What’s the purpose of your business website? It’s not any one thing. Your website should be achieving search engine visibility, boosting brand awareness, drawing traffic, and facilitating conversions. If it’s falling short in any of these areas, that’s reason enough to rethink your website strategy.
Today’s post will focus on that last area—conversions. It’s often assumed that conversions come down to content—persuasive writing, a clear statement of benefits, and so on. All of those elements are important, yet your website design can also help facilitate conversions. Here are a few website design elements to consider.
Call to Action
First and foremost, driving conversions requires you to provide a clear sense of what you want the user to do—which may be different from one website to the next. Maybe your goal is to close sales on your e-commerce page; maybe it’s to get your office phone ringing with inquiries or appointments; maybe it’s simply to get sign-ups for your email list. Whatever your end goal is, it should be clear throughout your content.
One way to offer this clarity is to offer a simple yet rousing call to action. CTA positioning is key. You want a call to action on every page of your website. Ensure that they are prominent and highly visible, as well. All too often, we see calls to action relegated to the bottom of the page, when in reality they should be right there in the center of things. Make CTA buttons prominent design features—not just afterthoughts.
Color Scheme
Believe it or not, the colors you choose can have an impact on your conversion rates; many companies find that simply changing the color scheme for their CTA buttons results in a demonstrable uptick (or downtick) in conversions, so it’s certainly worth a little A/B testing. As you consider different colors, remember:
- Certain colors will be problematic for those who are color blind—red and green in particular.
- Studies show that brown is one of the worst colors for conversions, so steer clear of that altogether.
- If you’re mostly targeting women or mostly targeting men, your colors should reflect that. For men, blue, green, and black tend to work best; for women, blue, purple, and green are better.
These are generalizations, of course; again, A/B testing is the best way to decide which colors work best for your brand.
Ease of Navigation
Another important aspect of your website design is its navigation structure. The general principle here is that your users should be able to find the information they seek fairly easily, without getting lost or becoming frustrated.
There’s no one right way to lay out your site, but simplicity is usually better. From the home page, include links to a few broad category pages—and from there, provide a clear path to deeper, more topic-specific content.
Video
Video can be another important design aspect. Indeed, studies confirm that on-site video tends to have a positive impact on conversion rates.
There are different ways you can use embedded video:
- Provide a brief video introduction from your founder or president
- Offer a quick explanation of your key product benefits
- Offer a product demo or tutorial, especially for products that may be less familiar
Just a couple of cautions: Many users are put off by video that plays automatically, so give your visitors a choice about whether or not they want to view your video content. Also note that embedding a bunch of videos on your site may adversely impact speed and performance, so be judicious in how you deploy video.
Free Resources
You may be using your website to sell products, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give something away. After all, if you have the word FREE anywhere on your website, that’s something your users will gravitate toward quite naturally.
Consider something like a free PDF, e-book, or white paper—something your users can acquire without having to pay. Just ask for their name and email address. This not only gives you something valuable and free to offer new visitors, but it’s also a great way to generate leads and build your contact list.
Signs of Trust
One thing your website needs to do, if you’re going to generate any conversions at all, is build trust. After all, nobody will want to do business with your company if they do not perceive it to be honest and reputable.
Your design can help build trust. Consider the following design elements, all of which can help you develop that sense of trustworthiness:
- Testimonials from past customers
- Awards or accolades your products have received
- PayPal’s certification logo
- Badges from Yelp or other review sites
- BBB accreditation logos
- Star ratings or links to your Facebook and Google review profiles
- Warranty or money-back guarantee seals
Any of these elements can help ease any concerns users have about completing a transaction.
Headlines
The different sections of your written content should be divided up with headlines—and the verbiage of these headlines is critical. Remember, a first-time visitor to your site will likely skim through those headlines before committing to read your full content. As such, those headlines are critical for addressing any worries a new lead might have.
Are your customers typically concerned about price? Reliability? Timing? Whatever the pain points are, use your headlines to address them head-on.
A Clean, Uncluttered Look
Something else to consider as you design your site to be conversion-ready: Your users won’t be interested in pursuing your products or services if your site gives them a headache. A clean, uncluttered look is vital for earning your users’ interest and trust. Make sure your website has plenty of white space; use short paragraphs and allow for some breathing room between your various design elements.
Design Your Website with Conversions in Mind
A good website can accomplish much—and that includes generating conversions. If your website isn’t delivering on that front, it may be the right time to consider some design tweaks.
We’d love to talk with you about some options, and to show you some of our own conversion-enhancing website design work. Reach out to the Web development team at enCOMPASS to start that dialogue today!
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