Hello Folks. In this post, we will understand how to use your website as an effective Sales & Marketing tool. The points covered here have been asked by various clients and partners in the last few months, and a post to summarize them should help everyone.
What we have seen in our experience of advising over 100 businesses is that almost 95% of them do not use their website an effective Sales & Marketing tool, and that’s why they are unknowingly leaving a lot of money on the table.
For example, today, many prospects come to our websites when they hear about our services or products, and our website has to be ready to engage any visitor, and also provide answers to all the common questions that any visitor/prospect would be expecting, to increase the interest in the products and services that you are offering. Now this may look very logical, but the fact is that 95% of the websites that we have come across are not able to do this, and so chances are high that your own business website may be lagging in this aspect.
Some of the things that you should really consider to check if your website is really interesting and effective in Sales & Marketing are the following:
First and most important input for your website is the navigation – keep it simple and intuitive. Navigation is one of the places where most websites falter. The navigation seems to become very complex in most B2C and B2B services and visitors don’t have a clue how to trace back a particular URL or how to save a given URL because when you have complex navigation, people do not follow the path or are unable to retrace a given page.
So please make navigation very simple and my advice is that any business site should not have more than three levels of navigation. So if you have the ‘Home’ page or ‘About us’ or ‘Contact us’ page as level 1, just think of one more level and another level, so maximum three levels. Anything more than that means an ineffective website.
My personal preference is two levels only where you have an ‘About us’ page, a ‘Contact us’, an ‘FAQ’ page and ‘Services’ page as Level-1. If you are looking for investors, then that deserves a separate page of its own at Level-1.
‘Services’ or ‘About us’ page can go one level deeper, into Level-2, to share the specific products and services on their specific pages. But that’s where it stops and not too many levels of pages.
The second input is that the top-level pages should not be too many in number; keep it between 5 and 10 – that’s something which most users can understand and navigate easily. So keep the top-level pages, which could be like ‘Home’, ‘About us’, ‘Product/Services’, ‘FAQs’, ‘Blog’, ‘Contact’ etc.
Third input is that if you are offering any product or service, there must be an FAQ page – a separate page dedicated to answering various questions and answers that you have faced from partners, customers, prospects. So an FAQ page is a very important.
Fourth input is applicable if you are selling a product or service that can be bought or ordered online or by phone, then there must be a very visible ‘Order’ page at the top level. We have found that the ‘Order’ page is often hidden at some second or third level and the website is losing sales. We have observed that by moving the Order page at the level-1 and making it prominently visible across the site, it has improved sales by anywhere from 25 to 100%. So there’s a big benefit from a small improvement.
Fifth input is about Testimonials. if you are a business that has been live for some time, then you must surely have customer testimonials and that is another top-level page because it can really help in talking to your prospects about the benefits of your services and no other page does it better than a ‘Testimonials’ page. So it’s a highly recommended top-level page that you must have.
That’s how some of the best performing websites are structured and what we have shared here is essentially the summary of website improvement and online business improvements that we do for our sites (we have 50+ of them), and for our business partners and clients, who are seeing results in terms of improved sales.
Now, there are many Internet consultants out there who will charge a fair amount for such inputs. So we thought we will save you some money by sharing these inputs, which are based on real-life successful websites under us.
Please remember that you can constantly reduce your cost of customer acquisition by having an effective website that converts your prospects by engaging them well and showing them the key benefits. Please also remember that a detailed one page website, if done properly, can beat a 25 page website that plays hide-and-seek with the visitors.
If you have already followed the above suggestions, and still your website is not proving to be effective in your sales & marketing work, something else is creating a problem. If you want our help in diagnosis, please leave a comment in this post (it will not be published) and we will get back to you.
Thanks for visiting,
Shankar on behalf of MyOrbit Team
Thanks a lot for this very informative post. I am reviewing my business website, and I can already see many areas of improvement. Your suggestions always make sense, and its great to have them free!
One more point worth adding is that you must try to have a contact form on your contact page, and it should not have too many fields to fill. Name, Email and phone are just about the maximum you should ask. Many companies have contact forms that have too many fields to fill, and visitors don’t like that.