Continually Improving Your Communications
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In the previous post “Communication In Your Web Design” I talked about how your web design can actually communicate to your visitors as to whether you are a “Trusted Expert” or not. In this post, I talk about the final phase of your communications strategy and becoming (and staying) a Trusted Expert which is…
TESTING
Why do you run tests?
So you can be as certain as possible that your communications strategy is helping rather than hurting your online business.
You’ll never know if you have the right site for your customers unless you test it.
You need to examine all the elements of the site – every single thing on your site is part of what will persuade user to purchase. You can’t take your assumptions and intuitions for granted, or assume that traditional marketing practices will apply. You have to examine everything you do with a critical eye. To be a Trusted Expert, you must have the best and most functional site you possibly can.
One of the best ways to realize the full potential of your website is by testing, and to keep right on testing. Your website is like your spokesperson, and it works 24/7 – out there, interacting with potential customers, all the time trying to persuade them to take action. You need to know if the assumptions under which you built your site are, in fact, true and meet the needs and expectations of your audience.
There are three major components to your ‘testing’ process that you need to take into consideration: testing, measuring, and optimizing.
Testing is when you compare elements on your sites or within your advertising campaigns to see which variation or combination is the best for persuading users to complete the desired action, whether that be a sale or a sign-up.
Measuring is when you monitor what the visitors to your site do. Using an analytics program such as Google Analytics (which is free, so why wouldn’t you use it?) you determine key performance indicators – traffic, overall conversation rate, page abandonment rate, length of time spent on a page, etc.
Optimization is when you put your test results in action to maximize your conversion rate. You take your insights and learnings from the tests you ran and put the results into action on your site.
As you test, you’ll learn more about the assumptions you made when you crafted your communications strategy. You’ll reinforce some assumptions, and have to refine and change others. While no one wants to be proven wrong, the great part about this process is that you are learning things about your buyer personas, and learning what they like, in real time.
You can use this information to continually improve your communications strategy. When you know what your buyers want, you’ll find it easier to be a Trusted Expert to them. As you grow more familiar with your users and what they want, you can create more meaningful options to test to continue to further improve your site, improving your conversion rate the entire time.
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and depending on what type of platform you’re on (specific CMS, Wodpress, etc) there will be a huge forum community that will always be up for providing feedback.
i find when I do a lot of designs I’m often on Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla forums getting amazing feed back from the community. It’s always import to get an ‘outside’ eye to review the work and step in as a customer or client.
Great thoughts Cow. It’s important for us to remember that testing is a crucial step in building a trusted, reliable blog resource. There are endless reserves that may be tapped into – just because of a tweak here or there.
Great inputs. Patience is the key when doing testing. Takes a lot of time and effort but definitely worth it.
Thanks for the input about testing. I will try to review my blog.
Testing has become one of the important feature in almost all industries now.Thanks for a review about this.
Right on point John.
If you can test it – you can improve it!
Igor
I can see myself testing hundreds of times, but I guess that is how you really bring out success.
-Mike
[...] Even More About Testing (Because the Last Post was Getting Long) Written by John Cow on July 16th, 2009 // Continued from the previous post Continually Improving Your Communications [...]