Are Your Visitors Getting the Most Out of Your Website?

If you’re a small business owner, chances are you wear a lot of hats on a daily basis. You might be responsible for marketing, sales, accounting, customer service, and a whole host of other tasks. So, it’s no wonder that you might not have a lot of time to spend on your website. However, your website is the one “person” on your sales team that never takes a break – it’s out there doing its job 24/7. As such, your website is one of the most important tools you have for growing your business. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your visitors are getting the most out of it. Here are four ways to help you do just that (plus a bonus).

Keep Your Content Fresh

One of the best ways to keep people coming back to your website is to regularly update your content. Whether that means adding new blog posts, products, white papers, case studies, or pages, fresh content will keep people engaged with your site. Not to mention, it can also help you attract new visitors and assist in search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and increased relevance in the search engine results placement (SERP). If you’re not regularly adding new content to your site, now is the time to start. Every day that goes by is another missed opportunity to help people (and automated systems like Google) better understand what it is you do.

Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

These days, more people are using their mobile devices to browse the internet than ever before. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. If it’s not, you could be missing out on a lot of potential customers or clients by providing a poor user experience. Luckily, there are plenty of resources out there to help you make sure your site is mobile-friendly, optimized, and speedy enough to load quickly on smaller devices. Google even has a tool that will test your site and give you specific recommendations on how to improve its mobile friendliness.

Use Effective Call-to-Actions

Your website should be designed with conversion in mind. That means using effective call-to-actions (CTAs) throughout your site to encourage people to take the next step, whether that’s signing up for your email list, making a purchase, or scheduling a consultation. People need to know what the next logical step in the process is. Without CTAs, they might come to your site but they won’t know what to do next or how to engage. Make sure your CTAs are clear and effective in order to get the most out of your website.

A call to action tells a visitor what the next step is to take.

Make Your Services Clear

People use the internet with intent. If they have come to your website it is most likely by choice rather than happenstance. Make sure you are being as clear as possible with them about what services or products you offer. As people we are always assessing how others can help us to survive and thrive. We’re hard-wired for it. If we don’t see the benefit to us we move on (or worse, stop listening).

Bonus: Pay Attention to Your Analytics

If you’re not already paying attention to your website’s analytics, now is the time to start. Analytics can tell you a lot about how people are interacting with your site, what content they find useful, and what changes need to be made in order to make your site more successful. There are a lot of analytics suites out there, but the most well known is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service that can give you detailed information about your website like how long people are spending on your site and which pages they’re visiting most often. Reviewing this data on a regular basis can help you fine-tune your website so that it better meets the needs of both your business and your customers or clients.

As a small business owner, it’s important to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your website—after all, it’s perhaps the most important marketing tool to help grow your business. By following these four tips—keeping your content fresh, making sure your site is mobile-friendly , using effective CTAs , making your services clear, and observing your site analytics —you can ensure that your visitors are getting the most out of your website!

Need some help?

We work with companies around the world helping them clarify their marketing and branding with tools designed to reach the right people at the right time.

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Developing a Growth Mindset: The Value of Newsletters & Email Lists

We are often asked by clients whether it is worthwhile to pursue starting and growing an email list or investing time and money into a sales email campaign to help generate new leads. The reason these questions generally arise is because of a perception that newsletters and email campaigns are considered old (possibly out-of-date) methods of marketing. With so much focus on social media these days, many assume that these older methods of marketing are becoming out of date much like the newspaper when the internet came about. But is it true?

Time and again, marketing surveys and statistics from studies show that email marketing remains one of the most (if not the most) effective methods of building a dedicated audience. Despite the immediacy and popularity of social media platforms, they have not been able to upend the old-school efforts of a simple email list.

Is Starting an Email List Still Worth It? In a Word, Yes.

As mentioned above, the statistics that come from research and surveys continue to point to email marketing remaining one of the best direct marketing options a business owner has available to them.

On average, open rates for marketing-based emails average about 21%. While that might not seem like a large number, that ends up being roughly 21 out of every 100 people that receive the campaign – a far cry from what you can expect from social media and its algorithms.

Further, when we look at revenue expectations between 2020 and 2027 we see nothing but exponential growth over the next decade. It is estimated that by the end of 2023, email marketing revenue will top 11 billion dollars a year.

How does that gigantic number break down to a number that a small business owner can digest? Email return on investment (ROI) comes in at a staggering $36 of return for every $1 spent.

Why is Building an Email List a Good Growth Strategy?

Perhaps the main reason that email lists continue to be a solid direct marketing source is that it is a resource that has intent behind it. What I mean by that is that every person who subscribes to your list has made a conscious decision to be there. They have read the content, responded to your call to action (CTA), and decided that the value they receive is worth the price of their email address (currently valued at about $10-20 btw). The point to take away from this is that an email list is perhaps the most direct method of marketing to a dedicated audience that we have available to us because our audience has opted into receiving future emails from us.

An email list is perhaps the most direct method of marketing to a dedicated audience that we have available to us.

A strong email list of dedicated contacts is also an actionable marketing tool. It can be leveraged over time to help nurture individuals — converting them from skeptical consumers to loyal customers. Hence, the more value you provide to your audience, the better you show how you are the best option to help them survive and thrive.

Finally, and perhaps one of the most compelling reasons for creating a thriving email audience is that it can help to bring in business when we are facing the ebb and flow of incoming work. Having a dedicated audience in your back pocket means that when we face an economic downturn (personally, nationally, or globally) will still have a solid marketing channel available to us comprised of people that are already climbing the engagement ladder.

Positioning Your Marketing for the Future

The business landscape is a tumultuous one. There are economic upheavals seemingly waiting around every corner. The development of a strong and dedicated email list helps us to create a stable marketing channel that we can leverage in the future when we need it. Even more important than providing a point of stability in our marketing plan, though, is what that email list provides a brand in terms of engagement opportunities.

Our audience is there for us. They want to be there. While our email list may be made up of a variety of people who know varying amounts about our brand, it represents opportunity and potential. Each time we reach out to our audience we have an opportunity to provide value, open the brand story gap, engage and educate, share information about our services, bolster our brand perception, and eventually close the gap and make the sale.

Start Now

There is no better time to start building an email list than right now. Every day is an opportunity to grow your audience and get your message out there. The “Know, like, and trust” principle takes time. A robust and useful email list is a long game that takes dedication (like most things in our businesses) and knowing that is why we should feel a bit of pressure about getting started.

There is a lot to do to get started with email marketing, but this is a process that directly reflects a growth mindset. And having a growth mindset is one of the determining factors of whether we are built for survival over the long term.

Illustration by Erin Lynch.

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A better title for this article might be, “how GOOD web design can help your business” because there are just a lot of really rotten looking, and rotten performing websites out there. We all have our stories of poor experiences while moving around the web. Yet, when web design is done well it can put a business on the map giving them a visual boost (through a great looking site) amongst their clientele, help people complete the tasks they are there for and do it quickly because the site was designed with performance in mind.

What makes web design good is a multi-layered conversation. There are literally dozens of considerations and touch points that go into building beautiful, performant websites. Too many points to cover in the scope of this article. For our purposes here we’ll focus on some of the most important benefits and how they help your business.

Your Website is a Sales Tool

We have a lot of discussions with clients about budgets and the value of spending a few thousand to many thousands of dollars on a website design project. Helping people break free of seeing a website as just a thing that a business should have to seeing it as an investment in a sales person, a lead generation tool, and a brand platform can take some work. While Squarespace, Wix and other quick build platforms are a great resource for getting a site up fast and cheap, those very qualities also negatively impact the perception of web design.

Sure, you can get a site that costs you $14.95 a month with free, beautiful themes; but without strategy guiding your content, design, user flows, and the myriad of other factors that go into good web design there is no reason to expect that site to move the needle.

The analogy we often put forth to potential clients is to think of a website as a sales person for a company. If they were to hire a full time sales person to grow a business, what would they expect to have to pay them per year to retain their services? How much more investment would there be in training that sales person to adequately discuss and promote the company’s products? Now, would they see that time and money spent as an investment?

Investing in a website is like hiring a sales person—one that is working for the company 24 hours a day. A sales person that is always loyal, always ready to help engage new clients and develop new business. Good web design is the catalyst that helps grow businesses. The old adage, “you get what you pay for” is a truism in the field of web design. Sure, you can get a site that costs you $14.95 a month with free, beautiful themes; but without strategy guiding your content, design, user flows, and the myriad of other factors that go into good web design there is no reason to expect that site to move the needle.

Good Web Design is Beautiful

There are a lot of unattractive/ugly websites out there. Visual design, though, can be every bit as important as the speed at which web pages load. The California based usability company, The Nielsen Normal Group, has done extensive studies on what they call the aesthetic-usability effect which refers to how people perceive an attractive website as being more functional/usable than an unattractive one. People tend to abandon or leave a website that is unattractive, having formed a poor first impression of the company. If they do stay they generally tend to take that website or company less seriously, or they perceive the company as being less professional. Both of these situations can cost businesses clients in the long term.

Good Web Design is Functional

Like a well designed building; a functional, well-structured website helps users navigate pages, easily locating the content they are looking for and helping people to make purchasing decisions regardless of where they are in the buying process.

A well defined information architecture is at the heart of good website structure. Coupling a strong underlying organization for the pages on the site and a strong strategy for the content on those pages reinforces the brand, provides a clear understanding of what services the company offers, and answers questions. Good architecture also reinforces the idea of user-centered design, which is the process web designers employ to help people do what they came to the website to do. When people can find what they are looking for and find it fast, they are more likely to pick up the phone or fill out a contact form.

Good Web Design is Performant

Having a good looking, well organized site is great, but if the site does not load quickly and perform in a way that fosters usability then nothing else that was done really matters. According to research done by Google in 2018, mobile users leave a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Each second longer that a site takes to load the probability of a bounce (users leaving that web page without going any further into the site) increases exponentially. And users leaving a website obviously equates to lost income.

There are many factors that contribute to site performance—each one working in concert with the other to provide a reliable, fast loading site. These are considerations made during the strategy and building of a quality website. High performing websites are designed to support businesses.

As mentioned at the start of this article, there are a lot of other factors that go into good web design, but these three over arching groups are some of the most important.

Good web design is a process. One that takes time and attention to detail. There are a myriad of factors that stand between average and stellar websites, and the differences between the two can be what makes a website just something a business does because it’s a requirement and something a business does to drive development.

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