"I really wish that when I started out on the net I could have had this course"
"What has been missing until now is now to make your website user friendly"
How to Predict Your Return on Investment for your Website
Like all investments in your business, there has to be evidence of a return before spending any money.
In the past, many companies have struggled to predict if a website update will increase sales. This is because the update process has focused primarily on business needs, with customers - the people who are actually doing the "buying" - being overlooked.
The problem with this strategy is that after the updates, if your customers are still struggling to use your website effectively, then there won't be an increase in profitability.
The Website Success System tackles this problem head-on and provides a tried-and-tested system you can apply that will prove whether or not it makes commercial sense to fix particular website issues - before you make any changes.
In essence the system allows you to find which aspects of your website stop customers from buying your goods and services, or making an enquiry.
How to Calculate the Expected Return on Investment for a Planned Website Change
The first step in evaluating the expected return is to carefully analyse where customers have problems with your website. The Website Success System takes you through this process step-by-step.
Typical problems for your customers are:
- Inability to correctly search or browse for the required item for sale
- Insufficient information to make a confident buying decision
- Confusing or frustrating checkout process
- Inappropriate cost of shipping versus the cost of the item
- Forcing them to register and create an account with you before buying
Analying the feedback you gather from customers shows you how often the issues happen and how severe the problems are for customers. This gives you important information on the probability of the issues causing the customer to abandon the sale.
This empirical data allows you to assign a value to the revenue lost for each problem customers have with your website.
You know from your webstats that 2000 visitors click on the checkout button for your website. You also know that the average spend per customer is £10.00.
75% of the customers complete the purchase, but 25% abandon their shopping carts, ( indicated by the number of visitors who exit your site from your checkout pages).
If you don't fix the areas your customers are struggling with, it means you are losing £5,000 per year (500 customers not spending £10.00).
Spend some time creating a cheap mockup on paper of the planned changes and doublecheck with your customers that your changes have solved their problems.
Note: It costs 100x less to amend the paper mockups of your planned changes than it does to fix the live system, It makes good business sense to quickly revise your mockup at this stage if you need to.
Now it's time to get some estimates of what it will cost to fix the problem.
Assess if the expected increase in sales is sufficient to justify spending money on fixing the problem.
If the cost of fixing the site is £1000 for the 25% of customers who struggled, that would bring in an extra £4000 in revenue.
Armed with this information, is is much easier to agree to the implementing the changes, because your improvements have been tested with customers beforehand, and the the expected return and the cost of the improvements have been quantified.
If you do not have customer involvement, there is no guarantee you will fix the problems and maximise the return. This lack of customer involvement is why 95% of businss website fail.
For more advice on how to work with your customers to create a high-converting, intuitive website for your business, become a member of the Website Success System TODAY!.
