To get users to take action from your site, you first need to be very clear WHAT action you want them to take. Do you want to generate more calls? Or does your sales team get too many calls from people that aren’t good prospects and you would actually like to filter the number of people who call you? Do you want to generate email list sign-ups, webinar registrations or more ecommerce sales? Most sites want some combination of the above. While you can have multiple calls to action (CTAs), having more than two CTAs can just lead to confusion. Therefore you need to prioritize…

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Great marketing copy inspires, motivates and almost compels users to take action. It does such a good job of talking to your customers core needs and concerns that they literally love you just for writing it and feel excited by the possibility that you can satisfy their need. How do you do that? Here are some tips:

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The intro text on your site needs to immediately capture people's attention and give them a reason to read more. It shouldn't be a book, more like a sentence or two that pulls them in. The majority of visitors will take a quick look at your site and go elsewhere. If you use Google Analytics, this is called your "Bounce Rate", i.e., what percentage of people go to your home page and quickly bounce away from it. How to you grab visitors and get them to stay? Simple, you speak directly to their core needs and major concerns.
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Most of the clients we work with provide their own copy for their website although an increasing number are asking us to help write the text or are hiring other professional copywriters. If you are writing the content for your website, here are some tips to keep in mind. This is part IV in the series on increasing your online credibility.

There are several categories of site content:

1. Your Positioning Statement
2. Introductory Text
3. Supporting Content
4. Call To Action

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Everyone says what they DO on their website. “We fix computers”, “We sell homes”, “We make BBQ sauce”, etc. This is important – people need to know what you do or sell. However, it does little to increase your credibility. People know what you do, but do they trust you to do it well? To do it at a reasonable cost? Within a reasonable time frame? Not likely. The problem is that anyone can say anything on the internet and it’s up to us as consumers to sort out the well-made stuff from the junk, the great services from the lousy. Marketers have crossed the trust line so many times in the name of profit that many of us have become slow to trust. How can you build trust just with the words that you use?

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Last time I talked about the fact that credibility is the single most important factor in turning website visitors into prospects and customers. The design of your site was covered as one of the ways of establishing credibility. Here is another.

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The classic cartoon to the right illustrates the basic problem all of your prospects face when they try to decide whether or not to buy your product or service. If they don’t know you or haven’t been referred to you by someone they trust, they have no idea if you are a “dog” or not. Since anyone can put up a website, are you for real? Visitors to your site are constantly evaluating on a conscious and unconscious level whether they believe they can trust you – whether you will deliver on the promise you are advertising. This is a measure of your credibility. Webster’s defines credibility as “the quality or power of inspiring belief”. The greater your credibility, the more likely that someone will buy from you site unseen.

So, how do you increase your credibility or believability through your website? There are many ways. I’ll discuss the first here and more in a later entry.

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