When you first build your company website, it is about what you think should go into it. Then, your customers visit, some of them engage and leave comments or ask questions. Then, you make changes to the website, so that more customers will do the same thing. Finding out which parts of your website provide the most value to your customers is always work in progress.
If you keep putting in the effort and respond to customer queries and enhance the areas helpful to customers, you’re optimising the website – it’s as simple as that. Some of it could include making videos for the text content you already have on the website. Or it could mean simplifying some of the content, if customers seem to skip over it, or spend little time on it.
Somehow, optimising a website is understood more as a technical requirement. Making it faster, improving the SEO, and the display of content across devices and so on. But the effort needs to help customers understand your product, your market and services better – the more you achieve this, the higher your return on investment will be.
Typically, this is one of the most important points of obtaining customer information. And that’s where you develop an acute sense of how customers view your product and how they think it improves their business.
In a form, most of the time, the information collected is the name, business email and designation. But it is possible to deepen the information collected, with a few changes when creating the form in HubSpot.
In a HubSpot webinar, Matthias Winkler from HubSpot showed how forms could be tweaked to get more ‘actionable’ information with dynamic additions that let you know more about the customer.
For example, if an industry shows ecommerce, then a new field for the customer to fill would be seniority. And if they indicate they are influencers, another field to enter the number of followers on Twitter will show up.
Optimise for customers – understand what they need, keep responding and address the issues they raise. That is the key to making websites ‘better’
These are examples of ‘dependence’ fields, which only display when more information will help to identify or understand the customer better.
The other tweak is a ‘progressive’ field. The best place to use this is when you are seeking additional information about a returning customer. So, assume that a customer is logged in from a previous visit, the standard field, let’s say ‘industry’ does not show. Instead, it displays a field called ‘mobile number.’
Now, two things are established with a progressive form field – it shows that a customer is returning and if they provide their mobile number, a willingness to engage to take the relationship further.
Custom subdomains, the one that appears before your main domain is a great way to improve visibility and searchability on the web. It helps people looking to visit sections of your website or allied businesses find them easily.
Classification and labelling the parts of your website customers want to get to makes navigation easier, helps your SEO and most importantly, reduces confusion. All of which are great objectives to aspire to.
Look at the HubSpot website itself. Though there are a huge number of pages and sections, getting to case studies, or the marketing blog, or the community page, or the academy are just single clicks away.
It is important to know how you will serve your customers or how you want to engage with them. The analogy that could be used to illustrate this is the sections of a large store. How do you help people to find what they are looking for? By clearly placing signs and navigational aids where they can see them and understand which aisle they need to visit. Returning shoppers then find what they want easily and as the experience improves, shopping at the store becomes a regular habit.
All the technical aspects of optimising websites are essential. But the true objective of optimisation is to ensure that customers benefit from the information on your website.
The top menu in your website could be one of the ways to navigate but having subdomains, as the number of pages grow and you build depth into sections of your site ensures that visitors can find what they want every time. Unless you’re going in for a complete revamp, it is advisable to make the changes gradually, see the effect and then go further.
In a recent post, the need to specifically identify the action required by customers and where they should be used was dealt with in some detail.
Now, there are a couple of additional things to keep in mind about CTAs in HubSpot – the link in a CTA could lead to a landing page, a campaign, or collateral like eBooks and white papers. The advantage is that if you make changes to the placement of these on the web page, you simply have to update the CTA button and the links will update automatically, unlike when pages are updated manually and a few connections break.
And connecting the CTA’s to multiple campaigns is a way to assess which ones get the most traction and response. That in turn, tells you what works with customers.
That helps to build the next stage and strategy for exploring communication – apart from knowing which benefits resonate the most.
Blueoshan’s consultants can help to set up everything from landing campaigns to workflows on the website, by understanding how the market works in your business. That is an important starting point. Workflows and campaigns should reflect existing market practices and norms.
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Blueoshan is a HubSpot Diamond -Tier Solutions Partner. Delivering worldwide from India.