This is the fourth part of our “Tips to Improve Your Website” series and today we are talking about how to make it easier for your visitors to convert, and how to remove barriers and road blocks that you many not even be aware are blocking their journey to conversion.
If you are interested in our other articles in this series you can find them on our news page in our web design category.
Tip Number 4: Giving your users an easy path to success
Road blocks, barriers and clear directions
Making life easier for visitors to view your website with responsive design is a step in the right direction but are you actively stopping traffic by putting barriers in the way of your website’s success?
Businesses are always looking for ways to increase customer interaction on their website, be it increasing conversion to sale for an e-commerce store, or encouraging visitors to make contact to get those all important leads. So how do we do that, well it is all about making it easy for visitors to achieve success, quickly and with minimal effort … and reducing their anxiety about giving your their information.
in order to help visitors to make contact/make a purchase you need to reduce the “friction” they experience during their visit.
Road Blocks:
Good examples of roadblocks on a website could be a pop up which has no “x” to close so you are unsure of how to get past it, a diversion that takes you so far from your journey that you are no longer sure where you are or what you came here for or a complete dead end!
Pop ups can be great tools to quickly remind your audience of an offer or an opportunity that you think they may benefit from, and as long as you are not spamming their every move with more and more “offers of help” these can be a benefit to driving traffic to conversion and a great call to action. That said if your visitors journey is working well and they are happily moving in the right direction pop ups can be the distraction that drives them completely off course. Considering when and if to use a pop up, what benefit they provide to the visitor, and listening to the data coming from your sites visitor activity to understand the benefit of the action is key to knowing if you have put them in a well placed and well timed action point or if you have created a roadblock.
Diversions can take many forms but any sitraction that detracts from the goal can drive traffic off to areas they didn’t need or have use for and interrupt an otherwise successful conversion journey. Examples of this can be anything from buttons added “in case the user wanted more information” to sticky navigation menus that follow your visitor down the page all the while offering to take your audience to other areas on the site. These can be avoided by knowing that if your website navigation is simple and easy to use, you can trust that your visitor can easily work out how to get to other areas they may want to check out and so you can focus your energy on keeping them on the journey that provides the easy track to success.
Dead ends can occur throughout your site if Call To Actions are not clear and well placed and the the user has to work too hard to get “back to where they started”. By simply not considering where the next step of the journey should lead to you can, without realising it. create pages where journeys come to an end. Keeping an eye on pages with high exit rates can help to identify if this is happening.
Barriers:
So the visitor found your site, they made it through your content and they are interested in your services, so let’s do this, buy now, get in touch, great! But wait, why do so many visitors who make it to here exit on page three of the conversion funnel?
Two of the most common barriers on websites are:
Asking for too much too soon – “I need you to give me a call to talk about your services so why do you need my street address, postcode is required as well as my company registration number and a private domain email?” Carefully considering the data you actually need to be provided can make a huge difference to conversion rates, making forms as short and simple as possible, there will always be some data you will absolutely need but if you ask too much too soon you will quickly lose trust and the user abort mission thinking that there is something covert happening here that they no longer trust.
Not showing progress – if your cart has 5 pages, tell the visitor they are on page 3 of 5, or they may wonder just how much more information they need to give you to buy that £2.99 product to get the free shipping and leave part way through the process.
If there are pages on your site with higher than expected drop out rates it may be that you have added barriers that you are not aware ot.
Clear Directions:
Adding clear and well placed Call To Action directions on your website will mean that your visitors can achieve success without needing a sat nav!
Throughout the journey to success that you want your visitor to take, you need to consider “what now” at every step, I found your home page, what now? I looked at your services, what now? I looked at the further information page about the service are that interested me, what now? what now? what now? and at each step providing links and clear navigation or buttons to make that navigation obvious and easy to use that will provide the best journey answering all the potential questions along the way to conversion.
Another key area to consider is the trail, breadcrumbs can be a way to decrease anxiety and build trust. As your visitor has followed the journey that you provided and not navigated through the whole site it can be difficult for them to go back to a page that they may want to revisit or read again to be sure they understood, so providing clear breadcrumbs to show where they are can help them to feel more in control and safe that they are on the right path and not deep in the depths of your site needing to hit the back button over and over to get back to a safe place.
Listening to feedback:
So once you have worked on your site and you are happy that you have created pathways to success and journeys that your visitors will find useful, helpful and will lead to better conversions for your site, what now? Measurement and feedback will help you to understand if you have got it right and how you can continue to improve, listening to feedback from customers, adding tracking to your site that allows you to have a “birds eye view” of what your users see and how they interact will help – and like every good directions app, keep those maps updated so no one gets lost when new roads are built or directions change!
Keep an eye out for more “Tips to improve your website” on our news page!
Web2market are happy to help you with improving your website and giving your users an easy path to success, starting with the website journey planning and user experience monitoring and feedback.
Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or call us on 01480 878510.