How to increase the return on investment of your website

The most critical part of increasing your website’s return on investment is making sure the site provides a clear call-to-action and (just as importantly) a functional, easy-to-use follow through mechanism. This call-to-action and follow through mechanism will increase your conversion rate (the number of click-throughs that result in a sale or other call-to-action) regardless of the action you want a visitor to take.

An effective call-to-action should provide a clear, concise message that answers the following three questions:

•What should I do next
•Why should I do it
•How do I do it

To create an effect call to action, you should incorporate the following elements:

• Visibility: Be sure to put your call to action in a place on the page that is visible at first glance. This means that ideally your call-to-action will be “above the scroll” (a location on the page that can be viewed in your browser without scrolling) generally in the middle or right hand side of the page.

• Clarity: Make sure that your message is clear. Use short, simple words and phrases to get the visitors attention. Include graphics but avoid cluttering things up with too many graphics.

• Incentives: Offer incentives and other rewards when a visitor follows he call-to-action such as “Free 60-Day Trial” or “25% off Online Registration”. Something that will make it worthwhile to follow the call to action.

• Engaging: Use engaging, instructive words and phrases to hook the visitor. “Register Here”, “Call today” or “Get more information” etc.

• Urgency: Create a sense of urgency. Limit the offer to a specific period of time, number of customers or number of orders.

Once you have engaged your visitor with an effective call-to-action, you need to decide what you want the visitor to do next and provide a functional follow through mechanism to complete the conversion. Decide what you asking your visitors to:

• Register for something
• Buy something
• Become a member
• Post a review or response
• Make a phone call
• Fill out a form, etc.

Whatever it is you are asking the visitor to do, it is critically important that the follow-through process be relatively simple to accomplish and that the follow-through mechanism is functioning properly. There is nothing worse than having a prospective customer follow your call-to-action only to discover that they cannot follow through to conversion because of a technical glitch.

These sorts of technical issues are quite common, and as much as anything, the failure of the follow-through mechanism is responsible for the poor return on investment of many websites. Not only that, these technical failures will significantly devalue a company’s brand and corporate image because potential customers relate this technical failure to the overall ability of the company. One could argue that it is better to do nothing than to have a poorly or non-functioning call-to-action on your website.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you should vary your call-to-action from page to page within your site. Different pages will appeal to different types of visitors. Some calls will work better with loyal returning customers, where other “softer” calls-to-action will appeal more to new or prospective customers.

Finally (the secret sauce for those still reading the article), never under estimate the power of your web site traffic reports! Every site should have a service monitoring web site traffic so you can get the fantastically detailed and informative reports about click-through and conversion data for every call-to-action on your site. These reports will allow you to actually measure which calls-to-action are working and which ones are not. They will also help you determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your overall Technology Enabled Marketing strategy…but I will save that discussion for another article.

Prepared for SmartCEO Magazine
By Jason Bach, Principal & CEO, Mosaic Technologies, Inc.
On October 22, 2007