Landing page, home page, or squeeze page; which is the most effective in conversions? One person swears by using a squeeze page to add contacts to his database. Another person tells you it’s a lousy idea and only brings you unqualified leads. Who's right and who's wrong?
Or, how about the headline on your homepage; should it be a question or an imperative statement? Should you use video on your homepage or would it me more conducive to use a set of bullet points to promote your new product?
Knowing what information to put on your website and where to put that information is often a confusing challenge for small business owners. A website design is more art than science and therein lies the problem.
Website Design by Audience
You may have specific guidelines to follow regarding good website content and design, but the final result depends on how your target audience reacts to what you've created. Both the content and the design of a website should meet the needs of your target audience.
It doesn't matter what you think is best; what matters is what is best for your target audience.
Unfortunately, most websites are created in somewhat of a vacuum. The designer creates the website based on what the client wants and the content is written based on what the client wants. What's missing from this equation is what the customer wants.
The customer's needs should be considered in every aspect of both design and content creation on a website. A simple way to find out if you have a website that is meeting the needs of your audience is to test the pages to see if they could be improved by changing a headline or changing some graphics.
Increase Conversion Rates by 40%
According to Marketing Sherpa, "Getting landing pages built and tested is one of the top five challenges faced by B2B marketers. The top reason people don't create landing pages is that they don't have the time or resources. However, using and optimizing your landing pages can improve conversion rates by 40% or more."
Google's new free tool, the Website Optimizer, is exactly what you need to test out your ideas and to create a page that has better conversions. With the Google Website Optimizer you can find out if you have the right content for conversion. Instead of relying on gut feeling to write a headline, you can now test new headlines to see which one converts better.
The time was, not too long ago, that only big companies could afford the resources to do split testing for a website page. With this new tool, small business owners have the ability to dramatically increase conversions without additional expensive resources.
How to Use Google Website Optimizer
Using the Google Website Optimizer, you can create two or three different versions of the same website page, customers are sent randomly to one of the versions and Google technology tracks it for you. Wait about two weeks to get the results. Whichever page performs the best is the one you should be using for your website.
When making changes to your website page keep these key points in mind:
- Test a small number of variants. Maybe change a graphic or a headline, but keep it simple so you can see if the changes are the reason for increased conversions.
- Test only bold changes on your page, such as headlines, colors, graphic placement, etc.
- Don't jump to conclusions. Study your statistics and make sure your decisions are based on fact. If you need to run the test for more than two weeks, run it longer.
Conclusion
According to Tom Leung, of Google, "Bad pages are where clicks go to die. Testing is not about technology – it’s a process you have, to come up with solutions." Don't be afraid to make changes to your website pages. The Google Website Optimizer tool is easy to use and with testing you can make the right changes to double your sales.
Great informative posting!!!!
Posted by: richerich06 | June 25, 2008 at 05:38 AM