This is the common thinking out there regarding the building (or re-building) of a website.
Business owners and designers spend weeks, often months going through the look and copy to ensure it all looks perfect. They even do the ‘SEO’ thing to it. The big day arrives and it goes live – Everyone is happy. Problem is, although it may look stunning, there’s likely very little chance of substantial traffic ever coming to it – In the next week, month or year.
How many of your visitors don’t respond to your call to action? (assuming you even have one). Top performing US eCommerce Websites have a sales conversion rates of better than 10%. That’s not just visitors, which is what most industry metrics show, but are people that arrive at the site and then BUY stuff.
Read more on Why do 98% of Website Visitors Take NO Action?…
Earlier this year we attended the Clemenger Digital Summit here in Auckland. An interesting event that drew a huge audience of over 500 with a follow up one in Wellington. The focus was upon new media and some innovative case studies. Of the dozen or so superb presentations, I’ve selected the opening talk below to show you.
There’s numerous options today to be seen on the web. Traditionally, you went out and hired a ‘web designer’ to build you a slick website. They examined your brand and discussed design criteria, then built a 4 or 6 page site for a fee ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 or more..
Online underwear merchant Bare Necessities in the US, long renown for running successful, highly segmented and targeted email campaigns, tried something new – Coordinating a personalized full colour, hard copy postcard campaign with their e-mail, to a segment of its customer file. The result? A huge increase in sales from those who received both marketing messages.
It appears that we humans are quite adaptable. In a relatively short time, nearly all of us have learned to ignore ads on the internet. ![]()
The best way to prove this is through eye tracking studies that capture exactly what we are looking at on a web page (left). Those areas in red and orange are what we look at. Areas outside this are being ignored. This human trait does a superb job of filtering out of unwelcome, unrequested marketing messages.
Here are the top 10 (US) converting websites for March 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by toolbar user to final conversion. To date no figures are available for NZ websites, although we expect the 10 best sites here to be much lower.
Whether you’re a retailer or service provider, your website is what people will most often turn to after learning about you through the various online or offline media channels. First impressions and offer counts, as is your ability to quickly provide them with the products or information they came looking for.
I read an email from a copywriter recently, claiming a 35% improvement in response rates for a client campaign. Sounds interesting I thought, this guy must know his stuff.
However statistics aren’t always what they seem and this is commonly the case on the web where bold claims are commonplace. It’s a great place for scammers. In this case the 35% claim was technically correct, but I eventually discovered that the 35% came from an increase in response from 1.0 to 1.35%, which in real world terms for this particular client, only turned into a few more sales. A small handful of dollars…
Here’s a typical small business complaint
"My web site isn’t working! No one is visiting and I’m not getting any new clients. What’s the best way for me to get found on the Internet; should I buy GoogleAds; start a blog?"