I love Glengarry Glen Ross Movie. There really is no better sales monologue than when Alec Baldwin berates the lagging office while driving home a few great points about sales effectiveness. The simplest of those (besides “coffee is for closers”) is ABC: “always be closing.” While that is of course great advice for a sales rep (even Jack Lemon’s character), it is equally true for a marketing manager when redesigning a corporate website.
Make sure that your visitors have a chance to convert in every touch that they have and earn money online from converting traffic. Think about the page visitors land on most frequently — your homepage. Most companies, in a rush to provide as many options as possible, do not do a great job of converting traffic from this page. Think about the characteristics of the typical corporate site: dozens of links, some sort of lifestyle image in a banner, and either no call to action or too many call to actions.
- Stick to one main call to action (flash demo, product test drive, key white paper, etc.) representing the one key thing that you hope your visitors do.
- If you have secondary calls to action, keep them smaller and in a different design element (different color, style of button, etc.)
- Make sure you have a call to action at the bottom of each interior page, even if it just a text link(s) to other areas of your site. Most site content simply ends at the bottom of the page leaving the reader to scroll back up to the top or click the back button in the browser.
- If you are linking off of your site (to partner sites, articles, etc.), set the link to open in a new tab/window to avoid losing the visitor.
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