Summary:
Your business website is often the first interaction you have with a potential customer.
If your website is not professional you may be leaving money on the table. Website
strategy expert, Philippa Gamse, will help you identify these issues and fix them.
Keywords:
As well over 90% of people now turn to the Internet as
their primary information source, it's crucial to your bottom line to ensure that your Web
presence is as effective as possible.
Yet 95% of the more than 5,000 Websites that I've reviewed
since 1995 were leaving money on the table, sometimes a lot of it - and often in ways that
could be easily avoided or rectified.
Many of these issues are caused by one of more of these
factors:
- Lack of strategic planning and consideration of the full
range of visitor types to the site, their needs, and likely emotional responses.
- Lack of clear positioning and navigation elements that drive
visitors around the site to ensure that they see relevant content.
- Lack of cohesion between the Website and the organization's
social media presence.
- Lack of coordination between departments to maximize
leverage of content and calls to action - sometimes this is inadvertent, but sometimes it
is deliberate.
- Lack of sufficiently senior and informed management
oversight to ensure that appropriate strategies and systems are in place and acted upon.
All of these can cause significant loss of potential
revenue, since the failure to engage visitors with your Web presence reduces conversion
and referral rates.
This article briefly explores the above issues, showing how
they manifest, their impact, and how they can be detected and resolved.
Lack of Thinking about Visitor Types
A common mistake in strategic Web design is to create a site based on a homogenous view of
the typical visitor. This assumes that all visitors will think in the same way, will use
the same vocabulary, and will follow similar paths through the site.
Of course, this is far from the truth. Visitors will have a
wide range of needs, levels of literacy and language skills, decision-making processes,
and will respond differently to various types of calls to action. It is very important to
consider this for your particular demographic, so that you can create copy and
navigational structures that appeal as widely as possible, and to avoid losing visitors
and revenue-generating opportunities.
One of the most valuable exercises that you can undertake
is to define a set of typical visitor "personas". Think about all of the
different types of individual that you might attract to your Web presence, not just
current and prospective customers. These can include potential investors or partners,
bankers, insurers, job seekers, media, and even members of the public who may find your
site by chance but who are interested in your content.
In creating these "personas", consider these
characteristics:
- Gender / age / language(s) spoken
- Education level / income
- Their reason for visiting the site - be very specific
- How do they make decisions - are they visual / emotional /
data-driven?
- Content / elements that are likely to attract them to
respond
- Content / elements that are likely to deter them from
interacting with you further
- Any other relevant details?
- Give them each a name!
It's best to do this with input from a wide range of both
senior and junior staff, and from all departments and levels of interaction with the
public so that you can build as complete and varied a picture as possible.
Once you have this list, try walking through your current
or proposed site structure in the shoes of each "persona", seeing it as they
would, and trying to interact in the way they'd prefer. This will almost certainly be an
eye-opening experience!
Lack of Clear Positioning and Navigation
Web usability studies have consistently shown that a clearly articulated value proposition
and / or differentiation statement can have a major impact on your results. Visitors need
immediate confirmation that they're in the right place for what they need, and that you
have competence and credibility. They're looking for the geographic locations that you
serve, your specialties, and any recent awards or notable news.
Your home page is where visitors will expect to find this
information, even if it's not where they first enter your site. So it's important to look
at the impression that your home page gives:
- What's "above the fold" (i.e. visible in the first
screen of content - often visitors won't scroll past this point on the home page)
- Which elements stand out more than others? Are they
appropriate?
- Are your key messages visible?
- Are the navigation tabs and labels intuitive and easy to
understand?
Designers love rotating elements. They'll tell you that
they allow much more information to be given on the page. However, relying too heavily on
these is dangerous because you can't assume that the visitor will wait until the piece
that they really need to see comes up, so they may get the impression that what they're
looking for isn't available, and leave your site.
It's also dangerous to use words or phrases on your site
which will only have meaning to those who are already familiar with your business. Other
visitors will fail to respond, and they may miss the content which would meet their needs
because the navigation labels do not draw them into the appropriate pages.
Lack of Cohesion between your Website and your Social Media
Presence
It's important to ensure a consistent message and presentation across everything that you
do online. Otherwise you risk weakening your brand and the emotional connections that you
hope to make with visitors.
Too often, an organization's social media messages present
a very different image than the website. There may be a Facebook fan page which is
energized and exciting, where the corresponding web information is bland and boring, or
filled with legalese, destroying the motivation of the Facebook visitor.
It's entirely possible that this happens because the social
media and web presence's are managed by different teams within the organization. If so,
this is a great example of a situation where a higher level overview of the entire Web
presence would identify and implement these opportunities for cross-fertilization, with
potentially significant impact on response rates.
Lack of Cohesion between Departments
One of the key messages that I always emphasize is that it's crucial to have compelling
calls to action on every page of your site. If you don't direct visitors to the next step
that you would like them to take, there's a better than 40% chance that they'll leave or
do something other than your desired outcome.
Since this is a "web" and visitors enter and
progress through your content in many different ways, it's important to leverage all
possible opportunities to cross-link between pages.
Online press releases are often a prime example of this
issue. They attract a lot of traffic because their content is naturally full of keywords,
but they fail to link to other pages on the site where the visitor can find more
information or buy the products and services that they highlight.
Again, a higher level review of the whole site would
identify the instances where they were failing to fully capitalize on their investment or
achievements.
Lack of Management Oversight
Somehow "gremlins" can creep into even the best and most professionally designed
sites, even those that tested fine last week!
Many of the issues discussed in this article can be
detected by informed analysis of your Web traffic reports, which are generated by Google
Analytics and similar programs.
The key word here is "informed". These reports
can contain a huge mass of data, pie charts and graphs, and can certainly appear very
daunting to the untrained eye. I've seen many situations where excerpts are distributed to
relevant personnel who immediately glaze over. There is a major temptation to look at the
"dashboard" executive summary, and if the number of overall visits is higher
than last time, to assume that this is a good sign, and ignore the rest.
The most effective way to gain actionable information from
the traffic reports is to look for answers to specific questions. Examples of these might
include:
- Which are the main landing pages for the site (i.e. the
first page that a visitor sees)? Do visitors progress from these pages further into the
site, or do they leave immediately?
- What keyword searches bring visitors, and to which specific
pages? Are there keyword searches that consistently generate high numbers either of
visitor responses or of immediate exits?
- What proportion of visitors comes to your site from mobile
devices? Do you know what your site looks like when viewed through a Blackberry, Android
or iPhone?
It can also be helpful to break the reports into relevant
sections for each department, rather than expecting staff to look at data that they don't
necessarily relate to nor have responsibility for.
However you approach interpreting your analytics, it's
important that key personnel are able to see them so that they can perform their tasks
around the Website as effectively as possible.
Who's your "Web Ambassador?" My recommendation to
ensure appropriate oversight and maximum return on investment for any Web and social media
presence is to appoint a "Web Ambassador".
This person should be a member of the senior management
team, ideally reporting directly to the Chief Executive Officer, with sufficient authority
within the organization to be a respected voice at the table, and to be heard during
budget and spending decision-making discussions. They should have a complete understanding
of the organization's ongoing strategy, marketing and patient service plans, etc. so that
they are always well positioned to advise on how the Web can support, enhance and grow the
business goals.
This understanding and authority will allow them to ensure
that traffic reports are appropriately analyzed and acted upon across all departments, and
that optimum use is made of cross-linking and other online revenue-generating
opportunities.
I also recommend that the Website and social media presence
be placed on the management meeting agenda at least every quarter. At this time, the Web
Ambassador can report on their evaluation and suggested improvements, with possible costs,
projected benefits and appropriate priorities for each one.
There are many excellent tools and utilities available to
help you to maximize your return on your Web and social media investment. One of the most
critical factors in your success will be your willingness at a management level to take a
serious and ongoing look at the resources that you're expending and the results that
you're generating. This may require some departures from traditional activities and
organizational structures, but the ensuing gains are available and potentially
significant.
© 2010, Philippa Gamse. |
