The digital era is in full swing. Imagine what could happen if a stronger website presence led to even 5 percent more conversions into website inquiries, or better yet, phone calls? And what if even one of those leads generated tens of thousands of dollars in sales? The financial outcome of a stronger website presence can be enormous.
A majority of customers today view a company’s website as a virtual storefront through which they can browse products and make purchases. Consider these statistics:
• A 2013 study by RTi Research found 81 percent of consumers research products online before going to a store and the percentage is still rising.
• A 2014 Marketo research report found up to 95 percent of qualified prospects go to company websites to research and are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep but as many as 70 percent of them will eventually buy a product from you – or your competitors.
• A 2014 Forrester study found consumers have higher expectations about what they will find on a company website: 71 percent expect to view in-store inventory online, and 50 percent expect to be able to buy online and pick up in-store.
Develop better content and design to increase conversion. Recent research from KISSmetrics indicated 96 percent of website visitors are not ready to buy. That means your website is more than a vehicle for e-commerce. It is a continuous opportunity to convert more visitors into customers.
Make sure all pages of your company’s website are clear, focused and geared toward the visitors’ needs. The content must be engaging yet concise, with clearly delineated headlines and meaningful information that addresses prospects’ pain points.
Images, videos and infographics can help to heighten the effectiveness of your website. According to James McQuivey of Forrester Research, one minute of video has as much marketing influence as do 1.8 million words.
Make your website user-friendly. With more than 50 percent of searches now originating on mobile devices and 77 percent of executives using smartphones to research products and services for their businesses, having a mobile-friendly website is imperative.
According to a Google report, 40 percent of mobile consumers turn to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile website experience, and 57 percent wouldn’t recommend a business that had a bad mobile site.
Because many conventional conversion points … are better suited to a PC, make sure your website includes mobile-friendly conversion points, such as drop-down menus and simple forms with auto-populated fields.
Ensure your website can be found. You have to think about how to drive traffic to your website, and this makes optimizing your search engine rankings mandatory.
There are a number of tools that can help you to analyze how your site is ranked relative to other sites in your industry. One of these is offered by Alexa. Google offers a free tool that will show you why your site isn’t ranked higher: Does it contain broken links? Has the content not been updated in the past three months?
Track your website visitors. To begin, implement Google Analytics for your website. The tool is free and requires only a line of tracking code be added to each page of the site. It will then record various metrics about visitor behavior on your site, such as the number of visitors, the amount of time they spend on each page and where prospects drop off as they move closer to a purchase decision.
Chris Ciunci is founder and managing partner of TribalVision, which has offices in Warwick, Boston and New York.
