AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

The chances are that most of your website is left to guesswork. Maybe you hired a “web designer” to select a pre-designed, pre-built theme and they simply switched the placeholder images and wording with the content you provided them. But does your web designer know about marketing businesses online or just about how to quickly assemble websites for their clients? This is one of the things many savvy businesses owners and marketers realise too late.

To put it another way, how do you know for sure that one version of your homepage layout works better than another version? How do you know if the wording on one page that describes your products or services converts more leads or sales than different wording? Or that including a simple gallery, instead of a slideshow, will be the factor that increases sales? Do you even know why the majority of your site visitors give up on your site and bounce back to the search results to look at what your competitors are offering? To answer the above questions, we provide a range of CRO A/B and multivariate testing services that can pay for themselves many times over.

Web page split-testing is a tried and tested method we use to increases leads or sales for our clients. Far too many small businesses stay small because their marketing agency never took the initiative to find out for a fact which layouts and wording produce the best results – even though this taps into the real power of marketing on the web. Implementing CRO best practices (and not generic web designer’s whims) are often the biggest opportunity many growing brands neglect to take advantage of.

As a sole trader, freelancer, startup or small business owner, or indeed a member of a marketing team tasked with the job of creating and monetising new markets, you likely know exactly how your business’s homepage is worded and looks. But do you know for a fact the list of benefits of hiring or buying from you (rather than the competition) contains the important elements? Should you include a price visitors can see? Should you request site visitors to use the contact form or instead encourage them to give you a call, or should you have them fill a “request a callback” form to generate more leads and sales?

We are able to answer all the above questions and a whole lot more using scientific split-testing rather than relying on your team’s best guesses and gut-feelings. CRO split-testing allows you to prove which elements work better than others. This knowledge is key to tapping into all those extra sales leads that you are currently turning away with sub-optimal design and marketing copy.

Experienced digital marketers are well aware that most web designers don’t realise that homepage slideshows are one of the worst “conversion-killers” due to hiding critical messaging in slides that most visitors don’t notice or even see. Many sites are created using generic templates that were designed by coders who have little experience in writing compelling sales and marketing copy. And few website owners or marketing managers know CRO best practices and are unaware of the missed opportunities of ensuring your homepage has a short simple “proposition”, benefits list and small contact form in full view. These elements usually completely out-perform generic templated homepages containing slideshows.

Don’t take our word for it though. If you can’t afford to lose all those potential customers then Conversion Rate Optimisation is a win-win situation. At worst, the results of a round of split-testing can tell you that the new variation didn’t perform as well as your existing page. At worst it shows exactly which changes would produce more leads and sales. Not doing split testing (or even knowing CRO best practices and the rules of thumb that have come out of millions of individual split tests) means not caring if your site is doing its job properly. For some people, that is just fine. For others it can be the difference between their business growing, just surviving or dying.

Albion makes the process of creating new variations of one of your homepage or landing page wording or layout a simple one. We make use of A/B split testing tools such as Optimizely to make the changes and then send a share of your existing traffic to each variation. And that is all that is needed to allow you the customer to sit back and monitor the results that show which variation generates the most leads or sales conversions from your existing traffic.

The only thing to ask yourself now is did we guess what to put on our website? and do we know for a fact that other variations wouldn’t generate more revenue and profits? Now is the right time to join your competitors in properly using websites as marketing tools. This will let you better understand how potential customers think, and how to tap into that intelligence to make more money from the increased profits and ongoing growth your small business deserves.