Is Your Website Optimised for Sales and Marketing?

It’s a simple question, but one many companies fail to ask. All too many websites are simply online brochures, missing out on excellent sales and marketing opportunities. In this introduction to a series on website optimisation, we ask some simple questions to get the ball rolling, such as what areas to look at and why, and who to turn to for the right answers. 

We’ll be covering the “how” in an upcoming blog post. For now, the objective is to ask the right questions before we delve into the practical. Subscribe for email updates (top-right) or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with the latest Versio2 blog posts.

If you want your website to work for you, it needs to be more than just a place for displaying information. For many companies this is fine, but they can’t expect to see any sales or marketing objectives fulfilled or any sort of online ROI. 

Some examples of features that set hard-working, efficient websites apart from online brochures include e-commerce and product or service listings on the sales side; and landing pages, social integration and smart web forms for marketing optimisation.  

There are many more features that turn websites into effective sales and marketing machines, but the ones listed here are probably the most basic identifiers. As to who to ask about whether your company website has any of these features, a quick browse should provide you with your own answers. 

This is a question to pose to whoever heads your sales and marketing teams. Is there a clear journey from website visitor to lead, and from lead to sales conversion?

The answer should be easy to define if your website is correctly geared. For specific marketing campaigns, where will visitors arrive, what do you want them to do, where should they go next, and how will your sales team follow up with them? 

Was your website designed for e-commerce, or was this something that was added on? Modern e-commerce websites are fully integrated, meaning that every page is part of the sales system and can display popular products or services throughout. Older websites, where e-commerce was added as an after-thought, are often disjointed with no quick routes between informational pages and shopping carts. 

You should also think about the process of buying through your website – is it too complicated, thus putting off potential customers? This excellent post from our Inbound Marketing partner HubSpot discusses shopping cart best practices and ways to boost e-commerce conversions. 

For example, long load times can be very off-putting. Perhaps something you hadn’t thought about before, but how many of us have closed a website window or navigated away, simply because it took a second or two too long to load?

These are all questions to ask of your sales team first of all, because they really should understand how your website works as a sales tool. Think of your website as your greatest salespersons – if he or she isn’t performing, you would ask your head of sales, wouldn’t you? If they decide they need technical advice on the workings of your e-commerce platform, it’s time to contact your development team.

This is a broad question that can mean many things, making it one of the most important to answer.  

Firstly, is your website content appealing to your intended audience – on-page text, blog posts, ebooks, pictures and graphics should all be geared towards your target customer personas – click here to find out more about how to create audience personas and download free resources. 

Secondly, is your website linked to your list of contacts and leads, in other words, your CRM software? Websites that are true marketing machines not only work well to collect names and email addresses via landing page forms and offers, but feed those into CRMs like SalesForce or the HubSpot marketing platform’s built-in contact management feature.

Finally, how well integrated is your email marketing, if at all? This is where we enter the realm of lead nurturing – that is following up with people who have downloaded a resource or subscribed to one of your offers via a landing page form. Do you have automated email messages set up to send out to new CRM entries?

5. Is measurement and reporting fully integrated?

As a final thought to ponder in this introduction to website sales and marketing optimisation, no website would be truly complete without adequate measurement and reporting. Without these, you’ve no way of knowing how well your website is doing, and where the weak areas are.

Google Analytics is the very first thing you should have set up, to tell you where people land on your website, where they come from, how long they spend there, and which pages they look at, including the last one before exiting.

Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons and graphics should all be linked to reporting somehow. The most basic way to measure the performance of particular CTAs is to track their links – a URL shortening service like Bit.ly will give you basic tracking. Better still is a system like HubSpot, which can cycle CTAs on pages so you can A/B test their relative effectiveness – we’ve an entire post on A/B or split testing here. 

This last question is perhaps the hardest for companies to address. Full integration of measurement and reporting requires the use of a dedicated platform, such as the one from HubSpot.

We’ll be reporting later this month on an exciting new development not just for HubSpot, but for Versio2 as a partner agency as well, which we hope will help companies create websites truly geared toward sales and Inbound Marketing.