DOES YOUR WEBSITE HAVE A CALL TO ACTION?
August 30th, 2007 | by genesower |
I received this from John Cito, a financial advisor and networking colleague of mine who belongs to my BNI networking group. It’s from a company called FINANCIAL VISIONS that councils financial advisors on growing their businesses but it really applies to ANY business, including yours. I thought the article was so dead-on that I could have written it myself. Enjoy these pearls of wisdom:
“Many website owners are not satisfied with the amount of new business that they get from their websites. If you are among them, you may actually be attracting some new business, after all, but may not have a good way to track it. Whatever your situation, attracting visitors is clearly not enough if you intend to use a website to build your business. The key, of course, is to capture information on visitors so you can follow-up.
What Do You Want Your Site Visitors to DO?
This may seem like an obvious question, but it helps to consider it from your website visitor’s standpoint. When you look at your site, is it obvious what a visitor is expected to DO? “Please browse my website” does NOT cut the mustard. You literally only have a few seconds to engage the visitor and to persuade him or her to take an action. Web marketers refer to your level of success as “Website Conversion Rate” or “Internet Response Rate.”
If you already have built-in response tools that appear in your menu bar that’s a start, but there is much more that you can do. The visitor may not even notice that nice list of options in your menu. If your goal is to get people to click on those items, your headline and graphics need to capture their attention, and home page text should direct them there. Additional graphics can also highlight the options. Redundancy is the “name of the game” with website content. Give people several easy paths to the same action.”
Next Time: We’ll look at what some of those added, more creative Calls To Action are.
