Make your website work harder

| February 14, 2005, 8:14 am

Focusing on your sites purpose can help develop a web presence that gives your customers what they need and provide measurable business value.

Objectives.

The first step is to define some clear business objectives, these should come from your marketing/emarketing plan.

So if you want to generate 50% of your sales leads online, great! You've got a number and probably an understanding of what cost per acquisition you can run to.

Segmentation.

Take a look at your customer segmentation, how does it relate to your site navigation and content? Is it clear to your customers where they should go for the information they want and what their next steps are?

Conversion

So you have visitors, and a segmented site that offers tailored content, now all we need to do is turn those visitors into customers.

Conversion points are the places that allow visitors to demonstrate an interest, buy, subscribe, refer, whatever your goals are.

If you have a lead generation site conversion points might be a brochure request, an email contact, or an appointment booking.

Find out what percentage of your visitors convert and improve your percentage by trying variants in design, content and structure.

Measure

If you don't measure it you can't improve it.

How many visitors do you have (not hits), where do they come from? How do they move through your site? Which paths convert?

Find this stuff out, all the information you need is recorded automatically within your log files.

This measurement is the key ingredient in knowing what is working and what isn't.

Marketing

Where do your visitors come from? How do they find your site? Search engines, banner campaigns, affiliates, emails, newsgroups, promotions, offline advertising or direct mail?

Try a range of approaches to see what works for you, check response rates, look at your log files, set up landing pages for campaigns to measure individual campaigns find out what really works and do it some more.