and they are looking for any validation of that mistrust that they can find.

10. Measure to see what’s working. You need to measure and see what’s working and what isn’t. So many web site owners have no idea how to track, manage and gather statistics so that they can make better strategic decisions. This is crucial to the success of your online endeavors. A tracking solution like Google Analytics provides invaluable intelligence that no website should be without.

Subscribe to our newsletter (on the right-hand side of this page) for great tips, advice and case studies on getting the most out of your online marketing investment. Or contact us for a no obligation chat.

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Which of the following two landing pages do you think had the higher conversion rate?

The long page with lots of content (version A) and relatively busy-looking text, or the short page where the main USPs are summarised concisely above the fold (version B)?

Version A

Version B

Increasing Fatso’s Conversion Rate

In this experiment, though the trial membership is free, the conversion process requires the provision of credit card details, which makes this a “high-barrier” conversion – a term First Rate uses to define conversions requiring more than trivial cost, effort or trust.

One of these two pages increased the conversion rate by 4.78% over the other – as measured in a Google Website Optimizer experiment, and had a significant effect on Fatso’s sign-up numbers and their bottom line. Which one was the winner?

To find out – Download the Fatso Conversion Rate Optimisation Case Study.

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In his last post, First Rate Head of Marketing and Business Development Tom Skotidas, discussed the topic of Conversion Rate Reinvestment and how this technique can provide an unfair advantage in SEM.

In this post he will discuss two important factors that can be used for conversion rate optimisation (CRO), the overall objective here is to increase the conversion rate of PPC landing pages:

“I won’t talk about the usual stuff, like creating a strong headline, making your offer compelling, or easy-to-complete forms. Of course these elements are critical, but I think we are all a bit tired of seeing these repeated over and over among the gurus.

What I want to give you right now, are two elements that are proven converters, but which I seldom see in landing pages.

Using FAQs on SEM Landing Pages

Go through 50 SEM landing pages and you probably won’t find more than 5 of them featuring FAQs.

Odd, isn’t it.

In real life, if a prospect had just been referred to you, would you try to close them on the spot without answering their questions or objections? Of course not. In fact doing so would either ruin the sales opportunity, or cause the prospect to politely say “I’ll think about it” and then run off to your competitors for comparison purposes. The latter scenario is especially common online, where comparison shopping is so easy.

Now I do understand that FAQs strike fear in the hearts of many landing page designers. FAQs are usually long-winded and boring, and these qualities are never good for conversion.

So how do you incorporate FAQs without compromising conversion rate?

A tactic that my agency, First Rate, often uses is called ‘Frontline FAQs’. We will sift through our clients’ customer service folders, or interview their customer service staff, to determine which questions and objections seem to occur at the highest frequency. Once we have worked out the top concerns (usually three to four), we then work with our clients to create short, interesting answers that satisfy each concern.

The idea is simple: by effectively answering their most common questions and objections, you will make your visitors feel that you “get” them. This will keep your visitors on your landing page longer (i.e. reduce your bounce rate), and make them feel a lot better about taking the next step (i.e. increase your conversion rate).

Call it, ‘Landing Page Aikido’.

Trust Credentials Support Landing Pages

As surprised as I am at the lack of FAQs in SEM landing pages, I am even more surprised when I don’t see a company’s trust credentials.

Trust credentials are pieces of evidence that make a visitor to a landing page believe that the company behind the landing page is real, unique, and will deliver on its claims.  These trust credentials are necessary to secure trust, and therefore propel the visitor to proceed (convert).

Here are some key trust credentials you can adopt to increase your landing page’s conversion rate:

• PR Mentions – If you have received positive PR online, make sure you include links to every mention, and code each link with an exciting statement (Tip: make the links pop-up into separate windows, to keep your visitors on your landing page).
• Awards – Include images and links to all public awards your company or product has won.
• Social Media Comments – If you have a Facebook or Twitter page, display them in your landing page. You can either provide your visitors with links to these pages, or stream your Facebook and Twitter comments into your landing page. (Tip: you can also answer certain FAQs by linking to social media posts made on your fan pages).
• Factoids (Did you know?) – You can use factoids to demonstrate several trust credentials; e.g. how many staff and/or offices you have, how long you have been in business, products your company has pioneered, your unique product preparation process, etc.
• Comparison Tables – If your product has features that your competitors’ products lack, then comparison tables can be a very powerful demonstration of your trust credentials. This tactic reduces your visitors’ need to compare other products and increases time spent reviewing your landing page.  Please note however – this tactic can backfire, if your unique features are not highly valued by the market.

Maximise Conversion Rate to Dominate SEM

As mentioned in my last post, if you can steadily and progressively increase your landing page’s conversion rate, you can steadily and progressively increase your CPC bids.

Over time, your ability to increase your CPC bids (while offsetting this with your higher conversion rate), means you can outbid your competitors, increase your ad position, and dominate pay per click search marketing in your category.

All of this while maintaining your cost per sale.”

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Answer: Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
The process of Conversion Rate Optimisation for e-commerce websites focuses on converting a greater proportion of your visitors into customers. In other words, it is the process of improving your website’s ability to sell for a given marketing budget.

Getting Started with Conversion Rate Optimisation

The optimisation is performed by finding your website’s weak pages, making changes to them – guided by best-practices and customer research – and testing the new pages directly against the originals in a statistically-valid “A/B” experiment (or “multivariate”, in more complicated scenarios). The experiment is important, because it lets your customers “vote with their clicks”. Your visitors aren’t made aware of the experiment and your website continues functioning as normal, while our software counts the conversion rate for each version of the page and quietly determines the winning page.

As a greater proportion of visitors to your website convert into paying customers, the ROAS of your marketing campaigns and the ROI of your website both increase

Should Your Company be Doing CRO?

If you operate a website whose objective is to get visitors to perform a desired action (to “convert”), then you have a website eligible for conversion rate optimisation.

The desired action can be anything from buying a product, registering for a subscription service, downloading a report, or spending a certain amount of time on the page. All of these actions can be measured using industry-standard website analytics software, and once you start measuring your conversion rate, you can improve it.

A small improvement in your website’s conversion rate can result in a relatively large lift in your website’s ROI. For example, an improvement in your website conversion rate from 2% (good) to 3% (better) is equivalent to a 50% increase in ROI. Going from a 2%-conversion-rate to a 3%-conversion-rate would allow you to reduce your marketing budget by one third, while keeping sales at the same level. This budget can now be re-invested into other sales-generating initiatives such as SEM, PPC advertising or SEO.

Can CRO Really Generate 100% ROI Within 12 Months..?

So can conversion rate optimisation get you 100% ROI within 12 months? Let’s do the math here in Monopoly money.

Say it costs your Monopoly website 500 Monopoly dollars to run a conversion optimisation project. Your current conversion rate is 1% on 100,000 monthly visitors and your customer lifetime value is $1.

To get 100% ROI on your 500 Monopoly dollars within 12 months, the conversion optimisation project needs to raise your conversion rate to an achievable 1.08%, as you can see in the table below:

In our experience, this is an achievable goal for many New Zealand websites.

If you are ready to increase your website’s conversion rate, please contact us for a no-obligation chat.

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