When someone says to you: “Help, my web site isn’t working!” how would you respond?
As the leader of a company that unlocks the growth potential of businesses, we often get questions like this. Maybe your company is re-examining its web site as part of its response to the economic turmoil, so let me give you 3 tips to help break this problem down into manageable chunks.
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First ask, “What’s it supposed to be doing?” to get at the intent. Seriously, step back and review what we expect to be happening and why. For instance, is the web site designed to fulfill a marketing purpose and capture leads? That structure looks very different than one that’s set up to upsell customers who buy your flagship product.
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Next ask, “How will we know it’s working?” so you know where to measure its success. Are you using visitor correlations to marketing events? Are you measuring requests for a white paper or other special report? Are you measuring sales conversions or increases in average orders? Are you measuring time to respond and time to resolve for customer service issues? These and two dozen other metrics are all valid ways of gauging success, but you’ve got to know which ones to use.
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Lastly, ask “What can we change?” to design your testing experiments. This is a big area and I encourage you to examine the things that cost nothing to change and can make the biggest difference in improving visitor engagement and conversion to sales, such as re-writing your copy, strengthening your headlines, increasing the frequency of your ask, providing more social proof, and making it easier to navigate. Do these things before you change your graphics or invest in pay per click leads or things like that.
With these 3 techniques, you’ll be on your way to understanding and repairing your web site, and building a stronger business.