Category: Conversion Optimization

Stuck in a Rut?

Stuck in a rut? Seem like 2016 just started but you can’t get moving? Make 2016 the year your website starts working for you. It should be an investment, not an expense. If your website isn’t driving sales or generating leads or sealing the deal, what is it doing? Do you even know?

Here are three steps you can take to get your site moving for you:

  • Evaluate – first take the time to understand what your site is doing for you currently. How many visitors are you getting? How many of those visitors are turning into contacts or leads or sales? What pages are getting visited? Are most of your visitors starting on the home page or is Google or some other site directing them to a page deeper within you site?
    Answering these questions will both help you understand what is happening on your site and get the juices flowing for you to begin considering what you want to have happening.
  • Plan – We ask every new client what their goals are for their website. A goal is something clear and measureable. “Be more informative” is not a goal. Neither is “Be more visual”. Both of these can be incorporated into a new site but a goal is something like “generate two solid leads a week” or “get two prospects per quarter to fill out our online intake”. Notice the time frame is clearly noted and the actions are detailed enough that they can be measured.
  • Change – Whether you are doing a complete site redesign or just making incremental changes, make the changes! You have heard that nature abhors a vacuum. The Internet abhors staleness. A fresh look or fresh content or both tells the world you are paying attention. That you know your site is your 24/7 portal to the world. Don’t let it go!

Evaluate – Plan – Change! It really is that simple.

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Begin with the End

Some of the complaints we’ve heard over the years:

  1. I tried a Facebook campaign. It didn’t work.
  2. Our website doesn’t really generate any business for us, it is just a brochure.
  3. I don’t’ know whether our website brings any business or not.
  4. My clients don’t have time to read blogs so I’m not going to blog.

And every one of these complaints were voiced during a client interview (to see if we would work together).

The problem in each case is that these potential clients started with where they were at currently instead of where they wanted to be. So though you may think it goes without saying, it doesn’t.

You should start your internet marketing with the end in mind. In every case, yes every case, people want to grow their business. But what that means for marketing and how their website fits in to the bigger marketing campaign is never the same.

Think about how you get new customers. If you are a non-profit organization, how do you get more donors? More volunteers? If you a service based organization, how do you generate more leads? At what point in the sales process do you usually close the deal? If you are a product-based organization,  the question is easier – how do you sell more stuff? But it isn’t necessarily an easier answer. Instead of asking themselves “How can we sell more iPads and iPhones” Apple asked themselves, what else can we sell to people that are already buying our stuff? And they came up with the Apple Watch.  So you really need to ask yourself the hard questions – Are we selling everything to our customers that we can? Are there other needs that we can meet? Are there other markets that we can create? Many of us didn’t know until a month or so ago that we needed a fancy watch. Now we do.

Once you have the outcome determined, building a website that works is much easier. Suddenly your “just a brochure” site becomes a lead generating machine. Your “validation of who we are” site becomes a “scheduling follow up meetings” engine that keeps your sales schedule full. Your “we don’t know if our site generates business” site becomes a “we closed a record number of deals thanks to our site” tool that sets you above your competition. Your “unplanned social media campaign” suddenly begins to send people to your site to schedule meetings or buy stuff.

Did you end up with a website that doesn’t know where it is going? Contact us today!

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Top Five Reports to View in Google Analytics

Actually just about all the reports are useful and can give you great insight into how visitors are interacting with your website. The list below is intended for beginners to help direct your attention and get into the basics.

  1. Audience Overview (default view)
    View the number of sessions and users over the last month. See pageviews, pages per session, average session duration, bounce rate and percent of sessions that are new (not repeat).  While all the info helps, the numbers of users and pageviews are great information for beginners to begin to digest how their site is being used and even more importantly, WHETHER it is being used.
  2. Audience -> Mobile -> Overview
    See the break down on how many are using desktop, how many using mobile and how many using tablet. Since Google began requiring sites to be Mobile Responsive and then to define what it means, it has become even more important to understand how folks view your site. You should definitely check your site to see how it looks on the different devices. And seeing how much actual traffic you get on each can help you determine how many resources you need to focus on each view.
  3. Audience -> Users Flow
    Shows what country visitors come from, what page they visit first and what page(s) they visit after the first page. This is critical to understanding if your visitors are making the decisions you want them to. If you have created a sales funnel and no one is getting through the funnel, monitoring the flow will help you understand where people are getting hung up and then you can begin to examine why they are getting stuck.
  4. Acquistion -> Overview
    Shows how visitors got to your site. Referral: Links from other web sites to yours. Direct: People who typed your url in the location field on the browser. Organic Search: people who searched for something related to you and came to your site. Social: people who clicked a link in social media to get to your site. There are ways to create campaigns to track even more but these four groups are a great way to get the big picture about how people are getting to your site.
  5. Acquisition -> Search Console -> Queries
    This is where the really cool stuff is. Queries shows you what queries people made at Google, how many times your site actually showed up  (Impressions) on the page and how many times someone clicked on the Google results that showed your site. It also shows your average position for those key words and the Click Through Rate or CTR. The higher the CTR, the better you are doing.
  6. BONUS: Acquisition -> Search Console -> Landing Pages
    This shows you what pages people see when they first get to your site. Search engines do NOT just link to your home page. This helps you understand what pages Google (and the folks who use Google) likes most about your site. For example, we do a lot of work with non-profit organizations. Over the last month, this page http://www.educyber.com/who-we-work-with/non-profits/ showed up 200 times in search results and got 5 clicks which means that we had a CTR of 2.50% which makes us pretty happy.

NOTES:

You can change the date range at any time but changing the information in the top right corner. You can also do comparisons of ranges, comparing one month to the previous month, for example. The default range when you login and bring up the reports is for the last month.

Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors who enter your site but then leave without visiting more pages. Most folks view a high bounce rate as a bad thing but you have to make sure you are interpreting what is actually happening. For example, if your contact page has a high bounce rate, it is likely because I have visited the page and either called you or emailed you. So I don’t need to be on your site anymore. But it would be for a good reason.

SEO Landing Pages – requires Google Webmaster Tools be enabled. If you don’t have Webmaster tools setup, you ought to. It too is free and it only takes a few minutes to link them up. Then you have even more data at your disposal.

If you don’t have GA enabled or if you have it enabled but aren’t looking at it, why not? This is the kind of marketing data you should have at your disposal. Need help with it? Give us a call at 303 268-2245.

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Becoming a Customer (Part 2)

Can your web site design (not the content) help you get more customers?

In our first article on <becoming a customer>, we discussed the content aspect – having a clear call to action on your site. In this article, we are going to investigate whether the visual design elements of a site can help your visitors become customers.

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You should always have a clear call to action

I remember the very first user testing we did years ago. We identified a person who would be a great potential customer for our new client and had him go through their existing website, sharing his stream of consciousness as he navigated the site through the tasks we gave him. The web site’s “clear call to action” was a flashing red button in the right column. Our tester mentioned it only briefly – “I’m not looking at the ads in the right column”.

Ouch.

That customer learned a good lesson that day. People were ignoring their call to action. Think about how ads work today on many websites, especially news sites. They used to have banner ads and right column (and left column) ads. Now most of them use inline ads. You read a paragraph. You are interested. You want to read more. As you scroll down the page, you see the inline ad and then your content. You have just interacted with the ad – an ad you may have skipped had it not been right in line with the content.

This is actually one of the exciting parts of what we do in this business. Design matters! Sometimes (often times) it is a subtle change that makes all the difference. Change a button from blue to green and suddenly people start filling out your form. Move the secure transaction logo next to the complete transaction button and suddenly people start buying your products. Move your call to action from a side column to inline with your content and the phone starts ringing.

Suddenly becoming a customer is easier for people on your website. And if you’d like help making your design work FOR you, you should work with us.

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Becoming a Customer (Part 1)

Have you ever thought about how you interact with web sites?

When we speak with potential clients, they rarely have stopped to think about how they want visitors to interact with their site. But what does it mean to become a customer? That, ultimately is what every business owner wants from their website.

Social media websites have it easy – some would say too easy. To become a customer all you have to do is create a free account and start sharing. A cousin of mine just joined Facebook last week. Within minutes of joining, he was able to be posting and sharing. Facebook had just acquired another customer that they can then sell ads to – and make money.

Unclear Goals 1
If you aren’t clear on your goals, neither is your customer

But what about a service company? How do you want visitors to interact with you? Too often I look at a web site and it has a pleasant enough look and it displays information. And when I talk to the business owner and ask “What is your goal for your web site?” the answer is “I want to educate (or inform) the visitor.”

But isn’t it really more than that? Very rarely, unless we’re talking to a school, is the goal to educate. Almost always, even for the schools, the goal of the site is to acquire more customers. For social media sites, that can be as simple as having a new person with an account. For ecommerce sites, the goal is pretty obvious, successfully complete the checkout process after putting “stuff” in your shopping cart.

But there are many other very good goals. If you have a long sales cycle, you might be getting a huge win every time someone signs up for your newsletter. If you are a consultant, your goal may be for someone to fill out a form before downloading a white paper or other document. If you are in the trades like a plumber or electrician, having someone schedule an appointment online could mean you just got another customer. For many businesses, simply getting the phone to ring is a win. If that’s the case, make sure you have a clear call to action focused on why calling you is a great idea.

EduCyber can help you get a clear call to action – why not work with us?

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Looking Back or Looking Forward

Imagine starting a marketing campaign with the thought of “We don’t intend to get any business out of this.” Ludicrous, right? Yet nearly every time I sit down with a potential client, especially if they offer services instead of products, I hear “Our web site is more about closing the deal instead of getting leads.”

Which makes sense.

If you’re just looking backward.

If you have a web site that was not built with the specific intent of generating leads for your business, it is no surprise at all that your web site is not generating leads for your business.  But why on earth would you want to continue like that?

Every single business with a web site should be able to generate new business leads via their website. Every single one. Without any “excepts” or “but you see”s. I used to let folks get away with this. Inevitably a couple of months after launching their new site they would call us up exclaiming “We got a new customer through our web site!” I would congratulate them and wait and sure enough the next question would be, “How can I get more leads through my web site?”

So now, every time, without fail, we ask the question that you should be answering as you prepare for a new web site. “How does your web site fit into your marketing plan AND how can we make it work better?”

Some simple things to ponder:

  • How does your business typically generate leads?
  • How does your web site fit into that process? (or “How should the web site fit into the process?”)
  • What are two or three actions that visitors could take that will help them move through the lead generation process?
  • What information / response do you want? Phone to ring? White paper downloaded? Contact Form filled out and emailed to you? Order form filled out? Newsletter subscribed to? Online chat request?

Whatever answers you arrive at, put behind you the thought process that says, “We have not received any leads from our website until now, therefore we will not in the future.” Instead, ask yourself how you can begin to generate leads.

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What is Your Focus?

“Brian, I just learned that a competitor is getting 60% of their business through their website. How come my site isn’t?” This question and many with a very similar tack gets asked a lot in my business. That along with customers new or existing asking about all the spam emails promising great results in the search engines or a huge number of leads coming in.

How does a company get a website that generates qualified leads consistently?

The simple one-word answer is focus.

This site http://arngren.net/ is a great example of a site without focus.

Arngren 1
There are so many choices, so many things to look at, to click on, to decide on, that most people simply click the only button they know for sure will help them – the back button. This site is trying to sell you everything from the front page. Everything.

Now take a look at http://www.converse.com.

Converse 1024X785 1They too have a lot of different products from shoes to clothing and within shoes a wide range from Men’s to Women’s and Children. And yet their site is focused on what they do best, what they sell most: shoes. If you’re looking for an athletic shoe, you can quickly figure out whether this site can help you or not. You see three very different styles beneath the picture.

Giving folks THREE choices is just right. More than that and they have to think too much. If they pause to think, they’ll likely remember that they were really interested in Nike shoes, not Converse. Or that Zappos has all kinds of shoes and all kinds of deals. But by showing three clear choices, Converse draws us deeper into the site. This pulls us deeper into the sales funnel and makes it more likely we’ll click the checkout button and pay.

One click further in you can give a few more choices if needed but the key still is focus. We recently started working with a new customer that handles residential and commercial flooring. The owner clearly recognizes that most of his web business will be residential. So there will be a small link on his home page to commercial flooring but the main choices will be residential choices. Notice, he is NOT saying “We don’t do commercial flooring” and he is not hiding it. But the FOCUS on the home page will be the residential choices because that is where the web leads will come from.

The biggest pushback we get from business owners is that by focusing on a niche, they exclude their broader market. I say that is nonsense.  In fact, the more focused you are on a niche, the better you present your company and the MORE folks outside of your target want to use your services.  Disagree? Let me know!

 

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Staying a Step Ahead

Not long ago I wrote about the 10 Reasons You Don’t Need a New Website. That list was formed from conversations, perhaps I should say excuses – I have had over the years.  As we approach the end of the year, the time of reflecting on the year gone by and planning for the year ahead, I’d like to share with you the secret to staying ahead of the competition with your Internet presence:

The secret to staying a step ahead is one that, if you take the time to look, is obvious. Review your competitors. Who is growing? Who is staying busier than the rest of the crowd? Who is reaping the rewards of clients / sales / leads through their web site?

The secret is simple. It is, in a nutshell, applying enough of the right resources to succeed. When it comes to your website, the resources you have at your disposal are time, money, and expertise.

  1. TimeTime 150X150 1
    Spending the time to understand what your website needs is essential. There are ads out there, we’ve all seen them, touting a fantastic web presence for only $100 / month. Sound too good to be true? Yeah, it is. As simple as it sounds, the best use of your time is to spend it figuring out how your web site fits into your business flow. Set website goals based on getting more business. Then you’re ready to determine next steps.
  2. Money
    Speaking with a non-profit client last week, I explained that if the goal of their site redesign is to raise an additional $100,000 / year then they should be prepared to spend up to $25,000 the first year. But that wouldn’t be a bad return on investment and the second and third years would be even better. Set your budget based on the value you’ll get from the site. If you see it as an expense, your website will fail. But if you see your website as an investment, understanding that a good web site can generate leads or conduct more ecommerce, you will be on the right track.
  3. Expertise 150X150 1Expertise
    Tied very closely to the first two, website expertise can be in house expertise or it could be turning to an outside web development agency. They key is that you understand the expertise required based on the time you spent setting your goals. Then you can make an informed decision. If you have staff that understands conversion optimization (getting more from your web site) then that is the way to go. If not, then you can find expertise in an outside agency.

For most business owners it means taking the time to make sure they are spending their money on the right expertise. If you determine an outside agency is the best route for your organization, contact us for help.

 

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Economics of Conversion Optimization

I spend a lot of time every day explaining Conversion Optimization because it is such an important part of what we do.

The general idea is to get more of your visitors to perform a specific task – a task that will help your company grow. It may be as simple as signing up for your newsletter or sharing on Facebook something about your site. Or it could be as significant as buying something online or calling you up, ready to do business.

First you have to determine what you want visitors to do, then start working on the process. But why? Is it really useful?

Let’s say you have a web site that sells widgets. Each widget is $10. During a typical month you get 10,000 visitors to your website and you sell 100 widgets, one to a customer. You have a 1% conversion rate:

100 (customer)/10,000 (visitors) = 0.01 or 1%

So you set to work on improving the conversion process and after much work you go from a 1% conversion rate to a 1.5% conversion rate. What? Only a .5% increase?

No. Not a .5% increase. Look again. That is a 50% increase. Now instead of making $1000 for every 10,000 visitors, you make $1500.

Conversionoptimization 1Stop and think about that. If you had not conversion optimized your site, and instead run an SEO campaign to increase traffic to 100,000 visitors a month you would make $10,000. But if you first optimize your site for conversion and then do the SEO campaign, you are suddenly making $15,000 month.

Spend time optimizing your site before you optimize your search! If you spend the resources to improve your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you will double the money you get from your site.

Well that makes sense for ecommerce but what about a lead generating site? The same principle applies. If you get 1000 visitors a month, ten of which call and one of which becomes a customer, you now have a formula. First look over your site and see what you can do to optimize the conversion process. Then make some changes. It is actually better to make small incremental changes so you can determine which changes are working.

On the web site itself you can’t change the conversion rate of 10 calls to 1 customer. That is an internal process you can (and should) work on. But you can work to get more people calling. Again, get 15 or 20 calls a month and you have a 50 – 100% increase in conversions, leading to more revenue for you.

So invest the time and resources to make your site better. It will have a positive impact on your bottom line.

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Listening to Your Web Site

Have you every stopped to listen? Really listen? I have often experienced situations where someone has a question and the listener is so sure they know the question and the answer that they haven’t really heard the question and end up giving an answer to a different problem. And I’ll confess that more often than not, I’ve been the “listener” who didn’t hear.

So how does that apply to Internet marketing?

You ought to “listen” to your web site. You can listen in different ways:

1.       Talk to customers who have actually used your site. Ask them what they liked. What they didn’t like? What they noticed? What they passed by without a second thought? And then listen to their answers instead of making assumptions about what they’re about to say.

2.       Look at your site statistics. There are many different ways to do this – you know what you want people to do on your web site but you can listen to visitors by seeing what they actually do – what links they click on, what actions they perform, whether they actually do what you want them to. You can try free programs like Google Analytics and I also recommend looking at the statistics program on your web server – look for something called webalizer, awstats or logaholic (three of the most common stats programs).

3.       Run one or more tests on your web site. A/B testing is the easiest to perform and usually the easiest to understand the results of. Listening through testing can help you understand what the best message is “Buy now!” versus “Check out pricing”, which colors to make your buttons (sometimes a blue button gets more clicks than a red one, who knew?), how much information to ask for (do you really need a physical address to get a newsletter subscriber?) and other useful kinds of information. Google Website Optimizer is a good tool to get started with.

What other ways have you found to listen on your web site?

If you haven’t been listening but want to, let us know how we can help by filling out this form.

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