Category — Website Optimization

Try website optimization to improve your sales.

I just came across a question on a discussion board: the company had a good amount of website traffic but their sales volume had stayed at a consistent amount for months. They wanted to know how they could increase their sales volume.

There are a lot of things you can do, but one of the most effective is website optimization. Website optimization takes your website and makes it work harder. After all, your website should be your best salesman. Here are the first steps you should take to improve your website traffic.

1. Measure: If you don’t already have website analytics on your site, implement them now. If you don’t know what your website is currently doing, you can’t make it better. If you already have website analytics implemented, look at the reports. I know many companies that want to improve what they have but don’t know where they’re currently at.
2. Compare: Review your competitors’ websites and find the similarities and differences. Take notes on what you like and what you don’t like… and keep an open mind. These are the people your visitors who are leaving are going to: make sure you know what they’re seeing.
3. Develop: After you’ve reviewed your own website and your competition, develop variations of your website. You want to leave what is currently working and improve upon what isn’t working. Look at what you did and didn’t like from the competition: can you make your site better? Put together different variations that take what you liked from your competition to the next level.
4. Test: Using a website optimization software, implement a test campaign that tests what you currently have against your new variations. Make sure you let it run long enough to get a good result.

I have worked with companies that have optimized their website and were able to bring in twice as many leads from the same marketing spend after the initial optimization campaign. If done correctly, it will make your website work harder for you without spending more money or driving additional traffic.

Need help with website optimization? The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing helps local businesses get the most out of their marketing dollars. Give us a call and we can review your current site and put together a personalized plan to help you make your website work harder.

Website optimization is a great way to improve your bottom line and lower your marketing costs. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that while those “genius” moments where your website optimization hits a home run are great and exciting, you can get further and help your business more by hitting continuous line drives rather than depend on the  home run rarity.

First things first… are you setting your website optimization up for success?

• How many revisions do you make to a minor change to your website? If you request three or more, you may be too much of a perfectionist. Instead of slowing down the process because everything needs to be perfect, get yourself to say that it’s good enough. Chances are, no one but you will notice whether or not those last two revisions were made.
• Are you suffering from paralysis by analysis? How much time are you spending analyzing your website analytics data versus developing and implementing solutions? If you spend more time analyzing, it’s time to come to some conclusions and implement a solution that will solve your problem.
• Are you passing on easy improvements, those line drives, to try for the home run… and in turn, spend more time working towards major site alternations passing up on lucrative smaller improvements? Those smaller improvements may be a better place for your time, energy, and money to be spent.

Change your focus to continuous improvement.

Implementing website optimization strategies shouldn’t be a short term solution. The marketplace, your visitors, and your business are always changing and you there will always be another area for improvement. You shouldn’t start your optimization process thinking that in six months you’ll be set and you won’t have to do anything for the next two years… it’s not like that. Your competition can come along at any time and copy your website, outbid you on your key terms, or offer a lower price; effectively lowering your conversion rates. By focusing your website optimization strategy on continuous improvement, you lower your risk  of succumbing to outside influences and set yourself up for long-term success.

The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing can help you focus on continuous improvement. Give us a call and we’ll review your business and marketing plan and develop a customized plan that fits your business goals and current marketing efforts.

Many small businesses can operate nationwide and are competing against some larger corporations with larger budgets. An easy way to make your business stand out online is to focus your online efforts.

Rather than trying to capture the entire nation, one thing that you can do is focus on your local market. While you may be able to offer products and services nationwide, or worldwide, by choosing to focus your efforts on your local market, you can develop your marketing strategies for the target market you know best: the one right outside your window.

If you already have a physical location and local customers, you can start tapping into the neighborhoods close-by and your customers’ networks of friends and family. You can extend that online through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and review sites that collect and rate local businesses such as Kudzu.com and Angie’s List.

Just like you would try advertising in the local paper before going to a national paper, try local online marketing first. You’ll be surprised at the results you see and how much you can save versus national campaigns. The local traffic will be a fraction of the national traffic but it will also be at a fraction of the cost… and it will be easier to sell to people who know you have a location right down the street.

For more help in developing your target market or focusing your efforts to your local market, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We specialize in helping small businesses develop and implement local marketing strategies. We can help you define your target market and develop specific marketing strategies for your local business.

Tips for Service and Product Based Businesses

Welcome to Part 2 of the Successful Selling Online series. If you haven’t yet read Part 1, you can read it here. We have already discussed the first basis of selling successfully online, here are some additional things to keep in mind.

Keep in Touch

Implement a plan to keep in touch with current customers and website visitors. Collect email addresses and develop specific contact points for your sales process. Start sending email newsletters about your company, products, and services offered – tailored to specific customer interests. You can also add a marketing message to invoices and receipts. If it works with your product/service use thank you cards and coupons to let customers know you appreciate them.

Evaluate Your Metrics

Implement website analytics (Google Analytics is a free service) and review your reports and see what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you’re also looking at sales reports and cost evaluations for each product/service. If a product or service is doing great, see what you can do to replicate that success among similar products/services or how you can get more out of those sales. See if you can optimize what isn’t working to improve that, or decide to turn it off.

Diversify

How is your traffic coming to your website? Is it all from one source? Just like you wouldn’t have all of one stock (think Enron), you want to make sure you don’t depend too heavily on one marketing channel. If you’re using Google Adwords, consider some of the other search engines, or impression based marketing, affiliate marketing, or social media marketing. There are so many potential channels for online marketing, make sure you don’t limit your success by only choosing one. At the same time, make sure you don’t stretch yourself too thin.

Ask for Help

Look at what you are doing and what you want to accomplish. If you have the experience and expertise to develop and implement your online strategies, go for it! If you don’t have the budget to hire someone full-time or don’t want to take on that overhead, consider hiring a consulting agency.

Are you ready to develop or revise your marketing strategy? Contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing for help developing and implementing small business specific marketing strategies.

Tips for Service and Product Based Businesses

Today, a website is more than an online resume, a calling card, or a place where people can go to get your hours and locations. Your website can be a very effective salesperson, and really, with the proper tools, you can turn it into your most effective salesman. And that’s just one portion of online marketing. Here are some tips to help you start selling online more effectively.

Be Different

What makes you stand out from the competition? There are things, big and small that make you stand out from the competition. There is a reason people are buying (or should buy) from you rather than anyone else. Find out what makes you different and make that a huge part of your visitor’s online marketing experience. For example, if you pride yourself on great customer service, make sure they can easily find out how to contact customer service by phone, email, and even online chat. Once they do contact you, make sure you respond quickly.

Provide Great Service

You want to respond to all requests, comments, and communications professionally and quickly. If you provide a contact form or email address, make sure you respond to your visitors in a timely manner… don’t let a week or two go by before you “get to it.” Make sure you are responsive and that you stand by your product and/or service.

Flaunt what you’ve got

If you’re selling products, have high quality images and give an overall and detailed view. Want to be different? Look at what your competition is doing and step it up a notch. What do your descriptions look like? Make sure you accurately describe your product and give enough detail so the customer doesn’t have questions.

Selling services? You may not have product images to put up, but you can give great detailed descriptions what each service entails. If you’re in a competitive market and don’t want to give extremely detailed descriptions, give enough to drive the visitor to call you instead of your competition.

Stay tuned for the second half of the Successful Selling Online series (read it here). If you have questions or would like help developing your online marketing strategy, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We specialize in developing and implementing online marketing strategies for small business.

Optimize your website error pages to capitalize on the unexpected.

The unexpected happens. A visitor can attempt to go to a page that you’ve moved, deleted, or renamed and get that dreaded error page. Usually, they’ll get there through an outdated link from a search engine, blog, or bookmark. It may even be a hard to find link on your website that wasn’t updated with the rest of the site.

This is a great opportunity to take the “bad” and change it to a “good.” This is a page that you can be creative with. First, you need to make sure it is consistent with your current website design. Reassure your visitor that they are still on the right site, the page they were trying to see no longer exists. Now, you can get creative with what you do with it.

• Make it entertaining. Many sites are using humor to help bridge the annoyance of an error page. Engage your visitor with your site and let them see some of your personality.
• Let them have access to a site-search tool to help them better find what they’re looking for fast.
• Give links to helpful resources. Highlight pages that can help point them in the right direction or pages that are most visited. If you know what most people are looking for on your site, make sure you highlight it on your error page.
• Recommend products and services that they may be looking for.
• Add a sign-up to your email newsletter. If you already have them engaged with your site, take advantage of it!

Because you don’t know exactly what they were looking for, you want to make sure that all of these come across as recommendations. You want to avoid a high-pressure sales situation.

If you’re looking for help developing and implementing marketing strategies for your website, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We can discuss your business, your goals, and develop solutions that take your business to the next level.

You have a great site, it’s well designed and well programmed. Your bounces and exit rates are low, your site is navigated easily by visitors, your pages are sticky… but your conversion rates have stopped increasing. And now you’re stuck trying to figure out how else to optimize your website in order to improve your conversion rates further.

Working with companies that had conversion rates from 1% to companies that had conversion rates in the 50% range, I have seen people try dramatic things to improve their conversion rates. The number always depends on what conversion rate you are looking at. Is it for a product, a campaign, or a website? A company’s conversion rate will differ greatly throughout. As a business owner, you don’t necessarily want the specifics, but you want to know if it can be improved further.

Once you have covered the basics of website optimization, a great thing to look at is your website segmentation. Create personas for your website visitors based on their stage in the buying process and their stage in your selling process. Put yourself in that persona’s frame of mind and then try navigating your website. Can you find the product/service you are looking for? Are you getting distracted by another aspect of the website? Does the content on the website do what it’s supposed to do or is it off-target?

This is definitely a more in-depth and time consuming website optimization technique, however, it can produce amazing results if done correctly. By appealing to your website visitor and giving them everything they need to find and purchase your product or service, you are ensuring there is nothing standing in the way of your conversion rates. If you are looking for a drastic improvement, this is the point in website optimization that you may want to consider hiring an expert who can help you focus your efforts.

If you’re looking for professional help to develop your user personas, call The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We’ll review your business goals and develop a work plan that fits into your needs and budget.

You have built a website, put up the content, and are now ready for even more traffic. But are you sure you’re ready? Before you spend the time, effort, and money driving more traffic to your website: you should make sure your website works the way you want it to. In short, you need to make sure your website is hitting the goals you initially outlined before you bring lots of traffic to it. Otherwise, if it doesn’t do exactly what you thought it would, you’re wasting money and time.

Define the goal of your website. Ask yourself,

• Do you want it drive leads or sales inquiries?
• Should it sell a specific product or service?
• Is it there to provide information and build you as an expert in your field?

Once you define the goal of your website, ask a third party what your website does. You can ask employees, family, friends, and customers:

• Why they would visit your website.
• What they were driven to do on the website.
• What their experience with the website was like. Did they like the site? Was it easy to find what they were looking for? Was it easy to register or purchase your product/service or make an inquiry?
• Would they recommend the site to friends and family?

Evaluate your website goals with the experience your third party had. Do they match? If they do, you’re ready to start driving more traffic to your website. If they don’t, you should reevaluate your website and make the necessary changes so your website does hit your goals.

Need help determining if your website will drive your traffic to have the appropriate reaction? The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing can help you evaluate your website and ensure your visitors are taking the desired action. Once you know your website is doing what it should, The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing can help you increase the amount of traffic your website receives.