Regardless of whether you own a small, medium-sized or big business enterprise, the goal you aim at with designing a website for your business is the same – converting visitors into customers. Your web design should perform optimally in this task for you to enjoy good returns.
In today’s online-driven world, in the majority of cases your web design is the first interaction that people have whatsoever with your business and you. That means that your site has a crucial role to play when it comes to seizing the opportunity to convert a new visitor into a customer in the future. So here, we have gathered three tips which you can use when designing your website for a maximum impact on new visitors. These can be implemented when redesigning your already existing site, too.
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Focus on the Value
Your customers will care about your service or product because you offer them value and a return on their investment. Your website has to deliver your company’s value proposition adequately. Your main goal should be to make it extremely easy for the customers to make a purchase, or subscribe for your newsletter, etc. But how can you do that?
The focus should be shifted from you onto your customers. It is all about the customers. You should understand what they care about, their challenges and pains – and build the content of your site to resonate with those needs and desires.
Also, address the clients individually; your copy should not speak to a crowd, but to the individual person. This will help you connect with your visitors and build credibility and trust.
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Minimize Distractions
The last thing you want your visitors to be wondering is where to go next. If you have a number of calls to action or your site navigation includes an excessive amount of links to select from, your visitor’s attention will be diverted in way too many directions. They will be wondering where to go instead of focusing on the advantages of your service/product and your message.
To prevent that, segment your navigation into two parts – a primary and a secondary menu. The primary navigation which will be present on top of all pages should include only links to a handful of pages which are critical to your mission – the ones that sell your product and educate the visitors.
The remaining pages can be added to the secondary navigation, where they will still be accessible but they won’t distract the visitors.
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Optimize Your Calls to Action
Image source – https://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/5683575389
Each element of your business website must be designed around the company’s purchase funnel. In other words – the path a visitor takes from your home page/landing page to the eventual conversion into a subscriber or paying customer.
The bottom of your purchase funnel is the call-to-action sections. These may be in the form of buttons to sign up for an account, or to buy a product, or to subscribe to your newsletter, etc.
Take a look at these three simple ways to optimize your website’s calls to action:
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Be explicit
Your call to action should never be vague. Your visitors should be given explicit instructions on the exact action you want them to perform. For instance, if you want the visitor to sign up for your newsletter, instead of the rather vague “Submit” form button, you should use something which describes the action better – “Subscribe to the newsletter” or something similar.
You should set the expectations from your calls to actions clearly. Your visitors should not wonder what would happen if they clicked a button on your website.
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Reduce the Friction
Whenever customers have to make a transaction on the web, they display some amount of natural resistance. They are never entirely comfortable with punching in their credit card info and sometimes even giving their e-mail address. There will always be some sort of fear of being scammed, spammed or duped. Thus, you must do everything possible to overcome the natural resistance of your clients, and to do that, you need to “reduce the friction”.
You should convey to the customers in every way possible that there is no risk involved. For instance, if you offer a free service or sample, the call to action should include the word “free”. Or you can offer a money-back guarantee and make sure that this is clearly visible.
You want to make your potential customers feel secure in dealing with you. And the fear of compromising credit card information is very justified in today’s world. So, you should add symbols that indicate that the connection is secure, like a lock icon, and display the SSL certificate that proves your site’s security measures. This will help ease the customer’s mind.
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Differentiate your call-to-action buttons visually
You will want to ensure that your call-to-action buttons are clearly visible and stand out from the rest of your content. A good way to do that would be to choose a different color for the calls to action. For instance, if you have a grey and blue color scheme on your website, you can make the call to action green or yellow. But make sure that no other element of the page except the call-to-action buttons is in that chosen color.
This way, the CTAs will stand out and they will attract the attention of the visitors. But that also serves another purpose – your visitors will be able to find their way on your website more easily and will get more familiar with the layout. And after they have browsed a few pages and are ready to take an action, they will know what to look for – the green or yellow call-to-action button.
These are just a few simple tips and techniques you can use to improve your business website’s design in order to get the most out of the opportunities it presents you with. If you implement these tips that will surely improve the user experience and help you convert more visitors into customers in the long run.
