The first paragraph of this article serves as a summary of the content. It discusses the importance of a goal-oriented approach for website owners who are struggling to convert their daily visitors into sales. The article provides a detailed plan to help identify and address the issues that may be hindering sales, and emphasizes the importance of setting clear goals, tracking relevant variables, understanding visitor behavior, and testing different strategies.
You've built a website and are attracting a few hundred visitors each day. Congratulations! However, you're not seeing the sales you expected. You've reviewed your sales material and everything seems fine. Your website is user-friendly and you've followed internet marketing advice, yet the sales aren't coming in. The only person who can truly identify the problem is you, but to do so, you need a method to detect the issues.
Here's a four-step plan to guide you:
Define Your Website's Goal: You might think you've already done this, but reconsider. The only worthwhile goals for your business are those that will ultimately increase your revenue. So, what are your goals? To generate sales? Leads? Improve customer service? The goals you set will dictate how you interpret your results and what you need to track. For instance, if your goal is to enhance customer service, you'll want to know if your site visitors are your actual customers and gauge their level of satisfaction.
Determine What to Track: Once you've established your goals, identify the variables you need to track. If your goal is to increase sales, you'll likely need to compare sales to the number of visitors. But it doesn't end there. Ask yourself, what is the most crucial page on your website? If your goal is to sell, your most important page is the order form. If your goal is to generate leads, the most important page is the one requesting contact information. Understanding this is crucial because if you don't direct your visitors to that page, you're in trouble. You might have the best copy in the world, but if no one reads it, you fail. Once you've identified the most important page in terms of achieving your goal, focus on directing people to that page.
Understand Visitor Behavior: To maximize the number of people who visit your key page, you need to understand the path they took to get there. Review your server logs to determine the sequence that leads people to click on the link to your core page. Which sequence yields the best results in terms of sign-ups, contacts, or inquiries?
Evaluate Your Traffic: All traffic is valuable, right? Wrong! This is a common misconception in internet marketing. Don't fall into this trap. Traffic is not a goal, except for sites making money strictly through advertising. It's merely a means to reach the goal you’ve set for your website. Instead of spending more money on a promotional tool that generates traffic but not sales, look at your other sources of traffic. Do they offer a better response rate? If so, can you amplify these results?
Now that you've defined your goal, identified the pages that contribute to achieving that goal, maximized results from those pages, and identified the best traffic-generation tools for your business, it's time to test your sales material. Write several sales copies, test different paths on your site, devise multiple Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) that are outlined throughout your site. This is a continuous process of testing and tracking.
By following this advice, you'll be able to build a constant flow of income with multiple activities and have the tools to evaluate the results produced by your website through this goal-oriented approach.
