How to Coax More Yes Votes Out of Your Visitors

The People's Choice by ponchosqueal

Like it or not, our visitors are constantly voting on our websites, and your website’s conversion rate is the tally of their votes.  It doesn’t matter how much sparkle you spritz on your home page, if your visitors don’t take that next step, they’re voting “No” to your website.

So how do you coax more “yes” votes out of your visitors?  Run a live test on your website. Not the whole website at once, but start with your worst performing page.  Design an alternative page and run a test where half your visitors see the new page and the other half see the current page.  Now watch your visitors voting for the page they like the most.

Before you Start, Think About These 3 Things:

• What’s the Plan? In the beginning, you didn’t design your website without some sort of plan in mind, so why would you start website testing without an action plan? Get your whole team involved.  Put your writing wizard on the editing, have your resident market-eer look over the analytics, and have your visual guru look at your design and graphics.  Come up with some alternative ideas and then a plan of attack.

• Keep it simple: Trying to get everything done in one test is a common mistake.  Will you really be able to tell which version is actually better?  Are the results conflicting or confusing?  The more variables you test, the more traffic you need to produce statistically viable results.  If you try to test a lot of variables, and you don’t have a lot of traffic, your test could run years, before you get any results you can use.  Keeping it simple for the first few tests will let you get comfortable with the tools and give you data you can work with, in a reasonable amount of time.

• Test and Test again: If Amazon and Google are constantly testing various page versions in a never ending effort to improve their sales and their search results, shouldn’t you?  Once you get your first set of test results, see how you can build on them.  Review them, make the changes, and test again. Get one page working really well, move on to another one – as long as you’re online, the optimization process is ongoing.

Want to read more about landing page testing and optimization?

The #1 Website Redesign Mistake

The #2 Website Redesign Mistake

An Excellent Landing Page Combined with an Unfortunate Picture

Not ready to go it alone on testing a landing page?

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