Taking and Facilitating Action With Your Website

Our series on converting your brand’s website into a marketing hub focuses on action this week. We will focus on both facilitating actions for your audience and your internal team. Turning your website into a marketing hub for your business ultimately relies on your website connecting with your audience. In practical terms, your website ought to serve your business as an administrative assistant, salesperson, and customer care center. It’s especially important to note that taking a close look at your practices and processes will help you identify where you can create the most efficiency. 

Use Development to Learn About Your Users

Collect valuable data

What data you collect from your audience can support action on both sides of the coin. Online retailers can close more sales by collecting email addresses (usually with an incentive) and reaching out to users who browse your online catalog and promoting the products they viewed. If your business relies on a sales team to land accounts, the more information you can gather, the more intentional your team can be in their follow-up. Google Analytics is a great place to start and customized cookies can help you focus on specific points of interest.

Help your team help your customers

The fewer questions your team needs to ask a prospective or current client, the faster you can resolve their issues. Collecting information via thorough contact forms and tracking where on your site users are when they reach out can save time and help you learn more about your customers’ needs.

Create Easily Actionable Steps Through Quality UX Design

Design a UX that supports decision making

Ideally, your website and digital marketing materials have instilled enough motivation that your users want to take the next steps and either contact you for more information or purchase your product. Identify where these checkpoints are and ensure that you’re supporting progress. A simple example is listing your phone number as a hyperlink/button so mobile users can call you without dialing. One click of a button replaces copying the number, opening the phone application, pasting the number, and pressing the call button. Make it easy!

CTA’s that make sense in context 

Your CTA verbiage can be more challenging than it seems at first. Simple labels like “Learn More” or “Contact Us” are functional, but they fail to lead the user toward a specific action. Review a list of quality options and modify them to suit your site.

Menu construction

Your menu should allow access to your full site map, beginning with the core categories/pages of your website. An easy-to-navigate menu is especially critical for mobile sites as there is no mouse to maneuver between pages. You’ll want your users to be able to move freely from page to page. Further, ensure that your menu categories allow access to all of your marketing pages.

Offer Clear Guidance With Web Copy

Support your UX with directions

If the goal is to ensure your audience moves from browsing your site to taking action on it, it is necessary to guide them through this process. Letting people know what’s going to happen next allows you to constantly manage expectations. In conjunction with CTA verbiage, make sure your copy serves as a guide as well as marketing content.

Specify audiences with header use

Any time you’re writing content, SEO best practices come into play. Since your homepage will address your primary, secondary and tertiary audiences, it is the best example for this point. Rather than trying to wrangle all of these users to the same content, create sections on your home page that address specific pain points. Use strategic headers to bolster your SEO and font changes (at least in size) to catch the eye and help your users find the information most pertinent to them.

Summary

The true value of your website accounts for the internal resources you save when your team can focus on specific tasks/projects instead of investigating the problem at hand. Ask yourself: Can my website speak and act on my behalf when I am not present? With this question in mind, we want to encourage all brands to think of how you close sales, build your client base, and support your customers in person. Then consider how many of these steps can be digitized and/or automated through your website.