This is the first in a series of posts that aim to provide you with useful tips and strategies to improve your conversion results on your website, in particular from landing pages.
It’s not much good getting traffic to your website if, once there, the visitor doesn’t take the action that you want them to take.
If you’re an experienced online marketer it’s likely that some of these techniques will be familiar to you. However, it’s putting them into practice that will make the difference to your results and the bottom line.
As with all direct response marketing, the key to getting the best results is to TEST. All the tips and strategies I’m going to share with you have been field tested and proven to work.
BUT they haven’t been tested for your unique circumstances yet. The only way you’re going to discovered the optimum approach for your business is to test alternatives and track the results.
It’s also important to remember, though, that for these techniques to work, you have to have a viable market to begin with. You need a market that has enough people willing to spend money on what you offer to make the business viable.
If that’s the case and you have a half-way decent offer, there’s little doubt that a few changes and testing will yield you improved results.
With that being said, here’s the first tip…
Better Conversion Tip #1 – Get Rid of Anything that Doesn’t Advance the Sale
Things like Flash animations, distracting graphics, unnecessary photos and pictures, “beautiful” design and layouts that are there only for the sake of looking beautiful and polished. Usually, these things do very little to advance the sale.
In contrast, things like video testimonials and Flash or Camtasia video that shows how the product works can be very effective in boosting sales.
Often times an ugly clunker of a site will outsell a pretty site with graceful matching colors and graphics. Page load times will be slower when the site is bogged down with flashing banners and graphics. All of these things do nothing for your visitor but get him to leave immediately.
If you work with a web designer or graphic designer, make sure they know effective direct response techniques. There’s nothing worse for sales than to have a designer who loves to come up with new “creative” designs to satisfy his own ego or because he “thinks” that’s what you want. Leave out the fancy gimmicks.
If you’re new to the game, find a site that you know converts well and use that as the model.
Beware of creating your entire website with nothing but Flash. There’s no question that Flash sites can look very cool and elegant. But they are not as search-engine friendly as conventional sites (much Flash content is invisible to the search engines) and in general you won’t get the same functionality from a direct response marketing perspective.
A few further tips:
1) Don’t present your text content as images. An exception to this might be your headline or a few chosen subheads.
2) Leave out the sound effects and background music. The only audio they should hear (if at all) is the spoken word, designed to advance the sale or get them to opt in.
3) Don’t make your site too cluttered or distracting. It should be clear right from the start where you want to lead your visitors when they arrive. If they hesitate or start having to click around, they’ll most likely leave the site and you’ll lose them.
That concludes the first tip in this series. The next will cover an issue that might seem obvious but it can cause an awful lot of headaches.