So you’ve got a small business and you want to start generating some attention online. Maybe you’re selling a product on an e-commerce site with a shopping cart, or maybe you’re just looking for prospects to come to your site, glance at what you do and raise their hand to say call me (in other words, you want them to submit a lead form).
Here are a few of the most basic building blocks of a winning conversion funnel.
- Keep it simple, stupid. Not too much text. Describe what you do and why they should care in big, simple, pretty words and, if applicable, a lead form with a big pretty button. If you’re doing e-commerce, make sure the path to shopping cart & checkout takes as few clicks as possible.
- Choose your messaging carefully. Say the stuff that matters and no more than that. You can tell them all the juicy details of your awesome business when they call you. People like to be marketed to like they’re smart, not dumb.
- Know the goal of each page. Each webpage you’re creating should have a single goal. If it’s a landing page with a lead form, orient everything such that it’s easy to fill out that lead form. If you’re selling a product, make it painfully easy to inspect the product, ask questions and pull the trigger.
- Optimize your forms. There’s little I dread more than filling out a long web form. Evaluate the information you’re asking users for and stick to only what’s critical. If you need lots of stuff shipping address, billing address, payment info consider splitting the form into a few neat pages with clean, simple forms and breadcrumbs illustrating where users are in the checkout process. Make sure the browser back button works within your checkout process, or you’ll surely lose some potential business.
- Don’t force account creation. Unless it’s critical for your business, give users the choice of continuing as a guest, buying as a guest, etc. The less info you force users to commit, the more likely they are to keep working with you.
- Use smart tools. If you’re creating a simple landing page to capture leads, consider using a service like Unbounce (there are myriad options) to build and host it yourself instead of consuming costly engineering resources. Be sure to measure results by adding Google code, KISSmetrics, Wufoo or comparable tracking.
