Your business’s website is your most important tool in taking viewers and turning them into paying customers. With so many markets becoming saturated with competition, it’s vital that your website stands out and pushes people through the sales funnel effectively. Below, the team at Stephensons – who specialise in website design in Barnsley – have listed some simple and easily implementable changes that you can make to your business’s site, to greatly improve your chances of success.
Dissect Your Customer Journey
A great way to start finding weak points and plotting a plan for your site’s improvements is to map and analyse the customer journey. This is the path through your website potential customers will take, and works much the same as a sales funnel. You know users are most likely to start on the homepage after clicking on an ad or following a link from your social media, so how do you convince them to click through to the checkout and make the process as easy as possible for them?
Some great ways to improve your customer journey are:
- Paying attention to your analytics to find out if particular pages are putting people off.
- Offering the customer something in return for subscribing to your mailing list or making a purchase. This can be a free ebook or audiobook, or a discount to your store.
- Monitoring reviews and comments on social media and third-party sites. Part of the customer journey is research, wherein a potential customer will check up on your site before deciding to make a purchase. By keeping tabs on reviews and providing excellent customer service you can improve the customer journey, and find out great feedback to improve your site.
- Making yourself available through contact information, or on-site instant messenger. This is particularly useful if your product or service is a little unorthodox and requires some more explanation for certain struggling customers to get to grips with the concept.
Be Concise
Yes, your website is the best place to solidify your branding, but this often leads business owners to bulk out their pages with unnecessary information and a whole host of colours, fonts, and images. To improve your site, you should cut out anything that isn’t working to push your users to purchase.
Think about the purpose of each page and what you want your customer to take away from it. Then, you can limit all text, video, and audio to fulfilling this purpose. ‘Stock’ website images are a big problem in this area, and instead, you should use high-quality original content.
However, there is an exception to this ‘rule’ in terms of SEO. Usually, the more text on your site the better the SEO will be, so be concise, but make sure you don’t stop too short, and lose out on keyword opportunities. Plus, cutting too much out might mean your site appears barren and unprofessional to users.
Don’t Be Humble
Finally, if you’ve had your site for a while, one surefire way to improve its web design and conversion is by listing your achievements. This can be everything from testimonials, to reviews, to partnerships you’ve held with industry leaders.
According to BigCommerce, testimonials from real customers can up a user’s chance of purchasing from your site by 58%. You can reach out to customers with the offer of a discount or loyalty code if they provide you with a testimonial.
If you haven’t implemented it already, a built-in review system can be a great way to help users find your best products, and give existing customers a chance to use their voice. However, many sites can and do fake their reviews to provide a false positive reputation. To ensure your customers can trust the testimonials and reviews of your business, perhaps embed them from a third-party review site, or lift them from social media in a ‘see what people are saying’ section.
Final Thoughts
No part of your web design is too small to worry about during this process, but don’t get too bogged down in the details. What matters is making sure that your site has the highest chance of conversion possible. One of your most valuable resources in this process is people who have visited your site, and whether they have made or decided against making a purchase.
Analytics is your best bet for identifying parts of your web design that need improvement Aside from this, by using reviews you can not only find things to improve but list them on your site as social proof. Once you’ve got your ideal customer journey down, optimise your site to this plan, and remove anything that doesn’t contribute to your success.
