If your company uses its web site as a marketing tool or sales tool, you can’t afford not to test new things. One powerful technique to help your company make huge site improvements with a relatively small effort is the incremental redesign.

Incremental redesign doesn’t involve a total overhaul of your web site — rather, just a single page or page template. It can involve your homepage, a landing page for a paid search campaign, your e-commerce product page or even your e-mail marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say your company runs an e-commerce web site, and you think you could improve your conversion rate. Use Excel to create a simple spreadsheet and log some “control” information — the date range and conversion rate. Pick one page — in this case, a product page. The objective for this page is to convince the customer to add the product to their shopping cart, so you hypothesize that the add to cart button isn’t large and colorful enough. Make a simple change to your product page template by making the add to cart button larger and more colorful. Next, log the test date range in your spreadsheet, what change you made to the template, and the conversion rate for the date range. Having this spreadsheet allows you to compare the before and after, and make a decision as to whether you’ll keep the new add to cart button. Keep this spreadsheet up-to-date over time and it will also serve as a log of what you’ve done in the past and what results you measured from those changes.

Of course, it may take many tests before you find the right page design, but this low-cost technique can be used on almost any page of your web site or even on a landing page.

It works. Last year, an online retailer hired me to improve their conversion rate. After looking at their site, I deduced that the single biggest barrier to conversion was their product page template. A large product image took up the entire width of the page, the pricing/value proposition wasn’t clear and users had to scroll before seeing any product information. With the old page template in place, the site conversion rate was 0.91%. After the product page was redesigned, site conversion increased to 2.76%, all because we changed a single page on their site!

Often, significant improvements can be made without redesigning your entire web site. I encourage small businesses to try the cost-effective technique of incremental redesigns to improve the effectiveness of their web sites.

It’s a fact that even the “big boys” of internet retail leave money on the table, and GrokDotCom does a good job pointing out real examples of how large retailers could improve their conversion rate. My favorite is their latest screencast that shows how one of Petco’s Google Adwords ads clicks to a page that shows no products.

No matter the size of your ecommerce site, you should check out GrokDotCom’s conversion rate screencasts and see examples of how ecommerce sites fail at converting visitors to paying customers. By viewing these, you may get ideas for improving your own site.

Copyblogger has a post today on 5 Tips for Knockout Testimonials. Whether you’re business specializes in professional services or in ecommerce — or any other business in fact — you can benefit from testimonials on your web site.

Web sites are, by nature, impersonal. There’s no one to greet your web site visitor when they arrive at your web site, and your site visitors also come with concerns about whether they’ll be getting what you claim on your site. Testimonials ally those concerns since testimonials tend to be specific, objective and relevant.

In addition to Copyblogger’s 5 tips, here are a few more tips to get effective testimonials from your clients/customers.

• Don’t be afraid to ask for a testimonial. Many business owners aren’t completely comfortable asking for testimonials. Perhaps it’s because they don’t think they need testimonials or they are afraid that the customer will say “no.” In my experience, most clients/customers will gladly share a testimonial.
• Know how to ask for a testimonial. Asking a customer face-to-face is best, but over the phone is good as well. If you ask by e-mail, you’ll want to include some guidelines (see the next bullet point) so the customer knows how to structure the testimonial.
• Know what information to ask for. Be sure to ask the customer to specifically describe what work you performed for them. If relevant to your business, ask them to comment on your adherence to schedule and budget. Ask them to comment on the intangibles of how you did the job and finally, ask them to share results. Some customers/clients might be reluctant to share specific results, but ask them to be as specific as possible.

When people buy something or acquire a service, they are seeking a solution to a problem. If your testimonials can describe the problems your customers had and solutions your company provided, you’re well on the way to convincing prospective customers to work with you.

Amber writes in with the following question:

“I was just wondering whether you could provide me with just some brief stats on expected response rates/conversions from a campaign directing them to a specific landing page as opposed to a homepage/product page on a website?”

My answer follows:

It would be tough to generalize that landing pages would improve your conversion rate because landing page design, which is a discipline all it’s own, affects conversion rate immensely.

One factor to consider is where the landing page receives traffic from. You’d have different content for Google Adwords landing pages than you might for other ads you might run (say for instance, landing pages for e-mail marketing campaigns). I would also recommend having different landing pages for each of your Google Adwords campaigns.

The key to improving your conversion rate is to give the person browsing your website information that is extremely relevant to the information they were seeking before visiting your site. Combine that with sound graphic design principles and your landing pages will certainly convert customers better than a homepage would.

One last note — sending search engine traffic to a product page can be an excellent tactic when their search specifically describes the product that you’re selling. In this case, the product page should act as a landing page.

Thanks for the question, Amber.

Whether you’re talking about a landing page or a website, the first consideration when optimizing a website is to take it one page at a time.

When you examine a single page of your website, you can carefully evaluate search engine optimization factors like titles, content and meta tags. You can scrutinize your content to ensure that it addresses all of your customers’ questions. You can inspect the design and evaluate whether the page has the optimal eye path.

Most importantly, a critical factor in optimizing your website is to have a single goal for each individual web page or landing page. Just one — no more. Many marketers and designers make the mistake of trying to do too much on a page. A page, however, should do one thing well rather than distract users with multiple themes.

One example of maintaining a singular focus on a page is removing the site navigation in checkout. You’ll notice that on MaroonHelmet.com and 3FellersBakery.com, two clients of ours, there is no site navigation on any checkout screen. We deliberately did this to keep visitors focused on the task at hand, which in this case was buying products.

Focusing on one goal per page is an idea that has been reinforce time and time again through research. The latest research (May 2007) from Marketing Experiments found that “Focusing the landing page on the primary objective increased conversion by more than 19%.” The same study found that “by clarifying the offer and providing only one call-to-action option (button), conversion increased by 65%.”

Optimizing your website should be a page-by-page process, and all content, illustrations, photos, etc. should directly support the one goal for that page. It’s this continual analysis and improvement that will keep your website running at peak effectiveness.

There’s a good article over at the Ecommerce Times called “Minding the Gap Between Click and Conversion” discusses the concept of “post-click marketing” and offers up some ways to solve the mystery of what happens between click and conversion.

Read the article, then consider the simple recommendations below. In my experience, these recommendations, while somewhat general, will address many drop-off problems.

• Even the best web sites are somewhat impersonal. Provide your phone number prominently at every step so customers can talk to a real person.
• For lead generation sites, keep it simple. Improve conversion rate by asking leads to fill out just the basics and then follow up either personally or virtually as soon as possible.
• For ecommerce sites, make sure landing pages are extremely relevant and focused. Give the customer information about the product in clear, concise language while reassuring them that your company (and web site) is reputable. Don’t make it cumbersome to order — collect only the information you need and keep screens neatly formatted.
• Don’t distract customers from their goals. Too many testimonials, crowded pages, a lack of a call to action and trying to cross-sell unrelated products distract customers.
• Make the process shorter. The quicker the customer can achieve their goal while satisfying their need for information, the more will act.