Businesses neglect simple strategies when building their Web sites. They often make the site about the company instead of about the customer. Customers can see through the marketing-speak. The following six easy-to-do features help businesses ensure they make the most of out of visitor’s time:
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Focus on the customer: A site tends to pump up the product or service instead of show how the product or service takes care of a customer’s needs.
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Keep it simple: This sounds obvious, but too many business sites do things the hard way. Navigation and the shopping cart process should be simple, and content scannable. According to statistics from MarketingSherpa, almost 60% abandon shopping carts.
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Make it instantly obvious what the business does: I’ve landed on pages where I had no idea what the business did. The name, slogan and landing page content told me nothing. Jump to different pages as if it’s the first time you meet the company — can you tell what the company does? Thanks to search engines, visitors can land ANYWHERE.
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Give the customer something to do: Limit the action customers can take or else it overwhelms them. One or two actions per page works. A good way to handle this is to give those who are ready — an instant action to sign up, buy the product, etc. Those who need more information — give them the option of reading more that way the home page isn’t too crowded. This method helps address two kinds of visitors: Those who just want the high level details and those who need in-depth information before deciding. LiveMocha does this on its home page.
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Links: Watch for link overkill — too many links turns a customer into an indecisive and frustrated one. When you click a link, do you get what you expect? Surprises are not a good thing here.
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Establish trust: Show customers there are faces behind the business. Talk about your people in the About / Company page, include bios, use photos, and give your company a personality / character. There is nothing wrong with building rapport with informal writing — this is how character comes through. Formal writing oozes stiffness, coldness, and unfriendliness.
Some businesses can’t make a sale on the first visit. So how do you remind visitors to come back? Stay connected? A good way is to have an e-mail newsletter and encourage them to sign up (this would be a call to action). This is a small investment compared to making the buy.
E-mail newsletters also help build trust and provide the company with a human voice. Ensure you gain a new reader by putting a simple note of “We value your privacy” in the newsletter sign up box. This message quickly answers the question that you won’t share information with anyone else.
Also include an RSS feed for the newsletter and the Web site’s regularly updated content for those who prefer this to e-mail. You might consider exploring other options to broaden your company’s reach.