Turn visitors into customers
So, you think you've got the right kinds of people visiting your website, but they're not buying much stuff or getting in touch.
What's going on?
Cicada often work with businesses who have invested in a website, but find that it's just not earning its keep. | | |
Make your website easier to use
Modern content management systems make it easy for you to add copy and images to your website, but that doesn't guarantee that visitors will respond in the way you want them to.
Ease of use means ensuring that people can interact with your website quickly, in a way that's natural to them, using their language, not yours. | | Make your website more relevant
It can take time to make your site truly relevant to the needs of your customers: the knowledge to do that often requires an in-depth understanding of what customers really want online.
The process of making your website more relevant can be illustrated by a perspective on Cicada client First Line IT. |
Here's our 10-point ease of use checklist
- Give people what they expect
- Keep the navigation simple
- Make pages easy to scan
- Don't hide important content
- Follow a 'pyramid' layout
- Use language thoughtfully
- Make use of images - a picture paints a thousand words!
- Use metadata where you can
- Keep shopping processes simple
- Measure and improve continually
Each of these points is discussed in more detail on the Cicada blog . | | Here's a perspective on relevance
In 2008 Cicada kicked off a Google Adwords campaign to drive local businesses looking for 'IT support Oxford' to the First Line website. A short while in, we knew the campaign was efficiently sending qualified sales prospects to the site because key Adwords metrics - such as Click Through Rate, and Cost Per Click - were telling us so.
But not many people were responding to the calls to action and contacting the business with sales enquiries.
In early 2009, we undertook a detailed review of the website. And what occured to us was that website content had evolved with existing clients in mind who, when the business had changed ownership a few years ago, had some very pressing communications needs. They still needed information on First Line's IT support services, but their perspective was different to that of new sales prospects.
Working closely with the client we restructured the way services were presented and added a good deal of content.
The business didn't change in any way, but it presented itself differently online.
Suddenly, the telephone began to ring and the business began receiving on average two new sales enquiries per month (this has since increased).
You can read more about First Line here. |
