Your website talks too much

Your website talks too much.

The number one piece of advice I give to almost any company seeking help with website conversion rates is to cut down on text. And I mean at the rate of the Amazon logging.

You should have a lot of text on your homepage only in the following situations:

1. Your competitors have established a dominant marketing strategy, and being too brief might undermine your legitimacy.
2. Your target customer isn’t expecting an immediate Call to Action (CTA) and has come to your website purely to gather information.
3. Your audience consists of patient, diligent readers (essentially, you’re selling to gnomes).
4. You lack the resources to create subpages, and for some reason, you must rely on a one-page landing page style homepage.
5. Your product is exceedingly complex, and you must list all its characteristics and assets, praying and hoping someone will please take the time to read everything.

Consider this:

Our entire digital experience revolves around text. Everywhere we go online, we're constantly reading.

As a result, we naturally develop reading strategies that minimize effort and maximize reward.

This often means quickly switching to another website if we don’t find what we need, immediately. Large blocks of text are instinctively off-putting.

When someone lands on your website, assume they already have some background context. If not, how did they land there?

Focus immediately on your product-market fit: you have the product, and they are the market.

If you can’t convey that within the first five seconds, you’ve already lost them. Statistics show that up to 50% of people will have already left.

The most critical action you can take within those first five seconds, i.e., during the initial view and scroll, is to do everything you can to entice them not to close your website.

Do everything you can to entice them not to close your website.

This is so important that I had to capitalize and repeat it.

Whether it’s through humor or something sexy, you must stand out.

The more general your product is, the less time you have (usually correlated to market size).

Hence, it is imperative to find ways to convey your offering to your website visitor.

A common mistake people make here is taking their company niche too literally. Instead, use my definition:

What I do = what I offer + why customers choose me

For example:

Costy is a CRM —> Costy is a CRM for the lowest price in the market —> Costy is a CRM with the same features as SalesForce but 5x cheaper

If someone lands on the website of the imaginary Costy CRM, they were already interested.

For the majority of your market, you don’t need to explain what a CRM is, how it works, and what its basic features are. People already know.

And for those who have no knowledge or education on the offering, they will instinctively take more time to read.

If this constitutes a significant portion of your customer base, consider creating a subpage like “New to CRMs?”.

Everything on your website should be precise and purposeful.

So start cutting all that text that no one ever reads. As someone who has worked on many websites over the years, I implore you to do an exercise:

Go Google a tool you're interested in but don't intend to buy today and explore the different company websites.

Now see how much of their homepage and website you’ve actually read before making up 80% of your decision on whether this is a company you like and trust.

Again:

Your customer wants to know what you do, what you offer, and how much it costs. That's it.