4 Web Design Tactics for High ROI

Want a quick increase in profits from your website?

Put these design changes at the top of your list to get the biggest bang for your marketing buck – and make you more money.

1. Publish an Email Newsletter

It still amazes me how many companies don’t have an email newsletter, or, if they’ve considered it, think it’s too much work. If yours is one of those companies, you are losing ground – and potential business to a company who sees the power of ENewsletters.

An ENewsletter:

helps you build relationships with your customers
keeps them engaged with you
keeps them informed and in touch with you
helps you build a list and make longer term purchasers

They cost almost nothing to produce and the time you do spend creating them is often returned one hundred-fold. If you’re really pressed for time you don’t even have to write them yourself – hire a writer to create the content, then set up an autoresponder to automate sending the enewsletter at regular intervals.

If you think you can rely on your website to sell, think again. Your website should provide detailed information – enough to allow customers to find what they want on your site.

Publishing an ENewsletter – or improving your existing one so that it is valuable to your readers will give you a higher return on investment than almost any other internet tactic.

2. Write Simply – Write for the Web

B2B sites in particular are often guilty of simply using their product descriptions for their web sites. They will simply take their brochure content and place it on their website. Rarely do either of these “shortcuts” work. What works is writing your content for the web. That involves better writing – and, unless you’ are a web copywriter yourself, hiring one. Alternatively, if you have in-house staff writers train them to not only write for website readers but also to optimize your website content for search engines so that potential customers can find you.

3. Provide Informative Product pages

Poor product information is responsible for users giving up and abandoning most B2B and marketing sites. Product pages are often written by product managers – people who know the product intimately.

Marketers then take this product information and add it to the website, complete with product and company jargon. This is both lazy and a recipe for disaster as far as attracting and keeping visitors on your site.

Product pages need to be designed and written with the non-expert user in mind. Because they’ve visited your page they’ve indicated their interest. As marketers your product information needs to be detailed, but written in a way that makes sense to people who aren’t necessarily experts in your field. It needs to tell prospects all they need to know to make a buying decision.

4. Cater to Seniors

It’s probably safe to say that most websites discriminate against older web users. Yet this demographic is one of the fastest growing group in terms of starting and running businesses, seeking out new products and services as well as in Internet usage. They also tend to have more money to spend.

From small, hard to read fonts to bad navigation and design, to flashy intros and intrusive ads that fail to deliver true content – all these and more make many business websites a usability nightmare for older users. And we won’t even talk about users with disabilities.

Want to ensure older users move their business your way? Design your site to cater for their needs (which generally means follow the basic rules of web design for online users) and you will be the exception to the rule.

There are other changes you can make to your website. But if you want the quickest return on investment and the best results make these design tips your priority.