Your website might get thousands of visitors a month, but the bottom line is that if it is not making you money, it is costing you money. How do you make people buy products on a website, or make contact enquiries? This brings to mind the age old proverb, “You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink”. Or can you?

The layout of your website and strategically placed calls-to-action are crucial to its success or failure. A call-to-action refers to an enquire button, a contact us link, or anything that engages the site visitor to take some kind of action that you consider valuable. There are various rules of thumb that should always be kept in mind when designing a layout for a site, and aiming for optimal conversion statistics.

They are:

• Calls to action should stand out, be large enough and be very visible to the visitor.
• These buttons, links or forms should ALWAYS be above the “fold” of the webpage. (The fold refers to the point at which you need to scroll down to view the bottom of the webpage).
• Wording that often increases click-through rates include, “free”, “now”, “instant” & “enquire”.
• Flashing or moving buttons often bring attention to the call-to-action, however this should not be excessive.
• They should be visible on all pages, not only selected ones.

Right, now once you are getting all your visitors to the contact or sales forms, you need them to complete these forms before quitting. The conversion rate of any form is inversely proportional to the length of the form or number of required fields. So, the shorter the enquiry form for instance, the more people will complete and send it. A form with fifteen required fields however will have a relatively low conversion rate. Also a two step form will convert less than a single page form.