The “Good” – reinvigorating online sales through web design
The other day I was summarizing my team’s accomplishments in 2008 and realized that this was one of the most satisfying. Not because it involved some incredible strategic plan or creative idea on my part, but rather because it validated that focusing on the simple things can have a big impact on results.
What I’m referring to is a site makeover project for my company’s SSL certificate product line. Certs are what organizations use to create secure (encrypted) sessions with users…i.e. the user sees https and the little yellow browser lock. Anyway, we are a smaller player in the market (VeriSign is the 800 pound gorilla) and primarily sell certs the same way we sell our enterprise security software — through our direct sales force.
During strategic planning last year we identified a significant opportunity to grow the business via the online channel. The problem was that our site was designed to mimic our enterprise site (www.entrust.com) and was NOT at all ecommerce friendly (i.e. “bad marketing”). So we executed a plan to completely overhaul the site design and buy process in order to make it easy to buy a cert in just a few clicks.
Here are the before and after screen captures.
It’s easy to see the huge improvement in design that came from our clear-cut focus on the user and their buying experience. Of course we also added in lots of SEO, Google Adwords and display ads to drive traffic to the new site.
Our results have been great with substantial increases in unique site visits, conversion rate and most importantly, sales (we’re publicly held so I can’t share specifics).
The key takeaway for me is that you don’t always have to shoot for the stars in your marketing plan – launching an innovative new product, making a big splash at the huge trade show, etc. Instead, it pays to focus on the simple projects like improving the web design for one of your smaller products.