Five Simple Strategies To Increase Visitor Response It's difficult to get visitors to your website, so it's important to get the most out of every visit you get. But how do you do that? To answer that question, you first need to determine what it is that you want your visitors to do. Buy a product? Request information? Download a file? No matter what it is you want the visitor to do, it's imperative that you plan your website strategy around that goal. At best, you want them to purchase your product or service, and at worst, you want to get their email address so you'll have an opportunity to build a relationship and have another shot at the sale in the future. So what exactly do I mean? Well, it would obviously depend on what your product or service is, but in general, you may want to consider these types of strategies: 1. Focus the initial site impression on your product or service.
2. Make your site navigation as simple as possible.
3. Ask the visitor to sign up for your email list.
4. Offer a FREE download.
5. Offer a method for your visitors to request information on your special offers. These are only five ideas, and there are of course, many more things you can do. For the purpose of clarity, I'll concentrate on these five strategies and discuss them in more detail below. 1. Focus the initial site impression on your product or service. This means that you should be very aware of what your visitor first sees upon entering your site. If you are trying to sell widgets, the visitor should see widgets when they enter, not a cute picture of you with your pet parakeet. The picture of you would be more appropriate on your "About Us" page. Your visitors have come, first and foremost, to find out about your products and services, so tell them about those and the benefits right off the bat. Once they are excited about that, they'll then want to learn more about you and your company. 2. Make your site navigation as simple as possible - do NOT make it difficult for visitors to locate the information they need. At the top and bottom of each page, you should provide links to each of the main areas of your website. Never let your visitors become frustrated with your site because they can't find their way around. This is a simple measure to take that many websites overlook. Do not make it hard to do business with you. 3. Ask the visitor to sign up for your email list for future updates and special offers. Give them a good reason to sign up for your email list. Most will not bother unless you can truly demonstrate the benefit to them. You can offer an incentive, like a FREE report or something of that nature that the visitor would truly place a value on. Or, you could hold a monthly drawing of something of value for all those who sign up. Make sure that the item is only valuable to very targeted, potential customers, so you only receive top-quality leads. This is really your last line of gaining any information from the visitor. You want to first make sure you get their email address, so ask for that alone…then when they submit that, they can be redirected to another page that asks for name, address, and phone. Make sure you tell them why you need the information and provide a "privacy policy statement" so they know you will not share their information with anyone else. Don't expect everyone to give you all of the information, but be happy when you get at least the email address. 4. Offer a FREE download. This is another method to gain the visitor's contact information in order to make a future sale. You can request that they provide their information prior to downloading the FREE program, e-book, report, or whatever you'd like to offer. There are quite a few programs that you could offer for download that probably would relate to your product or service and would be valuable to your visitors. These could be "shareware" or "freeware" software programs, but make sure you check out the distribution rules in those programs' licenses before you offer them. You might also partner with software vendors that provide products in the same area as you. You could be an "authorized distributor" of their free trial programs. 5. Offer a method for your visitors to request information on your special offers that will be returned instantly via an "auto-responder" email. If you periodically offer special deals for your products or services, you may want to consider this method of promoting them. If you simply state your offer on your website, you will not gain any information about your visitors. But, if you have them send an email to a certain address to receive the special offer, you can, at the very least, get their email address and highlight your special offer in a separate email of its own. This would be set up as an auto-responder, so you wouldn't have any additional work when visitors make the request. This was just a brief description of these strategies, but it should be enough for you to apply them to your own situation. However, if you would like more advice on these, please feel free to contact the author (contact information is provided below).
The bottom line is that many people create a website, but have not really thought out any strategy to make the best use of it. There are many interactive things you can do to make your website more effective. These five ideas should get you started thinking in the right direction. Your website needs to actively engage visitors, do not let it be shy. -----------------------------------------------------------------
The author, Steve Wood, designs & hosts web sites and offers a
web site design course at http://webdesigncourse4u.com. He owns
and operates Wood Interactive, LLC at http://woodinteractive.com.
You can receive Steve's Web Site Design Tips & Tricks by sending
a blank message to: mailto:tips@woodinteractive.com
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