I have started working with two small businesses that both have the same disappointment around their websites; people seldom subscribe and they seldom repeat the visit no matter how much traffic they have. This seems to be a common problem with many small business owners which can be extremely detrimental to the growth of your business.

How do you increase your conversion rate and encourage your visitors to come back?

Give them VALUE!

Whether your website is targeted at school children or horticulturists, fashion queens or rocket scientists, people will revisit your site, recommend your site or subscribe to your site for one reason… Value.

Value -verb

1. To consider with respect to worth, excellence, usefulness, or importance.

2. To regard or esteem highly

How do you judge value?

If you have a website, type in the URL, look at your website as if you are a new visitor and ask yourself these questions:

(If you don’t have a website, check out one of your competitor’s sites and apply the questions.)

1. Does it provide value on the home page? Will the content on the site benefit me?
2. Am I compelled to read the content, look at images, watch videos or take a next step?
3. Are there links to other places on the site that a customer in my industry may find intriguing?
4. Does it answer questions that a customer in my industry may have?

Then take a look as a returning customer or regular user of the website and ask yourself these questions:

1. Are there obvious reasons why I should return to the site regularly? (Like regular new content, news, updates, forums, blogs etc.)
2. What do I get if I subscribe to the database or sign up for membership?
3. How often could I come to the site and get more value?
4. Can I participate in the website? Do I feel that I can contribute to it?

Many businesses make the mistake of creating a website that simply serves information about the business. This may be interesting for someone who wants exactly what you are selling but only until they make the decision to buy it or not buy it at which point your information has been consumed.

Unless you are only using a website to back up your other marketing campaigns, you should create a strategy for value so that you can collect a database and grow your business.

What value can I give visitors?

Information

Share your expertise (and other people’s expertise) in the form of news, articles, blogs, video clips, reviews etc. Write on topics that will interest people that fit into your potential customer category. If you don’t want to write the content yourself, you can source content from other people and organisations in the industry.

Entertainment

Provide your audience with video, quizzes, polls, audio, images and opinions that entertain. Look at what would appeal to your target industry and create or aggregate this content. An obvious source is YouTube where you will find a goldmine of video content on almost any subject.

Opportunities

Whether you are offering free webcasts or e-books, specialist services, access to special industry updates, networking or interacting with like minded individuals, give your visitors opportunities that they may not get elsewhere.

Once you have implemented a strategy for value and a schedule for updating content keep a close eye on your analytics to see what your visitors consider most valuable and keep improving it.

Happy hunting!