Your homepage is your first impression. It’s picking your outfit for the first day of school. It’s the colorful cover of the book that is your brand. It’s having the perfect level of pressure in your handshake when you first meet someone new. It’s the first interaction that a visitor and potential prospect has with your organization. Because you want to put your best foot forward, you’re going to want to make sure that your homepage is set up with maximum conversion in mind, so it can ensure more leads and better leads. But what exactly do you need on your homepage for “maximum conversion?"
Prominent Menu Call-To-Action
It's always important to feature a prominent Call-To-Action (CTA) on your homepage, preferably housed in the menu bar of your website. Having a "Free Trial" CTA button, for example, can help engage curious visitors and swoop them up into your sales funnel. People. Love. Free. Things. If you're creating a button for the CTA, make sure that the color of the button contrasts with other content on the page so that prospects can easily spot it. You want it to leap out at them.
Customer Testimonials
Testimonials are paramount in establishing rapport and building trust with your site visitors. Potential clients want to be assured that you are the absolute best option to meet their needs, and your existing customers can help build that trust bridge. It's always helpful to hear from existing customers who have faced the same problems, and then learn how your organization is helping to resolve these issues, so video, text, and audio testimonials should all find a place to exist within your homepage. Piles and piles of data can be there on display, but nothing beats hearing from real people just like you.
Eye-Catching Imagery
If your imagery is bland, boring, blurry, or just unappealing, prospects will not want to engage with you. If you don’t have any sizzle, people will take one look, and head hastily in the other direction. Put care and thought into the imagery you’re using! Find relevant images that your target demographic can relate to, and make sure those images are high resolution (nothing says ‘We don’t know what we’re doing’ like low-res images). Get creative with how you display your images and assets! Galleries are popular and people love browsing through them, but be careful if your instinct is to do a slideshow, as prospects can find them time consuming and unnecessary. You can also play with different frames, shadows, gradients, and vectors to create imagery that will delight and excite. Give some thought to your favorite websites, and ask yourself what they’re doing that pulls you in. That should give you some ideas for your own homepage, and get your brain into that critical design space.
A Way to Contact
Imagine a scenario where you’ve done everything right on your homepage - it looks great, navigates like a dream, and your prospects are ready to reach out to learn more. Problem is, your contact information is hard to find. You have a fish on the line, but you’ve fallen asleep in the boat! Nothing is going to be more frustrating for both you and your potential client if they can’t get in contact with someone in your organization, so make sure you have a simple and easy way for prospects to reach out. Create and embed a Account Engagement (Pardot) form on your homepage, or try adding a button that links to your Contact Us page. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, it just has to be easy. Grease those wheels so they spin freely!
