Is Your Website Working?

For many businesses, the website plays a critical role in driving leads and converting sales. That’s because prospects tend to do their homework, either before or after they talk to you, by visiting your website. And if your website does a lousy job of communicating a compelling offer and value proposition, then your sales will suffer. I doubt that comes as a surprise to anyone reading this. We all know our websites are important, yet we don’t hold them accountable to the same high standards as our sales teams. For example, do you regularly review the performance of your website to ensure it’s meeting your target goals? Do you have a website performance scorecard? If not, let’s walk through a simple four-question performance review that you can use to evaluate your website. Question 1: Does Your Website Adhere to Your Dress Code? This first question is the easiest one. Review your website with fresh eyes and honestly answer the following question: “Does your website’s design give the same impression you work hard to create in your business?” Remember, your prospects’ first impression will often be your website, rather than one of your salespeople. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your website isn’t dropping the ball with a poor design, or a design that doesn’t match your company dress code. Question 2: Does Your Website Communicate Effectively? To be great in sales, you need excellent communication skills. That’s why sales teams spend so much time honing their sales presentations and practicing how to handle objections from prospects. With that in mind, take a look at your website copy and answer the following questions: 1. Is it clear what your business does and how you can help your prospects? 2. Is it clear where to click to learn more about a particular product or service? 3. Is it clear what makes your business better than the competition? 4. Does your website address common objections from prospects? 5. Does your website give clear instructions for the next step in the sales process? If you answered “no” to any one of those questions, then your website is not communicating as effectively as possible, which means you’re losing sales. And just like how your sales team needs to work hard throughout the year to stay up-to-date, your website copy should be reviewed and refreshed at least two times per year. Question 3: Is Your Website Hitting Your Target KPIs? Now let’s dive into the KPIs and how to track them to evaluate your website performance over time. The tools we’ll need are: Google Analytics Phone Call Tracking Google Analytics: If you haven’t done so already, I recommend installing Google Analytics to track website visits per marketing channel, webpage bounce rates and, most importantly, conversions. For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on conversions, or “goals” in Google Analytics. [caption id="attachment_22293" align="aligncenter" width="520"] Goal Conversion Rates on the Rise: Google Analytics “goals” allow marketers to track performance where it counts — at the conversion level.[/caption] Goals are one of the best measurements of website’s performance because they track how many leads or sales the website generated. Plus, you can measure the conversion rates over time, so you know if our website is improving from a sales conversion rate perspective. Phone Call Tracking: Google Analytics is great for tracking website visitor behavior, but if you also receive phone calls, then you’ll need to set up phone call tracking to measure the number of calls from your website. Once you set up call tracking, then you’ll be able to see how many calls came in from your website, and from which marketing channels (SEO, SEM, TV, radio, print ads, etc.). When you combine phone call data with website goal data, you’ll see a more complete picture of your website performance. Question 4: Is Your Website Following Up Frequently and Effectively? Part of excellent sales communication skills is the ability to follow up frequently and effectively. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. We all know how important it is to follow up with prospects in order to close the deal. But is your website doing a good job with follow-up? By that, I mean is your website collecting contact information from prospects and then automatically following up via email? If not then, again, you’re losing a lot of sales every day. Only a small percentage (maybe 1 to 5 percent) of your website visitors are going to call or complete a contact form to start the sales process. So at least 95 percent of all visitors are leaving your website, and you have no way to follow up with them. [caption id="attachment_22286" align="aligncenter" width="520"] Lead Magnet: A simple, gated giveaway is a great way to funnel website visitors into your lead nurturing programs.[/caption] For this reason, I recommend every business install a “lead magnet” on its website. A lead magnet is any free offer that you can make in exchange for your prospects’ contact information. For example, one of our lead magnets is the SEO checklist. Once your prospect requests your lead magnet, you can use an email service provider like ConstantContact or MailChimp. We use Infusionsoft to automatically follow up via email. If you do not yet have a lead magnet on your website, then that’s actually great news! You have a huge opportunity to improve the performance of your website right now.

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Is Your Website Working?

Phil Frost

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