Is this the face of your website?
How many times have you had the pimply teenager version of customer service?
“Welcometomcdonaldsmayitakeyourorder?”
What about pimply teenager sales technique?
“That’llbe4.47pleasepullforward”
The pimply upsell?
“Wouldyouliketoaddapieforonly99cents?”
There’s a lot of websites out there that are pimply teenagers. They’re order takers or worse – they can’t even take an order.
The curse of the pimply website
Open up your site and read it.
Does it do even a mediocre job of selling your products and services or does it treat sales as an afterthought?
Many read like really bad sales copy. Stuff we’d be embarrassed to say to a customer’s face.
“whenyourelookingforaqualityexpertexperiencewiththebestcustomerserviceyoucancountonus”
“weservicethegreatermetropolitanareawiththebestpossibleserviceandamazingsatisfaction.”
Yeah, your website needs to wash its face and lay off the chocolate, because even a bored teenager at minimum wage could make a better sales pitch.
If your site is “informational,” kill it now.
Remember the last time you engaged with a teenager who thought his destiny was to be “informational.” Tell me you didn’t want to kill him.
While it’s better to have any website at all than no website, the “informational” website just invites itself over and eats all the food from your fridge.
A website should be designed to sell visitors on the company and its products.
Your website is a salesman. The product of your website is sales.
As David Ogilvy said, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”
Give your site the report card it deserves
Look at your website as if you were a new customer.
- Does it sell you on the company and its products?
- Do you read the copy and want to buy what is being offered? (For comparison, find the last thing you bought online and look at the copy used. Is your copy that good?)
- Does it give visitors the information they are looking for?
- Does it give you a very clear idea of what to do next?
- Do you know of questions that your customers frequently ask that aren’t addressed on the website?
Try to sign up for a product or service.
- Are there unnecessary steps in the process?
- Is it easy to sign up?
- Is any part of the process confusing?
- Is there any part of the process that you would distrust if you were unfamiliar with the site?
Try to contact the company.
- Is there a clear way to reach the company via the web?
- Do the email links work?
- Does the contact form work?
- Does contacting the company require unnecessary steps or unnecessary input of information?
My company does a free website analysis. I’ll look over your site and answer these questions, and give you a free program of things to do to immediately boost website results. I don’t give away your email address, but I might suggest further paid services. Either way, I’ll try to help you get your website to grow up, stop slacking off and start pulling its own weight around here.