What do you want your prospects and customers to do once they reach your web site? If you don’t have a plan for how your web site should motivate your visitors to take defined actions at the right time, you are leaving an awful lot to serendipity. Every large enterprise competitor you’re facing pours large marketing budgets into the user interface design of its web site. This investment is intended to achieve many objectives, all of which translate into higher customer conversion rates and repeat customer sales:
- Highly precise targeting of customer segments and their online behaviours
- Clear transactional objectives (moving the visitor efficiently toward a committed purchase)
- Delivering automated assistance to the most typical customer service inquiries
- Clear navigation paths to maximize access to important information and content
While you might not be able to match the big guys in spending terms, you can take a completely different approach to the way you design your web site around visitor “actions”. It all starts with defining the audiences that your web site is intended to serve, and incorporating specific actions into your user experience. For most successful small businesses with a profitable online presence, the key is motivating transactional behaviour. Since you spend a lot of time and effort getting prospects and customers to visit your web site, the next logical step is helping to influence their next click.
Here are three steps that will help your web site visitors take the right action:
Step One: Assess What Visitors are Doing Today
Before you go down the path of re-building your web site from a transactional point of view, you need to analyze what’s working and what’s not in your current web site. Web site statistics (whether an online service like Google Analytics or SiteTracker, or a software based application like Webtrends) can provide a deep level of insight into the behaviour of your current web site visitors. One of the most important reports available is on navigation paths that help you understand where your visitors are abandoning their web site visit, what pages they exit on, and what percentage manage to complete a purchase transaction.
Step Two: Determine the Pages that are Driving Visitor Attrition
There’s likely a very good reason why your prospects are abandoning their visit on specific pages. These pages should be the focus of any short-term changes you make to your web site. If the page is a product information page, for example, is it clear how you intend your prospect to proceed to the Shopping Cart or Check-out pages? What kind of content resides on that page? Are there links to buyer testimonials and case studies? Is the content benefit rich and focused on solving customer problems? If your biggest exit page is your customer’s shopping cart, you’ve got a slightly bigger problem. For some reason, buyers are failing to complete their purchase transaction. Are your web site security and anti-fraud credentials prominently displayed? Is your pricing information and shipping information transparent and clear? Is there a technical problem with your online order system, or is the purchase taking too long to complete? These are all major factors that drive your prospects and customers to abandon their visit, sometimes never to return.
Step Three: Simplify Navigation Choices
If your navigation system is overly complex or visitors are faced with simply too many links and behavioural choices, it’s time to think about streamlining the structure of your site. Visitors like to know where they are in a web site – like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that helps them easily get back to where they were, but also easily intuit where they want to go next. Ensure your visitors always know how many clicks they are away from completing a transaction, and help direct them with on-screen hints, confirmation messages and suggestions.
While changing the online behaviour of your prospects and customers will take time, your web site plays a critical role in producing the right outcomes for your business.