Good things start at home

You know you want your online presence to attract the right type of client and deliver real results – and that means more than a one page website. But is that what you (effectively) have right now?

If you don’t get your homepage right, up to 70% of your website visitors will instantly click away from your site and all that hard work (and “fascinating detail”!) you spent time putting into the rest of your web pages will never be seen. Get it right and those visitors could become the long-term, loyal customers and supporters you deserve. 

Think of it as “kerb appeal” for your online showroom!

It’s easy to be too close to your own business (and as a proud workaholic, I should know!), but sometimes you need to step back and get a fresh pair of eyes of what you had planned for your website homepage. After all, this is still the single most popular page on every one of the thousands of websites we’ve built over the last nineteen years – without exception. As a rule, it is always the business owner who knows their product or service better than anyone else – but does that make you the best judge of what your customer really wants?

When all’s said and done, do you want a homepage you love or which gets the phone / till ringing? The former may give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, but with the latter you can focus on growing and scaling your business – as big as you want to go.

A couple of years ago I met a fantastic couple running an established ecommerce business, selling mid-range designer goods online. Lovely people; she was the creative genius and he was the pragmatic integrator every business needs, they sold a quality product and website visitor numbers were high. Yet their conversion rate (moving visitors to the “paying customer” bracket) was a painfully low 4% – just not enough to fund the plans they had to expand and free up some of their precious time currently spent “working on the website” every day.

They got there by focusing purely on the numbers, not on what their customers wanted. This resulted in the wrong sort of customers coming to the site, and the right sort leaving when they did.

I had to share that painful truth of every website – it’s not about you!

Having really got to know who they wanted to attract, and who was most likely to buy their fabulous products, my team came up with a new design which appealed to these dream customers on their level. It featured the sort of engaging content and styling they like, gave styling tips and ideas (just by changing the way the original content was presented – no extra work required), and joined up the website with their efforts on social media for a fully integrated approach.

Conversion increased from 4% to 16% within 90 days, and that was after putting a pause on their paid advertising elsewhere, saving them literally thousands of pounds. Win win!

If you’ve been telling yourself your website would work harder if only more people saw it… Stop. Go back to the kerb and take a good, hard look at your homepage and what it promises your customers – because that’s who it’s all about. 

This is all something we do for our clients as part of our Rapid Growth System for website success – reach out to me if you’d like to have a chat about how we can help you do the same.