Tips for successful online marketing – getting your users from A to B

Our design and marketing teams spend a LOT of time on answering one simple question – how best to get users from A to B?

A  is typically Google.

B  is often your ‘conversion’ – most probably your contact us page or your ‘thanks for your order’ page.

If you’re looking to drives sales through your website then the above question is crucial – the easier the journey from A to B the more sales you’ll get! Take a look at our blog on why conversions are king if you’re not convinced this is vital.

Here’s a handy checklist:

1) Start at the end – you need to decide what your goal is (i.e. B). For most websites the goal is typically an online sale, sales lead, registration or sign-up. You need to be very clear about this – get it wrong and everything else will be a waste of time.

Once you’ve decided your goal you know where your potential customers will be starting from (A), and where you want them to end up (B).

2) Help your users along their journey – typically, as a user travels from A to B they’ll travel along several points along the way i.e. the pages on your site.

Your job (and the job of your web design team) is to make sure you make that journey as smooth and pain-free as possible. hHow many times have you used a website and found REALLY annoying barriers getting in the way – Flash intro pages, cluttered content, no clear links, pop-up adverts…

3) Tick all the boxes – every user will have boxes they need to tick in their mind before being sure you’re the right choice for them:

• What exactly do they do?
• Are they any good?
• Is it for me?
• How much does it cost?
• Is it compatible with my ZX-1100 machine?

The questions can vary from site to site but are usually pretty similar. Each page along the user’s journey from A to B should be ticking one of these boxes.

4) Convert! -  having removed any barriers along the user’s route and having ticked all user’s boxes, you should be in a position for them to convert. Don’t forget to make the conversion process as pain-free, easy and simple as possible (does your form really need to have all those questions?).

5) Review – using website analytics software (such Google Analytics) review what’s happening to users on their journey – are you seeing what you thought? Any decent piece of analytics software will be able to show you how many users drop out before they reach B and at what pages they give-up.
Use this information to make further improvements.

Further reading
Take a look at Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug – this book is especially useful for understanding what questions your users will have in their head when they land on your site and how best to make sure your site ticks all their boxes.