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How to Win Over Clients and Influence Sales with Your Web Design

web design for sales

Marketing and selling your services can take days, weeks, even months. In the B2B industry, it can take even years! As a company that strives towards success, not converting leads fast enough can lead to a severe inconsistency in your sales flow.

You need to nurture and continuously educate your leads. At times, it can be an intensive and time-consuming process. If not done correctly, nurturing can lead to inefficiency. As a matter of fact, up to a third of B2B companies follow-up with their leads every month.

But, there’s always a way to alleviate the process, and that can be only through your website! Every company needs to have a proper website! A well-developed CMS build can help you convert leads into clients, and generate positive business results in the process.

That is why, in this article, we’ll go through the most effective strategies to scale web design for sales.

Define the Conversion Rate Optimization Process

If you want to use your website’s design to increase sales, you need to figure out or rethink your entire Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) process. Taking actions on your website should be effortless. If your site has been designed using a CRO process, you can address the various points that will help you convert.

First, Get Your Data Right

Gathering data that can reveal your CRO process’s loopholes is the sensible thing to do. For a thorough overview of your current state of affairs, you can use Google Analytics

To see if the data takes you in the right direction, you need to set GA goals first. In GA, there are three main goals that you can define:

  • Destination Goals: Track visitor activity on an individual or a set of pages. For example, order completion or filling out a form.
  • Engagement Goals: Track the time that people spend on your website, the number of pages that they visit, and their activities.
  • Event Goals: Track actions that occur separately from a page load, such as document downloads, video plays, and AJAX elements.

Setting Up Destination Goals

At the bottom of your left navigation area, select ‘Admin’

In the next column, select ‘Goals’:

Select ‘New Goal’

Select ‘Custom’ and go to ‘Continue’

Name your goal and select the Destination.

In the Destination field, you can include the URL of the page that you want to track the goal for. Check if each of the settings is the right one, and when you save the goal, you can access it on your Goals page.

Setting up Engagement Goals

As an example, let’s say that you want to set up ‘Session Duration’ or ‘Pages/Screens per session’.

Again, use the Admin panel to access ‘Goals’, and also, under ‘Goals Setup’, again, access ‘Custom’. Give your goal a name, for example, “10 pages in a visit”

And click on ‘Save’ after you’re done. Again, you can access the goal in your ‘Goals’ page.

Setting Up Event Goals

Event goals are completed after a specific event is executed on your page. The event goal can measure and track CTA button clicks, video views, and other visitor interaction on your website.

To set up an event goal, follow the steps above to create a Custom Goal, choose ‘Event’, and in the ‘Goal Description’ field, name your event.

Analyzing your current conversion process combined with analytics data will help you gauge whether you’ve achieved your defined goals or not. It will help if you learn how users behave on your website

Each question about user behavior can be answered using Analytics, such as:

  • What do users do when they arrive on your website? 
  • How does each element affect the page performance?
  • What are the main points of user attention, and what are the weak ones?

Your website data can help you visualize the current state of the CRO process. You’ll be able to locate the exact points where you fail to convert your visitors, by monitoring metrics such as:

  • Demographics data
  • Interests
  • Geographic data
  • Page behavior
  • Bounce rate
  • Page load speed
  • Conversion value
  • User flow
  • Source of traffic

Analyze each of your pages and how the users navigate on them. By defining the customer journey of your buyer persona, you can establish the changes that you need to make in your pages to turn your site into a conversion rate machine. 

Conduct A/B Testing

Look into your Analytics data and see if there are frequent patterns and trends in the users’ behavior. These patterns can help you determine the components of your website design that you need to focus on. Your data will help also help you devise hypotheses that will result in an outline for A/B testing purposes.

A strong hypothesis comprises of three key parts: 

  • A suggested alteration 
  • The desired effect after the alteration 
  • The logic behind the alteration

Let’s say you have a lot of potential clients that abandon the cart after they enter the checkout process of your site. After you’ve become aware of the fact, you might want to examine if the form fields that lead to the purchase are a bit too much. 

In this case, your hypothesis might be: 

“Reducing the billing form fields will boost purchases by X% because the checkout process will be much faster for our customers.”

Document each A/B test and measure your progress. The more you do it, the better the tests will be, and the better you’ll be able to optimize your website for conversions.

Document each A/B test and measure your progress. The more you do it, the better the tests will be, and the better you’ll be able to optimize your website for conversions.

You need to collect the information and dive into analysis mode. Make sure that you measure the right metrics. Assess each metric and KPI individually and focus on the bigger picture.

Lots of the A/B testing tools have an integrated analytics system to track the desired metrics:

 

  • Google Optimize: A tool that comes directly from the most significant A/B testing advocate – Google! You can combine it with your Google Analytics. However, you must integrate it into the code of your website header.
  • Optimizely: An A/B testing tool. You can use it to run A/B and multivariate tests, multi-page tests, and much more. An entire set of A/B testing tools that can help you optimize your page for more conversions.
  • Nelio A/B Testing: A tool that helps you define, manage, and keep track of A/B-testing experiments, combined with heatmaps. Nelio is also compatible with WooCommerce.
  • WordPress CTA: A plugin that you can use to create CTAs for your website. You can monitor and track conversion rates, run multivariate split tests on your CTAs, and increase your lead flow in the process.
  • Marketing Optimizer: You can use this plugin for A/B tests, create headline variations, layouts, images, testimonials, buttons, feedback forms, CTAs, and more.

Remember, defining and tweaking a CRO process is not a one-time task! It’s an ongoing process with new paths to web design for sales and improving your bottom line. Having a clear-cut CRO process will help you detect and use optimization efforts for your website and business growth.

Focus on Your Content

Despite the great design of your website, you must get your message across. That is possible only through the power of content. It is much better to develop your content first, and then adapt your design according to where that content would be most useful!

Think about Hierarchy

Content hierarchy matters because modern users scan content. With an average bounce rate of 58%, it is not likely that people will stick around on a website for more than a few seconds. Arranging your content correctly will attract more attention from users, and they’ll stay on your site longer.

Before you place the content, you need to decide what sort of content you’re going to integrate into your pages. Let’s take Teambit’s homepage content hierarchy as an example that you can implement on your homepage as well:

  • Connection: Connect your service to the readers’ problem.

  • Explanation: In short, explain your offer and how it can solve the target users’ problem.

  • Social Proof: You’ve helped some of your clients achieve success, brag about it.

Be Stylish

When it comes to content style, here are the properties that you need to address on your WordPress website:

Imagery

Bad images mean lousy content, and lousy content means an ugly website. If the resolution is too small – everything is blurry. And if an image is too big, it will slow down the page. If you can’t find a suitable picture for your article, don’t worry. There are lots of beautiful stock images out there that you can use and download them in the resolution and quality that you need: Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, StockSnap, Freestocks.

Typography

Having good typography for your content has the power to improve the UX of your website effectively. That is crucial for a couple of reasons:

Brand Identity: Various typographies can communicate different messages to people. Some fonts convey creativity, stability, trust, strength, elegance, and sophistication.

Image source: Airstream

Conversion Rate: The right typography and layout make your target users feel at ease, which can directly result in increased website visit time and, consequently, a higher conversion rate.

Image source: Bata

White Space

It is the space between your paragraphs, rows, headings, subheadings, images, videos, body text, etc. Whitespace can help you style content in the following ways:

  • Elegance: With more whitespace, your pages look more minimalistic and elegant.
  • Focus: With the right amount of whitespace, the user’s attention is focused on what’s important.
  • Less Stress: Even long-form content can become more readable with the proper use of whitespace.

Image source: Apple

Have a Proper UX

Getting more clients through your WordPress website will depend highly on its UX. Not every website owner has the exact knowledge or the tools to improve the website’s usability. However, with a versatile platform like WordPress, UX optimization can be effortless.

Is it Useful?

Even an artwork must be useful to someone! At least someone can hang it on the wall. So, if your website is not helpful for anything, why bother having it in the first place? A website that is not useful won’t serve your target customers, and it won’t be competitive enough with the other sites in the marketplace.

Is it Usable?

When the target customer opens your site, he/she wants to perform the desired action without any single obstacle. It means that every clickable area must be prominent, and the places where users know that they can access something should be intuitive.

Image source: Airbnb

Is it Credible?

When people open your WordPress website, you have 2-3 seconds to win over their trust. Without a proper UX, it is almost impossible to deliver your company’s credibility and vision for your company.

Image source: BuzzSumo

Is it Desirable?

Ford and Mercedes both make cars. Both of them can take you from A to B. However, Mercedes is much more desirable than a Ford. If consumers have the budget and the choice between the two, they’ll often go for the Mercedes without a single doubt. 

Mercedes are pretty confident that they provide better vehicles, and they know how to brand that.

Image source: Mercedes-Benz

When it comes to desirability, copywriting is critical. In most of the cases, your prospects are not interested in stats. They want what they see, they want the feeling, and that’s what you need to sell on your website. 

The desirability of your brand needs to be delivered through your website design, logo, images, elements, and aesthetics. The more attractive your website is, the more the users will want to return and let other people know about it.

Is it Accessible?

Accessibility is all about making your website usable for everyone. You need to have a website that is easy to use for everyone. Currently, there are accessibility web design regulations that are mandatory or represent a standard that companies need to consider when they approach the design of their sites.

Is it Valuable?

The moment someone opens your website, you must deliver value! Without providing value, today, it is unthinkable to convince your target clients that you have something in store that deserves their money and attention.

Image source: Gary Vaynerchuk

Here are some quick tips that can help you enhance the UX of your WordPress website and win over clients in the process:

Speed Things Up

Speed is one of the vital parts of your UX strategy. People are getting used to faster online experiences, and if they don’t get them, they will leave and most likely never come back.

To analyze your website speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool can monitor how your website performs online for mobile and desktop devices. It will provide you with sufficient data about what’s good and what’s not when it comes to speed, and additionally, with tips on how to improve performance.

There are several ways to enhance the speed of your WordPress website:

  • Apply a Caching Plugin: There are CSS and JS files so that they don’t have to be downloaded every time the user loads a specific page from your website. Users that return to your page will benefit the most from the caching process.
  • Optimize Your Images: HQ photos might have a resolution like a billboard and a size that is easily more than 5MB. Even modern smartphones generate HQ photographs with high resolutions. Imagine how much additional weight they represent for your WP website.
  • Fix Google Maps: Ensure that the map doesn’t slow down your website. If a map takes more than 2MB, your visitors might need to download additional memory that they may not be interested in or that is not in their focus at that moment.
  • Optimize Databases: Cleaning and optimizing your WP databases is one of the ways to improve the performance. If you don’t have the technical expertise to open and clean each database manually, you can always use a plugin called WP-Optimize.
  • Minimize CSS and JavaScript: By adding plugins and additional widgets, the lines of code on your website grow. It results in a surplus of JS and CSS characters in the source code that are just a burden to the core. The solution for this is to minimize your source code.
  • Cut Down HTTP Requests: When a page opens in a browser, the computer must send hundreds, if not thousands of HTTP requests to servers. The more requests and the more information goes back and forth, the more time it takes for the page to load.

Have an Unequivocal CTA

Your CTAs and messages need to be clear for the users to notice them straight away

When a person accesses one of your pages, the CTA, and additional messages is what pushes him/her to take action. In most cases, when it comes to WordPress, CTAs often come in the form of buttons or links. To successfully guide your users to the CTAs, you have to make them clear and visible.

Maintain Scannable Content

When people land on your page, you don’t want to obstruct them. An enhanced content scannability for the users will result in:

  • Increased understanding of the content.
  • Reduced task errors.
  • Comprehension of the site’s architecture.
  • Content quality and likability.
  • Reduced bounce rate.
  • Return visits.
  • Enhanced SEO.

With better content scannability, you can stress the value that you provide with it. Visitors are more likely to spend more time on your page and immerse themselves in your words/messages.

Nail the Mobile Experience

When they use their smartphones, your target customers look for websites that don’t require them to constantly zoom in to see the content. Of course, most users browse websites on their mobiles than on desktop, and it’s really a no-brainer to offer them a flawless mobile experience.

Fortunately, WordPress provides you with a mobile-responsive experience from the moment you put your page online. It is ideal if you don’t want to manage two separate websites (one desktop, another mobile) for your users.

Image source: Loggly

Responsive WordPress websites work like liquid – the page scales up and down to fit the screen when a user opens it on his/her smartphone. 

An additional step towards a great mobile experience is to enable Google AMP for your site. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open-source project that was born out of the need for improved mobile experiences. It allows a stripped-down version of your articles, but all the essential content that you want to offer will remain. That can include ads and your related posts section.

There are several benefits of implementing AMP to improve the mobile experience of your WordPress website:

  • Faster Page Load: One of the most important WordPress UX improvements is speed, which is what AMP is all about.
  • Decreased Bounce Rate: Faster load times can successfully reduce your bounce rate.
  • Better SERP positions: The AMP icon in Google search results is an excellent recommendation. It increases your click rate and improves your position in SERPs.
  • Paid Search: Advertised content will be opened much faster than the content of your competitors that haven’t implemented AMP.
  • Image Optimization: The Google AMP Cache utilizes the image optimization stack used by the PageSpeed Modules and Chrome Data Compression.

To learn more about building sites with AMP, please read the official documentation guide provided from the AMP project.

Structure Your Homepage the Properly

One of the biggest factors why you can’t attract more customers with your website is the vagueness of your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), and the way you present it on your homepage. So, how can you organize the content on your homepage to highlight the UVP of your website?

Have an Unmistakable Headline in Your Hero Section

You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of your target users! The headline in your hero section plays a significant role here, and it must be distinctive and clear enough at the same time to let them know what you offer. 

When it comes to your hero section headline, please keep it simple. Remember, your customers scan the content, and if your hero section is not understandable enough, you’ll lose their attention in a flash!

Image source: Ditto

A UVP can be highlighted with more than copywriting. Visual representation matters as well, and there are two excellent ways to achieve this on the hero section of your homepage:

  • Photo: If you have a tech product, a good idea might be a photograph of someone using it.
  • Video: You can directly showcase the benefits and the product UX with a video.

Have Fewer Distractions

Your homepage has one single goal – to inform target customers about the product/service and guide them to the conversion point. In order for the conversion to take place, you need to minimize the superfluous distractions that may redirect the attention of the user to something else. Remove unnecessary things from your homepage such as:

  • Excessive buttons: Your focus must be on your CTA buttons. The CTAs must be placed strategically, alongside your copy and your offer, as opposed to being distributed on as many places as possible on your homepage, which can be damaging to your conversion rate.
  • Unnecessary images: Of course, using images is great. However, they must be carefully selected. You need images that communicate the goals of your product/service and enhance your copywriting. Bad quality images can be distracting and damage the credibility of your business.
  • Ineffective testimonials: Don’t lie in your social proof section! Include testimonials from real clients that describe how they’ve benefited for your product. Make sure that you include when you can names, their job titles, and company name.
  • Lengthy paragraphs: We said clear and concise headlines, not blog paragraphs! Use a bulletin list if you want to break down the benefits and features of your services/products.

Have a Simple Navigation

Too many items on your menu, and you’ll confuse your web visitors. What you need is a simple website navigation that is intuitively organized. Some tips for executing this successfully:

  • Make a Logical order: The main menu category should be precise and stand out from others. With that in mind, sub-categories as well must be in context with the main category under where they’re placed.
  • Have a Limited number of categories: It’s best not to have more than 7 main menu items.

Image source: DevriX

Embrace Social Proof

If you want to increase your sales, your satisfied clients might be your biggest selling point! Social proof directly showcases how your clients use your product to improve their businesses and lives in the process.

The two most important things in a  customer testimonials section on your homepage are:

  • The challenge that the client faced before he/she found your solution.
  • The benefits and the solution that the client got and he/she opted for your product/service.

Have an Effective About Us Page

In most of the cases, the second most popular page on a given site is the ‘About’ page! A properly organized About us page can help you to:

  • Introduce your business to your target audience and prove that you’re a credible brand.
  • Share your brand’s story to build a connection with the visitor.
  • Present your team that can solve the target client’s problem.

Tell Your Story

Differentiate from the pack that blandly describes just the business model and the service perks! Provide your clients with an inspirational story of each of what have you accomplished through the years!

Image source: Mailchimp

Put Your Team in the Spotlight

In other words, put a face to your company name and convey the culture that you have. Present the people that power your business and your services. Do a short write-up along with a photo for each member and showcase the personality of your team.

Image source: NextSpace

Link it Up

You can also use your About page to direct your visitors to other pages of your website. Ensure that you include all the necessary links into your copy and encourage your prospects to:

  • Follow you on social media
  • Sign up for your email newsletter
  • Browse your products
  • Read your articles

At first glance, you won’t see too much conversion opportunities in the About page. However, doing a proper job optimizing it, an About page can get those sales numbers rolling.

A Compelling Product/Service Page

Your product/service pages are critical to winning over more clients. Most product descriptions out there provide nothing more than features and specifications. The following steps will ensure that you optimize your product/service page for a greater sales success:

Stay Concise

Don’t be too broad about your product details. You need to pique the interest of your target customers. By including too much info about your service, you risk overwhelming your prospects.

Think about elevator pitches. When someone pitches a product, it must be good enough to open the doors and attract investors. This is why a brief product/service presentation can convert more website visitors more than a long and tedious product description.

Image source: Mint

Prove the Value

The perfect product page encourages people to take the desired action, from submitting a form, to purchasing the product. But, in order for that to be achieved, they must see the value first. Here’s how you can demonstrate this on your site:

Encouraging trust: Prospect trust other customers more than the words of your copy.

No sales lingo: Erase the boring sales language from your customer testimonials. Satisfied people should speak from the heart about the benefits of the product and in turn, they’ll sound more natural in the process.

Data and facts: What’s better, telling that you’ve helped them, or saying how much you helped with numbers! Data and facts can outdo stories and beautifully-crafted copy.

Image source: HubSpot

Be Visual

Another vital element of your successful product/service page is visuals. If prospects are given at least 15 seconds on a page, they’d rather look at something visual than a copy.

Some people love to read, and others, well, they want to see a graphic, an image, or a video about your product. This is why it’s a wise tactic to use screenshots, photographs, and even videos that can demonstrate your service and how your team works.

Image source: Basecamp

An Obvious CTA

It is perhaps the most important element on your product page! This is where you turn page visitors into clients. For your CTA to work, you need to transmit what the prospect should do. In any case, avoid phrases that sound commanding, such as “Buy it!” or “Order Now!”

Image source: Dropbox Business

Wrapping It Up

Bottom line, the site’s visual elements, a defined CRO process, your copy, and the rest of the content can all help you win clients and influence sales decisions! You need to structure your site in a way that helps people form a connection with your company. Present the product benefits, while at the same time building trust through real social proof and content.

If you want to discover more on how to skyrocket the conversion rate on your WordPress website, don’t hesitate to contact the DevriX team!

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