Learn how to improve conversion rates with an agile site redesign
The process is simple and common.
While browsing online, a visitor sees a post on LinkedIn by your business. Intrigued, they follow it through to your blog. From your blog, they are guided to your Service or Product page, where they are prompted to complete a contact form. Wanting more information, the visitor completes the form and an inquiry is created in the database. With skill, timing, need, and a little luck, that inquiry turns into an opportunity and then that opportunity turns into a customer.
It’s called a conversion. It’s a common action that all businesses strive for, but it certainly doesn’t happen often enough.
The law of averages makes conversions hard to do well. Most inquiries never become opportunities. But some do. When your conversion strategy is calibrated and firing on all cylinders, it is a game changer for the growth of your business. It all starts with generating those inquiries.
Introduction to Growing Conversion Rates
Generating inquiries through your website is both a science and an art. It takes keen observation and creative problem solving. When all the factors work together, your conversion flow should look something like this:
- Your social post creates awareness and directs visitors to a specific webpage.
- Your web page gently guides the visitor through a series of steps or path.
- The conversion flow aligns with the expectations of the visitor– no surprises.
- Your form seals the deal and creates an action.
This process leading towards conversions is the circle of life for web marketers. It starts long before the visitor arrives on your site. The best, most qualified leads, start as a query in a search engine.
But how do visitors find your site through a search engine? To attract people to your website, many businesses believe that quantity is more important than quality. The more posts your business publishes on their site or social media, the more visitors will engage with your content, and the conversions will come pouring in.
This isn’t necessarily true. Quantity is helpful, but it’s more important that the content your business shares online is useful. Useful content generates more meaningful engagement. Identify what is useful information for your visitors, create posts that reflect that information, and align those posts with phrases that signal intent. Getting found is the first step in the lead generation process.
Once your post is found, the next step is to gently nudge people towards a better understanding your solution, the value you provide and how you mitigate risk, all bolstered by support for your claims. Then, the most important part: you must provide a clear and simple call to action that naturally follows the flow of your useful post. If everything in your conversion flow is working, this call to action will inspire your visitors to share information with you.
Your Conversions Are Working — Now You Can Sit Back and Relax.
Well, not exactly. Just because your site is posting a high volume of useful content, is guiding visitors through information on your solution, and is producing conversions, doesn’t mean it always will. The world changes rapidly, and often without warning. What worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.
What should a business do to respond to ongoing changes in the way visitors interact with their content online? The key is responsiveness. If your business’s approach to your web presence is responsive and flexible, then rapid change won’t slow down your growth. You will be more agile in adapting to and taking advantage of shifts in the digital marketplace.
That’s the foundation of Agile Website Redesign.
Agile Website Redesign
Most businesses experiencing a decline in conversion often have one knee-jerk reaction – they immediately assume they need a complete website overhaul.
Traditional website redesign is a long, thankless process. It’s a counter-intuitive reaction to the swift marketplace changes. Even worse, traditional redesigns generally slow down conversions instead of improving them.
In reality, changes in the market come swiftly, but they also come incrementally. The way visitors search online for solutions to their needs is different today than it was yesterday, but it’s not completely unrelated. That means that an equally swift yet incremental strategy for web redesign is the best way to respond to changes in internet trends.
Agile Website Redesign is a responsive, gradual method of web redesign and maintenance that gives businesses the freedom to make informed redesign decisions, respond quickly, and maintain high conversion rates in spite of changes online. It uses a myriad of analytical tools to track and test which strategies work for your visitors so you can confidently launch changes based on data and experience.
The Five Steps of Agile Website Redesign
Transitioning your approach to web management from traditional redesign methods to Agile Site Redesign is tricky. It requires a new perspective on building relationships with visitors and customers through your website, and a new way of working through that perspective.
Here, we outline the 5 simple steps of Agile Site Design to keep your website producing conversions.
Step 1: Brainstorm
The first step is thinking about and planning your website changes. If you have a successful conversion flow, keep it– it definitely didn’t happen by accident. Look at your successes and get a clear idea for how you want to fix the conversion flows that are not working as well as they should. Reflect on what facets of your current site seem to produce high conversions, and where the conversion flow seems to break down.
Identify your goals. These goals should include measurable outcomes: number of visitors, number of contact or inquiry forms submitted, amount of time spent on the site, etc. These kinds of metrics make it easy to track the success of your conversion flow.
Step 2: Build
Once you’ve brainstormed a blueprint for your website, identify which pages or experiences are the most important to your business. These are the pages that successful conversions hinge on– think of these pages as the foundation of your buyer journey. Prioritize these pages and build them out first.
It’s important to really dig deep into the content, design, and flow of these pages. If your content has an inconsistent tone, or if your design doesn’t visually prioritize the right information, or if connections between pages aren’t intuitive, visitors will leave your site abruptly with a subpar experience. Once your foundational pages are structurally sound, build out the adjacent support pages.
Step 3: Test
Nowadays, it’s easy to test what’s working in your conversion flow and what isn’t. Read our Introduction to Agile Site Redesign to see some of the analytical tools we use to boost SEO, hone design decisions, and fix breakdowns in driving conversions for our clients.
Using analytical tools, like Google Analytics and Hubspot to track conversions and development means that your business can fine-tune its strategies precisely and incrementally. You get immediate feedback on whether a conversion flow is actually producing the results you had planned for, or if the process needs to be revisited.
Step 4: Tweak
You’ve brainstormed your goals, you’ve built out your core pages, and you’ve tested your site’s performance. All that’s left is responding to the data your analytical tools have gathered. Take time to review how your site is performing. Often, conversion flows don’t behave the way you predicted. That call-to-action that reliably drove conversions three years ago might be a dud today.
Testing and tweaking your conversion flows is the core of Agile Site Redesign. By incubating your site in a constant state of testing and tweaking means that changes are never a surprise, and your responses to change are often ahead of the curve. At the beginning of this article, we asserted that the digital marketplace is constantly changing in swift but incremental stages. When testing and tweaking becomes a regimented part of building buyer journeys and conversion flows, your website will always be relevant to your visitors.
Step 5: Repeat
Don’t be afraid to revisit the changes you’ve made. Agile Site Redesign is made to be an on-going, responsive process. Like Steps 3 and 4, you might have to revisit Steps 1 and 2 periodically to make sure your site is doing its absolute best for your buyer journey.
Need Help With An Agile Website Redesign? Macon Raine Can Do It For You.
Agile Site Redesign is a labor of love. It takes observation, patience, and lots of creativity to build useful content and drive conversions. If you need help, get in touch.
