Growing Your Business Online - Part 1
By Rod Jacka
How important is your company’s website to its bottom line? It is no secret, we know that it is important, but how important?
Whether you’re selling product, generating sales leads, publishing a newsletter or just a brochure, there is little argument that that your future customers will use your website at some point. Often their first impression of your company will be made based on a visit to its website in the very early stages of their purchasing cycle whilst they gather information, determine their requirements and start to make a decision.
As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. That moment when your future customer arrives at your website is make or break. One false move, one disappointment, or if you fail to clearly communicate your offer and suddenly your no longer on the short list. Further you must earn the right to turn that visitor into a customer one click at a time.
So how does this help your business grow? It is simple; if you don’t ensure that the first impression that your company makes is a good one and if you don’t move that visitor forward in their decision to purchase from your company, then you have left both business and money on the table. Improve the rate in which you convert visitors to customers on your site and improve your bottom line.
Test everything
The key to making improvements in your advertising and website that positively impact is testing. Almost every element on your website and in your online advertising can be tested and evaluated. Testing takes the guesswork out of implementing change. I am often asked questions such as “will … work on our site” or “what should I do about …”. To these questions I almost universally answer, perhaps, but to be sure we need to test. It is only by devising and implementing a structured test that we can reliably measure can we begin to understand what changes have a positive effect and those that don’t. Each company and website is unique and what works for one may not work for another. The only magic formula is test, test, test and revise.
There are a variety of tools and techniques used to test websites and advertising. My favorites are ClickTracks and Google Analytics. However in my experience most users of web analytics tools such as these are limiting their use to just finding out how many visitors their site gets and what pages that they access. By not fully utilising the potential of these tools to test your website and advertising you are wasting a significant opportunity.
By combining these tools with developing formal business goals for your website and a structured testing framework you can achieve positive results quickly and efficiently.
So how big an impact can testing have on your bottom line?
Lets assume that your website currently attracts 1000 visitors a month and uses articles and whitepapers to generate sales leads that are then followed up by your sales team. 500 of these visitors stay for a little while, 200 of them register on the site and 20 of them become customers. A small improvement in the number of people that complete the registration or contact forms will result in big improvements in the number of customers.
If your testing resulted in changes that increased the number of registrations by 25% you would have 50 more customer. Even better you could do this with no increase in your marketing costs.
You can see that implementing a testing system is an investment that can reap substantial rewards. To see how such testing can improve your bottom line I recommend that you download our free ROI calculator.
Panalysis can assist you to setup and implement testing and analysis systems that can grow your business on the internet.
For further information on how web analytics and testing can help your company, please call or email us for a free initial consultation.
In my next article in this series I will discuss how testing can help you build a more powerful first impression in your web site visitors.
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