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 Why is your home page so important?
Read on...
Your home page is important because it is the page on which the crucial decision is made: Is this web site relevant? Internet surfers often plow through vast amounts of irrelevant content to find the information they seek. Though search engines do help to narrow down the search, it often takes several false leads before finding the site(s) they want. To keep this process efficient, visitors will typically rely only on the home page to decide: "Is this web site relevant?" If your home page does not supply the information a potential client will need to make a decision to stay on the site, in a way that can be easily and quickly assimilated, then your home page has failed its most important task. So what should be on your home page? |
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E-Newsletters
Web sites are passive in nature. They do not actively draw people in all by themselves. You have to send people to your web site, or prospects have to be actively looking for your product or service. A company newsletter is a very good way to promote your web site in a more proactive way. Newsletters allow you to remind people about your existence and direct them to your web site on a regular basis. It is also a fantastic, non-intrusive, and automatic way to keep in contact with leads for new business that are not quite ready to buy, or to help keep in contact with your current clients. Of course you do have to have something to say. I recommend
a quarterly newsletter. Doing a newsletter quarterly does not
wear out your welcome to your recipients' email box, and does
not demand too much of your time coming up with content.
The newsletters do not have to be long, just relevant and
useful to your readers.
To do a newsletter well, you need a specialist to handle the list
management and mail-out for you. Do not try to run a
newsletter from your home PC using your regular email
program. You risk angering your recipients by accidentally
sending duplicates or forgetting to remove opt-outs from your
list. Additionally, your ISP will most likely have anti-spamming
rules
that you will run afoul of. All this will have you wasting your
time on tasks much more efficiently done the professional way.
For more details see the "Extras" page of our website.
We recommend Constant Contact. We use them to send you this newsletter. They are very reasonable in cost, and excellent in customer service and support. To help you get your newsletter looking like your web site we offer a "Newsletter customization package." |
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Let's examine a web site we manage that was launched earlier
this year. This is a good functional web site with lots of
excellent content in the Services section. The hits statistics for
the site have increased nicely for a web site of this size and
type from approximately 300 hits in April to over 5000 in July.
However, the client is concerned that not enough of these hits
are converting into sales.
For many of our clients, converting visitors to sales (conversion
rate) is an important goal for their web site. We provide
detailed monthly statistics reports that can help determine
conversion rates - if you know how to interpret them!
To
calculate conversion rates, the most useful statistic is not the
Total Hits, but the number of Unique Human Visitors.
Unique Human Visitors is the total number of hits, with robots
and duplicate hits from the same source, removed. This gives a
better idea of the number of people looking at your site. In this
case, (not unusual for a new site) less than 300 people visited
the site in July.
Knowing that relatively few real people are visiting the site
changes the strategy from working on the conversion rate as a
primary goal, to working on the web site's traffic first. Then work
on the conversion rate by turning as many of them into
customers as possible.
Ultimately, the way to increase traffic to any site is...
marketing. One component of a company's marketing efforts
that Back2Front can assist with is search engine optimization.
For this particular site, we noticed that although this company
provides a local service, the only mention of the location is a
fairly vague "Southern Ontario". Chances are that people
looking for this service will not search on "Southern Ontario".
They will most likely search on their city or town. One of our
first recommendations therefore, is to add specific service
locations prominently on the home page.
To help with the conversion rate we recommend adding
benefit statements to the home page. Visitors may be thinking
of inspection services only when they buy or sell, and may not
be aware of other benefits of the service. We recommend
adding some good benefit copy that is short and snappy, to
encourage visitors to call sooner - something like...
Is your home making you sick? There is no substitute for good marketing and a strong business
plan. However, a company's web site constitutes a significant
part of their communications with their target market, so
optimizing it for performance is important. We will be working
with Delroy Inspections over the next few weeks to help them
make informed decisions about their web site, provide our
detailed recommendations (more that we have space for here),
and implement changes to the site, all as part of our ongoing
management service.
Volunteer your site for our next Case Study!
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 Upcoming presentations:
E-commerce - How to sell directly from your web site. Pickering Public Library Evening Business Seminar Wednesday September 17th, 6:30 to 8:30pm Members of the public are welcome. Admission is free. The 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them! Aurora Chamber of Commerce Lunch and Learn Tuesday November 18th, 12:00 to 1:30pm Cost for Potential Members: $25 |
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Here are a few of our most recent clients and their
respective web sites:
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Please let me know how you like this newsletter, or if you
have
suggestions for future issues.
I would love to hear from you!
Candace Carter
Back2Front - The Web Site People Web Site: http://back2front.ca |
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