So, you’ve created your website, got traffic coming in droves through AdWords and you’re building fantastic relationships with prospects through your powerful email marketing campaign.
The next step is to take your website and optimize it. This means maximizing the number of prospects who become customers and how you achieve that is through testing. Imagine you are looking at a page on your website that might help convince a prospect to become a customer: The question in your mind should be “What can I do increase the conversions from this single page?”. How you go about doing this is by asking yourself another question, “What happens if I change…?”
The notion of change is really centred on testing new ideas. And the ‘to-do list’ of testing is only limited by your imagination: Here’s just a few to start you thinking.
- Test using video/audio
- Test live chat
- Test using live presenters to walk the customer through the sales funnel
- Test rearranging the order of the elements on the page
- Test writing a specific landing page on your website based around a high-use keyword
- Test improving the sales copy
- Test long copy vs short copy
- Split-test two sales pages to determine which is better
- Test a new headline on a key page
- Test different calls to action
- Test using photos, illustrations, graphics
- Test different fonts, colours and sizes
- Test using different colours and phrasing on the action buttons
- Test using testimonials
- Test prices (putting them on the page or not or changing them)
- Test a sign-up form to your email marketing
- Split-test two emails to determine which is better
- Test upsells at the point of sale
- Split-test two adverts to determine which is better
- Test personalised URLs
And those ideas are just focusing on one page of your website, imagine what else you can test!
What’s really exciting is that every time you test something and it yields an increase in conversions you are effectively giving yourself a pay rise and that makes this one of the most rewarding activities of owning a website.
Next week, how to build lasting traffic to your website.
Jed Wylie is the author of Make Your Website Sell and works for Morgan Wylie a web design and digital marketing agency in the Midlands. Follow Jed on Twitter.
