The most important thing about being in business, aside from building relationships, is increasing your sales and your digital marketing ROI.  But exactly how do you go about doing that?  By optimizing your new website to its fullest potential.  Your website is the one thing that can increase your sales more than any other marketing tool you have at your disposal.  However, you must first know how to set up that website the right way, if you want to increase your sales. 

1. A Responsive Design

A website that has a responsive design provides the customer with the best viewing experience possible.  It should be easy to read and easy to navigate through without having to resize, pan or involve excessive scrolling.  Additionally, that means your website should be mobile ready; otherwise, you'll be losing a good portion of your traffic to your competitors. 

You need to pay attention to things like having flexible images, fluid page element sizing and the speed at which your site loads.  You'll need to test your website in all the most popular browsers.  Your website may look fine in Firefox or Chrome but it may not display properly in another web browser.  Periodic testing is key.

Is Your New Website Design Helping You Or Hurting You?

Put yourself in the customer's shoes.  Click around on your website to see if the navigation makes sense and if everything takes you where it says it's taking you.  Are all the links working and do they open in a new window.  It's important that a customer can easily get back to your site after they've clicked on one of your links. 

Does your new website have a free offer or promotional discount that would encourage your customer to opt-in to your offering.  This should be something of extreme value if you want to increase your opt-in rates and grow your customer base.  

Your offer should be displayed prominently at the top right-hand or left-hand corner of your website for the best exposure and the most responsiveness.  Your most successful offers should always be placed above the fold.  Many times a customer won't bother to scroll down and if your offer is below the fold, you may lose a subscriber due to customer laziness. 

Try to avoid too much clutter on your pages.  Pages that are littered with Adsense or other ads are very distracting and will discourage customer interaction.  Additionally, try to avoid cramming too much content onto each page.  You need to leave enough white space and add images to help break up your content and make it more readable.  Keep in mind that many of your customers will only scan your content so it needs to be presented in a way that will make it easy for all types of readers and all types of mobile devices as well.

2. Strong Calls To Action

You must have a strong call to action on each page, one that immediately grabs the attention of your customer and leads them through to your offer or where ever it is you want them to end up. A strong call to action tells the reader exactly what it is you want them to do.

Your calls to action must be tested and tweaked constantly to determine what's working and what's not.  Never let anything rest.  There is always something that may work better.  Testing and split-testing are extremely important if you want to grow your digital marketing ROI. 

3. An Exceptional Content Strategy

Does your content strategy include the six basic marketing components?  Your inbound marketing strategies must include the who, what, when, where, why and how if you want your campaign to be successful.

• Who - who is your target audience
• What - what is your message and is that message designed to appeal to your target audience
• When - when should all of your content be created and published
• Where - where will your content be distributed, what location, on what devices, in which context
• Why - why are you developing each piece of content , what is its purpose, what result are you expecting from it
• How - how should you structure the content and how should it be presented

These six components should be put onto a checklist and used to make sure each of these basic content strategy elements are covered in every marketing campaign you produce. 

Your content strategy is another area that needs to be continually tested and tweaked depending on the success or lack thereof for each marketing campaign.  After you've determined which strategies give you the most return on your marketing investment, you can ramp up the content you post. 

On that same note, never rest on your laurels.  You may have a particular campaign that has performed beautifully for a long time.  However, that doesn't mean that it always will.  Stay on top of your campaigns and make changes immediately if you notice any drop in performance.

Bottom Line

If you want your new website to perform as expected or better, you need to pay close attention to the responsiveness of your website design and adjust it accordingly.  Make sure your team is educated on how to develop strong titles, strong headlines and strong call to action verbiage.  You also need to blueprint an exceptional content strategy and test it continuously to make sure you're getting the best digital marketing ROI possible.