3 Quick Fixes to Boost Conversions

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.

1. Rethink your conversion funnel

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.

• Build a landing page now. An effective landing page creates a focal point for products or strategies you’d like to emphasize, allowing you to capture your prospects’ attention and compelling them to take some action – in one trackable location. The landing page focuses visitors’ attention on one key goal: clicking your call to action.

• Use good lead generation mojo. Think you know lead generation? Incorporating the following can help get customers to provide their info: putting lead gen forms “above the fold” so customers notice them; adding a short video to speak to the user; and making good use of white space, so that people aren’t too distracted from the call to action.

2. Be smart about UX

How good is the experience your website creates? UX (short for user experience) refers to the totality of what the user encounters:

• Visual design – how it looks and feels
• Interaction design – how it works
• Information architecture – how it’s organized
• Content – what it says and how it sounds
• Functionality – what it does.

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:

• Use our website to find information about our new product offering.
• Ask other members of our community some questions about the offering.
• Sign up for a webinar about a specific topic.

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.

3. Do A/B testing

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.

Elements you can A/B test include:

• Call to action color, copy or placement
• Headlines
• Website layout
• Images
• Videos
• Keywords

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.