Marketing and the clear definition of a Brand Proposition are central building blocks for a growing business. But, ask an MD or Sales Director of a growing SME and they will probably tell you sales is much more important than the ‘fluffy’ stuff.

But, the dichotomy is that when it comes to the web, clear marketing definition and execution are essential to delivering sales leads – especially when it comes to design and web usability.

Here’s a couple of recent examples that I’ve worked on that demonstrate that website usability can deliver sales and profit to many different types of businesses, often very cost-effectively.

Website Usability Audit For B2C

In conjunction with a web agency, I recently helped produce a website audit for a large B2C company, backed up with some creative to answer any issues that were discovered. With the realisation that online marketing should be delivering more for the sales pipeline, they commissioned a number of web agencies to appraise their website from the view of a user. For a company with revenues of nearly £100 million, this could turn out to be a shrewd investment that could have a large impact to income generated via the online channel.

With a defined service offering and target market briefed by the client, I set up some usability sessions with people who fit the company’s customer profile to understand how the website performed. This objective approach to analysing a websites performance can often be a real eye-opener. The sessions offered two key pieces of feedback (a long with a raft of other ideas).

1. Clarity of the product offering was poor. The test subjects could not understand the context and relevance of the product that is being offered. This created confusion and lack of understanding of ‘what’ to buy.
2. One of the central pages in the sales enquiry process hindered 84% of the subjects to take the next step to enquiry due to lack of product understanding. It was like asking someone to pick one of the products before they fully understood which one they needed.

If on a large scale, 84% of people abandon the checkout procedure, how much potential revenue is lost? Or, to twist it on its head, if tweaks were made to solve the problems (less than a days work), how much additional revenue would this amount to?

Focusing The Online Sales Process For B2B

I started working with an HR outsourcing company back in May. Traffic had been steadily growing on their site with outsourced SEO and link-building having been contracted to a firm in India. But – if I may be so bold – it was a “quantity over quality” approach that was not delivering business results.

After interviews with the Sales Director and Managing Director, I began to understand the company sales proposition from their point-of-view. But, they don’t buy their own products and services: So I did some more digging to understand the issues that the target markets they sell to face; issues that would lead them to needing the services of my client.

By honing the website content and toning down the existing content search engine optimisation (which had been over engineered) the traffic is already starting to grow faster (in less than 60 days) and, more importantly, the traffic to the website is much more relevant.

But, there was another part of the sales process missing. The website was too passive in terms of turning traffic into enquiry and some small design changes were made to the website:

1. Call-to-actions on service pages to lead the way to enquiry
2. Simplification of the enquiry form and re-wording of the field names and instructions to encourage people to complete the form.

Bearing in mind, this website had not had any online enquiries for six months, they received five within two weeks of the changes.

Summary

Good web design is not about ‘fluffy’ or ‘pretty’. It’s about function. Yes, design plays a huge part in displaying content and call-to-actions, but fundamental layout and action oriented ‘interface’ design are the key drivers to make things happen. You need a starting point, but soon enough, users will start voting with their clicks.

Whereas many companies are looking for SEO to solve their online conversion problems, it’s actually more about website usability. With constant feedback from user experience and analytics, there are no excuses not to leverage the data to define a more user focused, humanized website experience.

The investment into good web design creates sales.

Find out more about how Click 71 can help improve your website design.