Our tips for building a results driven website

At Black Sheep, we're passionate about creating websites that truly make a difference. We're excited to share our know-how to help you get the most out of your website. We believe you can achieve fantastic business results while offering an amazing experience on your site. 

With 22 years of experience working with marketing teams, communication teams, business managers, and owners, we're here to share our insights with folks like you.

This guide is brimming with our top tips for building websites that not only deliver results but also ensure a wonderful customer experience.

Forget what you know about traditional website design—it's time to think bolder and smarter. This guide dives deep into creating a site that doesn’t just look good but acts like a top-notch salesperson.

Your website can drive better user experience when it acts as an effective sales person. 

Say what!?

From a User Experience perspective, this might sound counter intuitive. When you hear about user experience you may think about performance, speed, usability, labels, information architecture, layouts and more..

These things are important, and form a part of delivering great user experiences. But in this article, we are going to be taking a different angle and talking about user experience in a way that focuses on business results too.

Because, while these measures are part of an important experience, we believe that knowing your customers, knowing how to sell to them, and understanding how to optimise your website for conversion are vitally important. 

To make sure your website acts as an effective sales person, it needs to embody the principles of a great salesperson. When speaking with the right people, which your marketing efforts should help you achieve, your website should take those individuals by the hand, and walk them through the buyer journey. If you think about a fairly standard sales process, your seller will.

1. Help visitors qualify they are talking to the right person
2. Demonstrate professionalism and clear communication to build trust. 
3. Answer any questions and address objections
4. Help guide a buyer through the process
5. Meet buying signals with closing techniques
6. Keep track of their sales activities
7. Engage in ongoing development to improve their close rate. 

When delivering a great user experience, it is important to focus on not just addressing this list, but addressing this in a way that provides a great experience and speaks to your customers needs directly. 

So let’s break this down into some specific examples which you can apply to your website as soon as today!

Help visitors qualify they are talking to the right person

When someone lands on your website, it is usually not an accident. In a world with hundreds of millions of websites and an abundance of choices. Consumers are unlikely to stumble upon your website for no reason. 

This makes it extremely important that your website qualifies those people are in exactly the right place fast, instantly in fact! The typical amount of time a user spends on a web page is 15 seconds, and the moment they land, they are trying to decide if they are in the right place, and if you have a solution for them. 

Take our website home page for example. The first thing we tell people is “we design and build websites that deliver real results” Our goal is to capture the attention of people looking for help with their websites. This is a simple yet effective tagline that automatically lets people looking for a website know they are in exactly the right place. 

The benefits of helping users know they are in exactly the right place, straight away is a how you entice users to take the next step in their journey. Now they know they are in the right place on your website, the next question is likely - And can you solve my specific problem?

Demonstrate professionalism and clear communication.

Before we dive into guiding customers toward your solution to their problem. Let’s talk quickly about professionalism, clear communication and how effective this is in building trust. When we talk about sales here at Black Sheep, we talk about being in the business of building trust and trust building is the business your website is in.

Your website needs to exude professionalism and clearly communicate to your audience in order to build trust. This is achieved through a great many things including having a great brand and applying that brand effectively to your website. 

To be more specific - when we say ‘brand’, we don’t just mean logo. We really mean a brand, an identity that helps back the quality of your product, service or message. This involves having a solid Logo, Typography and colour palette for sure. But it goes further than that. Defining your brand values, position, tone, voice, imagery and the profile of the customer you are trying to appeal to.

All of these things together put a driving force behind your message. They shout, not only are we good at what we do, but we are also proud of what we do, and we are prepared to invest in articulating that clearly and beautifully in a way that aligns with the value of our ideal customer in an authentic way. What’s not to trust there!

Help guide a buyer through the process.

When a buyer moves on from the content you have above the fold they are either signalling that you gave them enough information to qualify your solution further, or they’re still trying to figure out if they are in the right place. If you have helped your customer confirm they are in the right place, there are a few possible next steps your customer may want to take. 

1. They want to talk to someone, and need to find out how. 
2. They have a specific problem, and need to find out if you solve that specific problem
3. They aren’t 100% sure you are the right solution for them and need proof
4. They have heard about you, and are looking for something specific, like a project, person or location
5. They are unsure about the process and are looking for guidance and leadership
6. They are unsure about their problem and want you to help them understand if they have one
7. There is limited choice for people who can solve their problem and they want to address specific objections in their mind about you.

For your product or service it could be one of these, a mixture or something entirely different. And one of the biggest challenges your website needs to overcome is to understand specifically what your target customer is going to be visiting your website for so you can effectively address them.

This is one of Black Sheep's points of difference. We have a real focus on helping businesses really understand their users, so they can be more effective with what content they put on their website, where that content lives and how that content is optimised to convert people from website visitors into customers and qualified leads.

How well do you know your customers, and how clear are you on why users may be visiting your website and where they are in their journey to having their problem solved?

Answer any questions and address objections.

Do you know your customers' common objections when it comes to buying your product or service? Are your customers worried about the times you are able to provide your service? Perhaps they are concerned you are not going to be thorough and the outcome will be sloppy because of previous experience.

It is important to understand the questions and objections users may come to your website looking to have answered. A real seller is going to be looking for these and seeking to have answers to them throughout the sales process. The disadvantage your website has over a seller is that is can not ask open ended questions to uncover problems and diagnose them.

If your website is able to effectively address your users' concerns and questions more effectively then your competitors, without overwhelming your users with content, then you are going to be more likely to convert a website visitor into a lead or a sale. 

Reflecting on this section, would you be able to put yourself into the shoes of your buyer and have a clear indication of what questions or objections they are most likely to be looking to answer on your website?

Meet buying signals with closing techniques

As users move through the buyer journey, you want to make sure that journey is designed to recognise that movement as buying signals and is set up to capture more leads earlier in the process.

Typically, this is referred to as call to action (CTA). It is important you are putting calls to action in targeted places on your website to help people move through the buying process with you, before they need to engage with further steps, potentially get distracted and fall out of the buyer journey. 

One piece of advice we can give is, good call to actions have meaningful labels and are clear in what they are asking users to do. Bad calls to action are things that ask people do something without having a clear outcome

• Click Here
• More
• Contact

Great calls to actions are clear, specific and help search engines clearly understand what the next step is going to be. Some great calls to action are

• Get a free appraisal
• Find your nearest clinic
• Book your appointment
• Add to cart
• Shop now

There is a common sales adage, that says “Stop at yes” so this is another great tactic to help empower your website to work like an effective sales person. Stop at yes and give users the ability to convert early and often. 

Are you meeting your customers' buyers signals with opportunities to convert early and often? If not, dive into your website and start asking!

Keep track of their sales activities

Some of our astute readers out there may be getting through this article thinking, well none of this is worth the time if you aren’t measuring it. And we agree! If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And when it comes to giving your users a great customer journey and an amazing customer experience, measuring it is the only way to give yourself the opportunity to understand what is and what isn’t working.

More importantly, knowing specifically what success looks like and what the right things to track are will help you keep focused on improving the things that are going to have the biggest impact. Here are some of the key things we think you should be keeping track of.

Getting an understanding for volume of traffic up front gives you the starting metric for conversion. When you know how many people are using your website, you can start categorising them into why and then hone in on which traffic is converting where. 

Knowing where your traffic is coming from is vital for understanding why they are on your website to begin with, and where you are winning and losing. Direct traffic from existing customers, organic search traffic, referral traffic and search engine marketing traffic are all going to have different metrics and objectives. 

When you see who is leaving fast, and from where you can diagnose which top of funnel activities may not be hitting the mark. Are you appearing in search engines for the same things users are actually looking for? Is your content qualifying people in the wrong place? This is a great indicator of brand, content and traffic source quality. 

Sometimes you want high time on page, other times you want lower time on page. For a blog or case study, longer engagement is better. On a cart, you don’t want people sitting there for ages trying to make a decision. If your users are bouncing from your blog or case studies quickly, there is a great opportunity for problem solving. 

As users flow through your website, having tracking on your calls to action will help you understand which calls to action are performing and which aren’t. Comparing interaction with your calls to action to traffic also gives you the opportunity to track how effectively particular content or messaging may be aligning to your 

Keeping track of the number of leads that convert to a sale gives you a clear understanding of your lead quality. Your marketing activities may bring you 100 leads, but if only 1 of those leads converts to a sale, your customer acquisition cost might be on the high side. 

Engage in ongoing development to improve their close rate. 

We opened this blog post talking about how you ideally want your website to be your number one salesperson. I have met a lot of excellent sales people in my life and one thing I can tell you for certain. Those sellers who continue to be great never stop learning and growing. If you want your website to be an effective function for your business then it needs ongoing growth and development. 

We touched on a lot of different aspects of a successful website, and we talked a lot about activities that help you learn and understand more about your customers. These are the insights that should help you decide the areas you need to invest in developing this sales person to deliver on more effectively. 

You may think of this as an ‘agile’ approach to your website, but my preferred way to think about it is:

• Build
  • Build your website, go, do it! Make something and get it in front of people. All the better if it is expertly designed and developed with an amazing brand and compelling content to help it shine.
• Measure
  • Put the things in place to measure its success. Where is it in search rankings, and how is traffic flowing through to your calls to action. 
• Learn
  • Talk to real customers about their buying and product experience, is this reflected in your website and customer journey. 
• Repeat
  • Now build, take these learning and determine how they can be applied to your website, apply them, measure them, learn again and keep on going. 

Keeping an ongoing development schedule for your website can be as lean or as intense as is required for your business. Different outfits are going to have different needs and value their website differently.

So when did you last make a change to your website in order to enhance the outcome it is delivering for your business, and how are you measuring the success of those changes?

Final Reflections

As you focus on these elements, your website transforms into a powerful asset that not only attracts and retains customers but also drives tangible business results. The journey of enhancing your website is ongoing, but with each step, you're building a stronger, more effective presence that serves your business goals.

We would love to hear what you were able to take from this article and how you were able to improve your website to deliver better results. Drop us a line on our contact form or reach out on socials.

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