How to turn a business card into a successful sales channel
There are hundreds of thousands of websites on the internet. It goes without saying that poor-quality ones will bring neither success nor profit. View the development of a business website as an investment that will pay off handsomely.
You have roughly 0.05 seconds for a user to form their first impression. To capture their attention, you must offer attractive graphics that appeal to your target audience. To make a sale, you must provide high-quality content and a great user experience (UX). Users won’t bother thinking about where to find information; they’ll simply buy from the competition. Compare for yourself how much you like these websites and which estate agency you’d be willing to buy from.
The 4 Cs of a successful website
The first step – whether you’re launching a marketing campaign or planning a redesign – should be an initial study. As well as market analysis, it will tell you who your customers are, allowing you to design a website tailored to their needs straight away.
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Conversions
Conversions are the actions a user is expected to take – making a purchase, submitting an enquiry, subscribing to a newsletter, etc. They are the be-all and end-all of online profitability.
For a website to be successful, it must have clearly defined conversions and pathways to them. Conversion pathways must be tailored to your customers’ habits and guide them naturally.
There is always room for improvement. Perhaps a different CTA (call to action, usually the text on a button) or more striking button colours would work better for your customers. A/B testing can help with this – it’s easy and will very effectively tell you which direction to take.
For example, we tested the colour of our buttons in this way. Neither the management nor the graphic designer liked the orange buttons, but users click on them many times more often. And who are we to go against the users?
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Communication and its tone
You must speak to customers in their own language. Choose a consistent tone of communication and draw up a style guide. A few points will suffice – where to always place the logo, which colours to use, and so on.
Are your customers young people? Use informal language and don’t be afraid to use colloquial expressions. Customers will then recognise your products without any trouble. That, too, is something that can set you apart from the competition.
A brilliant example is the WOOX online shop for sportswear. Its language is so distinctive that you can identify it without fail. And note that it certainly doesn’t sell only to young people. Consistency is, of course, essential. At WOOX, they have several copywriters, yet they all follow a single communication guide.
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Navigation
The user must always know where they are and what to click on. The user won’t waste time searching – why should they? The path to conversion must be intuitive and easy. Test the website with users. They’re bound to point out some shortcoming you weren’t even aware of. You can carry out simple testing in-house. We’ve prepared a detailed guide for you.
During testing, you can also address various dilemmas – such as whether to include prices in your offers, or whether and how to manage a blog. And other qualitative insights.
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Community
In the 21st century, it is no longer enough to focus on just one sales channel. As well as an e-shop, you also need to build a community of fans. Be on the social media platforms where they are. Have a blog and talk to them about things that interest them, in a language they can relate to. An excellent example is the bookshop Martinus.cz, which, in addition to running the bookshop, organises competitions and runs online projects. For instance, it hides books and lets its fans search for them.
Similar projects aren’t for everyone, of course, but believe me, even simple friendliness on Facebook can work wonders.
Size doesn’t matter
A high-quality conversion website doesn’t need to have dozens of pages. So-called microsites can also deliver excellent results. These are websites with very simple content, often consisting of just a single page. Usually, these sites promote only one type of product or service.
For example, microsites account for a third of the turnover at the fuski.cz e-shop. They have a total of three microsites – boma.cz, lonka.cz and voxx.cz – each presenting a different product category to a different target group.
A microsite is also ideal as a landing page for your campaigns. An example of such a site is our pojdmetestovat.cz. Both PPC ads and PR drive traffic to the page. The aim is for the user to download an e-book. On our main website, which is full of information, they might get lost or be distracted by other offers. On the microsite, however, they have all the relevant information in one place.