Elegant Organisation

There are many ways to tell how well your website is performing.  Perhaps you’ll measure:

• the number of sales
• the value of the sales
• the number of visitors to your site
• the amount of time visitors spend on your site
• how visitors find your site
• where visitors are from
• the most popular pages
• what time of day visitors come to your site
• where your site appears in the search results for your most important keywords
• number of newletter subscriptions
• number of memberss

and so on…

However, what you don’t know, is what people really think of your site.  You might be missing a trick by not offering a certain product or service, or by hiding your delivery details, or phone number.

Visitors might want to read more about your products, or your calls to action could be stronger, or maybe your visitors would liek to discuss your products or services with each other on a forum.

Unless you make the effort to actually ask your visitors what they think, you’ll never truly know what they think of your site.  It might be that people love your site, or that your site is the only one offering a certain product, or the lowest price, and that’s why people buy from you.

Why not encourage your visitors to suggest improvements to your site, so that you know what they think?  You might be surprised at the answers, but you’ll be better informed as to how you can meet their needs.

If lots of respondants want you to change your colour scheme, or have more product pictures, or have video demonstrations of your procucts, then you’ll be able to make more use of your website, and turn yiur visitors into customers.

By giving the respondants an incentive,  such as a discount voucher, or a prize for the best suggestions, you’re more likely to encourage even the first time, or casualy visitor to comment.

Whether you choose to email a questionnaire to your members and subscribers, or have a survey section on your website, you’ll want to make sure that your visitors have the opportunity to comment, without feeling pressured into it.

Oh, and by the way, it’s not a good idea to have the survey/what do you think about this website/tell us what you think form pop up on the first page that the visitor arrives at.  The visitor has just arrived at this page, and might not know anything about your website or company.  If they’re just looking for a price, or an address or phone number, they don’t want to be impeded by a form that’s not important to them.

Now you know what sort of things you can do to improve your visitors’ experience of your website,  and its usability, what’s stopping you?

Tags: audience, calls to action, customers, designer, experience, forms, links, navigation, products, revenue, Usability, users, visitors, website

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Usability, design, ecommerce, visitors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.