Is Your Website Leaving Money on the Table? 3 Ways to Know

If your company website is running on autopilot, chances are it isn’t making you money. Want to know if you’re missing out on opportunities? Evaluate where you stand against these three big-value items.

Your website is leaving money on the table if:

1. It Isn’t Responsive

Responsive website design is a way of coding and designing a site so that it offers a user-friendly experience for people regardless of the size of device they’re using. Don’t think this is important? Think again! It’s 2015 folks, and responsive websites have been the best practice for more than 2 1/2 years.

If your company website still features static-width design, you are losing tons of traffic from searches for your products and services. It’s not unusual for companies (even those in B-to-B) to see 30%, 40%, even 50% of their site traffic from mobile devices. Tablets are taking the corporate world by storm (have you been issued a Microsoft Surface tablet yet?), and if your site is a drag to navigate, your visitors are highly unlikely to move through your sales funnel in an efficient way.

So what now? First, don’t plan on retrofitting what you have into a fabulous new responsive site. You’ll quickly discover that it’s more cost-effective to start fresh.

Besides (and more importantly), if your site is still a fixed-width, chances are your company messaging has evolved. Approach a move to responsive as an opportunity to take a hard look at your goals. Get your priorities right and create a site that positions your company for the future.

2. You Don’t Pay Attention to Your Analytics

Are you a fan of the “free gift with purchase?” Then get excited. Your website has been storing up a veritable goldmine of data, and it’s just waiting for you to dig in. Even the most simple website has a large amount of information available to it at no additional cost to you through Google Analytics – one of the most powerful free tools out there.

Your site analytics can tell you a lot about the people who are visiting your website and how they’re using it. Ignoring your analytics is equivalent to letting your office phone ring and never answering it!

Beginners will want to check out the number of unique site visitors and most trafficked pages. Delve deeper into the treasure trove by establishing goals related to your sales funnel and keep track of the number of conversions you get. Don’t like the results? Use the data you’ve gathered to improve your site!

Ancillary digital marketing tools including Google AdWords, Facebook, and email marketing engines like MailChimp and MyEmma also collect data. Pay attention to your engagement numbers – what content are folks reading and sharing? Once you know, you can share more of the insight your clients want.

After you get into the habit of studying your analytics regularly, you can focus on greater segmentation of audiences and automated marketing. Really ready to embrace analytics to further your business? Check out tools such as HubSpot, Silverpop, Pardot, or Infusionsoft.

3. Your Forms Are an Afterthought

Consider: the forms on your website are the single easiest way to collect specific information from potential clients. Once they’re up and running, good forms are a fantastic vetting tool. But bad forms… well… bad forms are the web equivalent of an obnoxious salesperson.

When planning a form experience, consider two things: the technical experience and appropriate placement in the sales funnel.

The way a user completes your form is very important. The form should be responsive (see above!) and make the most of the native functionality on the device your site visitor is using. Using native functionality means that completing the form will be comfortable for your potential customer – putting the experience on their terms, not yours. Form fields also need to be tall enough to fit an adult fingertip – no one likes to discover they’ve clicked on something other than what they intended. We call this “Fat Finger Syndrome,” and it’s been causing trouble for years.

Once you have the technical elements of your forms nailed down, think carefully about where and when your site visitors will encounter them. Pushing an unqualified lead to sign up for a demo on the first page of your site could cost you lots of time and money. Plan carefully for landing pages (reached by paid advertising or organic search) to deliver the content a user wants so you can capture the information you want from them. And remember – once a form comes in, you need to be ready to address it quickly. Whether it pushes directly into a system such as Salesforce or goes to an email inbox, responding promptly is essential to establishing trust early in your client/vendor relationship.