If you’re running an online business, then you have to make sure that you never underestimate the power of your website. Aside from being the means by which your customers might get in touch, buy your products, and solicit your services, it can be one of the most powerful tools for marketing, customer service, and building your brand. Here, we’re going to look at a host of enhancements that can allow you to make the best of your site, keeping customers there for longer and improving their chances of converting.
Keep Your Branding Consistent
A very common issue in the world of business website design is a thoughtless approach to branding and theming. You should take the time to think about what you want the brand of the website to communicate, and then consider which elements are going to help it do that most effectively. This means thinking about the colour scheme of the website, the imagery you want to use, fonts and typography, and even the styles of images that work best for it. You can write down all of these design aspects to create a brand bible so that if you’re making any future webpages or you want to tie in your other branding into the website’s style, you can easily replicate it.
Streamline Your Design
One of the most common mistakes that a business website owner can make is believing that their site needs to have all of their information as visible as possible at any time. As such, you can end up with some pretty overstuffed web pages. Instead, you should think about streamlining things down, leaving only the most relevant information on the page, with just the most easily understood and visually impactful navigation. With the help of modern website builder tools, it’s becoming a lot easier to build a streamlined page that only focuses on what the customer needs access to.
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Different Forms of Media
If you’re looking to communicate a brand, a message, or even the benefits of your products and services, then sometimes words alone aren’t going to communicate that information in the clearest and quickest way. Aside from helping you make your point a lot more clearly, multimedia such as images and videos also make your site a lot more engaging. Videos can also make for great how-to content, demonstrations of your products’ uses, or even just a welcome for the visitors coming to the site. Rather than hosting the video directly on your site, you can upload it to YouTube and then embed it into your site so that it loads a lot more easily and doesn’t use up your own resources.
The Benefits of A Blog
Blogs aren’t just for individuals writing on the things that they know, love, and want to talk about. Plenty of businesses have a blog that can help them in a variety of ways. Businesses tend to post blogs that cover not just the benefits and various uses of the products and services they sell, but related topics that can be of interest to their target readers, as well. Blogs are a great way to bring new visitors onto the site, interesting them with a topic that’s relevant, then slowly leading them towards paying some attention to the product or service you offer, especially if it’s related to or an answer to their question.
A Real Mobile Experience
Given that we are very much in the age of the smartphone, it can be a little surprising that some people still haven’t taken into account just how important it can be to ensure that mobile device users can happily and easily make use of your site. Instead of treating mobile visitors as your second-class customers, understand they’re most likely to be your most frequent and thus most important visitors. Take a closer look at some of the methods of optimising your site for mobile devices. This can mean ensuring that it’s able to scale to a mobile screen’s resolution without looking weird, but there are plenty of businesses that develop even more streamlined versions of their site specifically for mobile devices.
Improve the Load Speed of the Website
Nowadays, people are used to such quick access to the information that they need, that asking them to wait even a few seconds can see more of them dropping off before they reach what they’re looking for. This is especially true for customers who have to click through several pages. There are various ways to improve the load speed of your website, with your choice of web host being one of the most important factors. You can also optimise things like videos and images, making sure that the file sizes aren’t overly large and thus going to take overly long to load. If you want an accurate picture of how long your site takes to load, there are site speed tests that can help you do it.
Add A Call to Action
You might be surprised how beneficial adding a simple call to action at the end of relevant pages can be. There are some customers who will be visiting your site who will be a lot more likely to get into the process of making a purchase or inquiring about your services if you simply ask them to. What’s more, a call to action resembles not just a sales pitch, but a matter of convenience. After all, if you have your customer geared up to check out a product, only to then tell them to go and find it themselves, it can be a little deflating. A call to action is an offer for them to follow up on a relevant piece of information or recommendation.
A Helping Hand
Every business website should have some manner of direct customer support. Some will make use of an FAQ, and some will just provide a phone number, but the more immediate and the more convenient you can make it, the better. As such, it may be worth looking closer into the best chat software for business websites. You can make sure that, regardless of what page of the website the customer is on, you are able to offer them help if they need it. That way, if the customer is having an issue navigating to the page they want or completing a sale, you can be there to remove the barrier to converting them easily and with a positive interaction that leaves a good impression.
Connect to Your Social Media
If you’re like most businesses, then you have started to make use of social media to better connect to your community, share your blog content, and build a sense of positive social proof through word of mouth and customer interaction. You can improve the impact of these benefits of social media by connecting your site to it. This can include a live feed of your Twitter, for instance. But you should also make sure that pages are easily shareable by implementing social share and follow buttons on as many of the pages of the site as you can.
Add Your Contact Information
Customer support tools like a live chat might mean that your customers don’t have to ring up your headquarters to get answers every time they need them. However, you should still make sure that you give your customers the opportunity to reach you. Some queries might not be well handled by the sales or customer management team you have available on live chat. What’s more, giving your customers the opportunity to reach out and contact a real person, be it by voice or email, makes it clear to them that there are real people behind the running of the website, helping to build trust.
Test What Works for You and What Doesn’t
Aside from following the tips above to add specific elements to your website, you should always be trying to get an idea of which elements actually work, and which might not require quite as much focus. The single best way to do this is to test how they perform on your website. With processes like A/B testing, you can get a better idea of which individual changes actually increase metrics like time spent on pages, clickthrough rate, and conversion. You want to make sure you know what your goals are as well. If you’re looking to increase sales through the site, then having customers spend a lot of time on one page might not be as important as increasing the rate of customers who click through to the next page.
The tips above are going to help ensure that your site meets every modern standard of great online business, but you’re not done there. The trends and tech that can improve your site are ever-updating, so it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of business site design and implement what works best for yours.
This post is a collaborative guest post
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