Improve Conversion

You may have heard it before but content really is king.

The way your content is displayed and the way it is structured will determine if users bother to stay on your site and move on to take action and convert.

It’s better to have a bad design and great copy than a great design but bad copy. We have seen some very ugly looking sites delivering incredible sales.

A set formula that often works is to use a layout such as:

• Heading title
• Summary of what the page is about and any conclusion
• Bullet points for the most important points
• Sub heading
• Content of sub heading
• Call to action (there should be a call to action near the top, maybe to the right of the content)

The heading titles should be bigger and in different colours so that they stand out.

Your visitors will often scan the page to see if this page has the information they are looking for.

Make sure that your text is sized so it is easily readable. Try to use darker colours as sometimes light ones may appear fine on your computers but on others, depending on factory default settings, may be too light to read. Avoid grey, orange, sky blue, violet & light green.

We use the tried and trusted marketing approach of the AIDA model which provides a compelling framework for persuasion online:

• A – Attention
• I – Interest
• D – Desire
• A – Action

A - The heading can get their attention. Communicate your offer and value very quickly to grab a visitor’s attention.

I - The summary of the page and how your business can solve their problems.

D- The bullet points display the desire by communicating value, showing your most important reasons why they should do business with you.

A - A call to action helps you potential customer take action by giving them options on relevant content or to complete any form submission.

By using this structure the content will be displayed in an ‘F pattern’. Numerous studies have show this is how users view content areas. This ensures that content does not get missed.

Ask 3 Critical Questions

Bryan Eisenburg believes there are three critical questions that should be addressed for every page a website visitor sees as they perform a sequence of actions (e.g. ‘click to see…’) that result in the ultimate objective (typically a sale, booking or enquiry).

1. What action needs to be taken?
2. Who needs to take that action?
3. How do we persuade that person to take the action we desire? Is it easy for them to take action?

How life was easy with just one browser, however today there are several browsers your customers could be using.

Additionally each browser has different versions and you should conduct several tests to ensure all visitors can access and use your site. The more visitors that can use your site effectively, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Let’s think about this in a traditional retail environment, imagine you spend money on a promotion to try and drive visitors to your store. This works however as you assume all your customers are over 6 foot tall, you build shelves so high that 20% of you visitors that are 4 foot tall cannot see items on the shelves, let alone buy them. By not catering for all visitors you could be cutting off some customers. This would never happen in a retail shop and the same should apply to online.

What browsers do online consumers use?

Internet Explorer is still dominating the market but Firefox and Safari now account for 30% of visitors. Typically we see the breakdown as:

• 70%  Internet Explorer
• 20%  Firefox
• 7%     Safari
• 1.5% Google Chrome

Within Internet Explorer alone at the time of writing there are three versions

• 6 (65%),
• 7 (25%)
• 8 (10%)

We have sometimes spent days ensuring that a site displays correctly in IE6 as well as IE7 and now we have to work on IE8 too. As you can see there are sufficient numbers on each of these browsers to ensure this work is done.

How to ensure your site works on all browsers?

There are free and paid for tools to run tests in all browsers but often this just gives you a snapshot of any issues. You really need to go through all pages and functionality to make sure everything displays and works correctly.

Each of our staff work on a different platform and browser, so each person can test any website on all platforms when quality testing and spot issues quicker.

Your stats package or analytics will have information on what browsers and versions your customers are using. Don’t ignore it.