Your website is your organization’s face to the world. It’s where you interact with your audience – and where potential customers find and learn about you. A full website redesign is the best way to keep things fresh and functional…but what if you don’t have the budget? The good news: small tweaks can have a big impact on your bottom line. Here are three “conversion tune-ups” to increase your website’s effectiveness at less cost than a full overhaul.
Your website is critical to directing the conversion of potential customers into paying customers. There are a few things you can do to help make sure the flow through your funnel is healthy.
How good is the experience your website creates? UX (short for user experience) refers to the totality of what the user encounters:
So, how do you get smart about UX? Good UX means your website delivers an experience that aligns with your brand, fulfills a need, is easy to use and is appealing. The quickest way to improve the UX of your website is to perform usability tests with real users. Have a facilitator test a handful of users, one at a time, on tasks like these:
Say your users have a hard time navigating your site. Or find some of the graphics distracting. Or don’t connect with the product content as it is written. With just a little time and effort, you’d have a list of concrete changes to make that would better serve your audience.
A/B testing is splitting website traffic between two versions of an element (A and B) to see which performs better. And it can help you raise $60 million. No, really! During President Obama’s 2008 campaign, his Director of Analytics tested combinations of media (a photo or video of Obama) and copy on a button (“Join Us Now,” “Learn More,” “Sign Up,” or “Sign Up Now”). He measured which combination resulted in the most sign-ups and found that a photo of the whole Obama family and a button reading “Learn More” meant 40.6% more sign-ups with an average of $21 in donations per sign-up. Result? Serious donation totals. Even through the Obama story is a few years old, the concept still holds true today: test to see what works best and reap ROI benefits.
There you have it. By implementing a few of the tune-ups above, you can take your website performance from OK… to out of this world.