Latest News > July 2007

Directing your visitors with Calls to Action
By CHITS UK

Building a website for your business requires a significant investment of time, energy, and money. The last thing your company needs is for your site to be merely decorative. Instead, you want to use your web presence to attract, inform, and convert visitors into paying customers.

To do this, you need a site that engages your visitors and uses calls to action to guide them along the path you want them to take. Here are five steps that will help your site be more engaging and produce better results for your business.

Define Your Goals
If you don’t know what you want your website to achieve, the chances are very low that you will be successful. In order to be productive, you need to outline the results that you would like to see. The benefits that your website could provide for your company should be considered from a number of different perspectives—sales, branding, customer service, human resources, and technical support—for a start. Then, prioritize your goals so you know which should receive the highest emphasis.

Create Your Content with Those Goals in Mind
Consider which types of content are most likely to attract your target audience. What questions might they have? What concerns can you resolve? For example, if selling a product is one of the goals of your e-business, you might consider content such as photographs of the product from different angles, customer testimonials, articles that describe how to use the product effectively, and case studies that show results.

Use Strong Calls to Action to Show People Where to Go Next
Never leave a customer stranded on a web page or wondering where to go next. Instead, use a strong call to action to provide legible road signs that will help visitors find more information or take the next step in fulfilling your goals (e.g., filling out a contact form or making a purchase). Most importantly, don’t be oblique! Use clear language in your calls to action to show them how to take the next step.

Give Visitors Reasons to Get Involved
Websites that talk “at” visitors are not as effective as those that engage visitors in a dialogue. To this effect, you want to encourage your users to interact and get involved in your site. Offering them a chance to fill out a survey or win a prize are a couple ways to encourage your visitors to connect with your site.

Make it Easy for Customers to Find Help and Give Feedback
One of the most common reasons why visitors leave the action path that you’ve created for them is that they experience a problem or issue that you didn’t foresee. If your visitors can’t find easy solutions, they are likely to simply walk away from your site. Make it easy for visitors to get help, search for information, and get in contact with you if they need further assistance, and they will be much more likely to stick around.

By following these simple persuasion architecture techniques, you can have a dramatic effect on the productivity of your website. It’s a good idea to test the effectiveness of your changes by asking people who are not familiar with your site to try out your navigation and see how easily they can complete your website goals. If some of the methods covered in this article interest you, please call 02082382401 or send us an enquiry for a no-obligation consultation.

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