Identification of target actions

Corporate website should become a part of your business: make communication with existing customers easier and bring new ones, sell online or take a potential customer to your office.

Today we are going to learn through examples what target actions depending on the type of business the site should include and how we can determine their efficiency.

To start with, let us define some terms. Target action is an action that a visitor shoulds take in order to achieve the desired result. This event is often the first step of your sales funnel and the way to “hook” a potential customer of your company.

Let’s get started!

1.  For example, your company is a manufacturer of industrial equipment: conveyors, machine tools and generators are your thing. What kind of site do you think you need? What should it include? Why would a visitor come to it? And the main question – how can the site help your business?

To persuade the visitor that your equipment is the best and your company is the reliable partner the site should be the most informative presentation platform or perform a function of a shop assistant. Tell your visitors about your product in details, show a video or a presentation where it would be presented in all its glory or give the visitor an opportunity to download this presentation. And, of course, don’t forget to post your contact information!

So, the target actions on the site-presentation will be the following:

1. Viewing the page “Contact us”;
2. Viewing the video or presentation;
3. Downloading the price list or technical documentation;
4. Sending feedback form;
5. Sending an application for equipment inspection, and others.

2. Let’s consider one more, not trivial example. You own a school. And not a simple one, but an internet school! For everyone who wants you to conduct seminars about design, law and rocketry.  Note that you do not directly sell anything. You provide educational services. What should you do? How can you turn your student into your customer? And then sell him participation in the seminar or an extensive training program, but not for him alone but for all employees of his company? Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

In this case the target actions on the site will be:

1. Registration on the site in order to get access to the training system;
2. Requesting a chat with the online consultant;
3. Viewing training video or presentations;
4. Subscribing to e-mail newsletters, and others.

3. And one more, the most common example – online store. I think the goals of e-commerce are clear. Sell, sell and sell again! For this purpose a customer should get the answers to all his questions on your site: how to choose, how to buy, how to pay, how to deliver – and he should not get lost in the endless variety of goods.

Thus, we have to:

1. Attract the customer to the site;
2. Persuade him to purchase in our online store;
3. Give the choice to select from a great assortment;
4. Tell about the product, make possible to read other customers’ reviews;
5. Make a buying process hassle-free;
6. Help the customer if he has some problems;
7. Tell about the warranties, after-sale service and delivery conditions;
8. Deliver the product to the customer and get a service review from him;
9. And, of course, make him a client for life! Bring him back to the site and … Sell more, sell more and sell more again!

Based on the tasks, a list of target actions should be roughly the following:

1. Filling in the contact form;
2. Chat with the online consultant;
3. Subscribing to email newsletters;
4. Downloading a price-list or a catalogue;
5. Registration on the site as a buyer;
6. Adding the product to the shopping cart;
7. Purchasing the product;
8. Repeated purchase of the product;
9. Using the product comparison service;
10. “Liking” the products (or the whole site) in social networks and others.

Now about the most important – about analytics.

Website is a good thing. But it must be effective! Conversion is the main indicator of site efficiency or a target action.

Let’s calculate the conversion of any target action on your site. For example, a book purchase. Let’s divide a number of people who bought it by the total number of unique site visitors.  The result is the conversion rate of the target action.

For different areas and target actions the conversion rate can vary greatly. The main thing is to understand the point – small number of visitors and high percentage of performed target actions is  far better indicator than millions of visitors and not a single purchase.

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