In today’s tough business climate, having a website is not just a necessity, it can be of vital importance to the overall success of your company. Is your company’s website cutting it? Is it living up to what you thought it could do for you?

If not, one of the possible problems is that your site may be too informational in nature. Instead of simply presenting your company’s information to site visitors, try finding a way to convert them into a buyer.

Think of all the traits that your best salesperson holds. What makes them the best? Now consider that person’s weaknesses. What if you could remove the weaknesses and simply focus on the strengths? Well, your website can do just that.

One of the greatest things about your site is that it never sleeps; it’s always there 24/7; readily available for anyone, anytime, anywhere to check out. It doesn’t get hungry or tired or need a coffee break.

In building your site, not only do you need to consider your vital sales points and product offerings, but think hard about what clients will want to see and give it to them.

In order to create a great site you need to do your best to implement these ideas.

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We have all seen it, a long form asking for enough contact and demographic information to cause even the most persistent marketer to drool. Sure it would be great to get all this information, but people are becoming less likely to fill all of this out. So then what happens, they leave. That’s it. It’s over. You just lost them.

We have begun to counsel our clients on the less is definitely more theory. It would be great if you could gather this information from your website visitors, but the end goal is to get them to complete the transaction. The “transaction” can be different for every site, a sale, a lead, create an account, whatever you want the visitor to do. If they leave they will never convert.

We are starting to suggest simple concise forms that allow visitors to give you their information in stages. Maybe it is just an email at first. Once they are comfortable with you and have further questions then we ask for a phone number. We typically try to keep 3 or 4 fields, name, email, phone and message, something like this.

If done properly you are still able to capture much of the information that you are looking for even with not asking them for it all at once. Let’s take a look at an example.

We recently completed a site for a manufacturing company that has a vast dealer network across the United States. We built the option for visitors to sign up for an email newsletter. If they do so we store their email address so we now know that. We also built a dealer lookup feature. The visitor simply enters a zip code and we display a list of all local dealers in their area ordered by distance. This is a win-win, the visitor gets what they want, a dealer listing, and the website owner gets what they want, another piece of the demographic puzzle. So we now know the visitors email address, zip code, city, and state, all without having to directly ask them for it on a long form.

On this same site there is an extensive product area where visitors can browse categories. Because most items are high-ticket items, most visitors will want to request some more information. At this point all the user needs to type in is their name, phone if they want a call, and any specific questions he/she have related to the product. We are able to send an email to the manufacturer with the visitors contact info, questions, location, etc. By submitting this form it also sends an automatically generated email to the visitors email address thanking them for their interest and the email also has the name of their closest dealer, along with full contact info, a link to a map, and a link to the dealers website if they have one.

By breaking the information up we are able to give our customer the information they need while never making the visitor fill out more than 3 fields at a time.

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