The biggest issue facing businesses is the sales conversion funnel and the conversion costs and rates. Nearly all new clients do not know the goal of their website – “It is to make money John” I hear you scream! But to make profits that keep repeating requires you to figure out what your customer’s goal is when they visit your site – you do not want them visiting a competitor’s site instead.
Businesses find it difficult if not impossible to combine their goals with those of their customers and then build a site that meets both the businesses and the customer’s goals.
For instance, take customers comparing prices between your site and others – why are you not giving your visitors a price comparison table on your site – it saves them visiting other sites. I’ve seen this work time and time again.
Conversion rates are not helped by web designers. Web designers mislead businesses all the time. They sell slick smooth websites, which do not convert. Web site salesmen, designers and coders all have their own objectives that do not align with yours. Sales people will tell you anything to get the sales and then it’s not their problem – it’s the techies problem, all their interested in is their commission once you have signed up. I’ve met, employed and worked with so many web sales people – they are all the same, always scheming against their employers, looking for a new job or planning to set up themselves as a web agency.
The designers are almost always trying to create a design that fits their own personal view of design that stamps their mark on the world. Sliding images, pretty buttons, or a design in 50 shades of some colour or other, something that a high percentage of your customer’s won’t appreciate or even be able to read properly. I know this first hand as I once worked with a designer and had many “discussions” about what I wanted and what he wanted to do which seemed far too often to be at either ends of a scale. Then there is the really unhelpful bunch. Coders or developers waffling on about code reuses and scalability what does that mean and will it make a difference to my sales? Probably not. When you attract high volumes you soon find out that the site does not performance – a well know web design company with soft in their name has a very pretty site, but every customer I’ve come across complains about performance endlessly and their customer service.
The real problem with web design agencies is that they are not often around to find out how well their design works. Nearly all customers fall out with them at some point and take their marketing in house or elsewhere. Designers are working in a vacuum with no feed back on market results.
Remember web agency staff will not take responsibility, even if what they do goes wrong, they’ll spin the disaster into a CV success ready for the next sucker.
You cannot afford to make this mistake. I see hundreds of business AdWords accounts every year. The one thing that strikes me is the huge difference in conversion rates of different website from a similar market. This difference is not small; one site may be at 0.75%, another 1.5% and the other 5%. The real professionals can be as high as 20%. A difference of 500% in conversions means the difference between the good life and reposition of the family home. The real high converting websites marry their own goals with that of their customers.
What can you do? You either find a web designer or developer who truly understands marketing and conversions (good luck with that one!) or as many of our clients have done you use a third party to focus on ensuring your website marries your goals and that of the customers and not the web agencies own goals and targets by.
If you’d like advice on conversion rate optimisation for your website gives us a call today.
