You spent a lot of money on your brand’s website, probably hundreds of thousands and possibly a million or more. But do you feel your site is performing as it should? If not, you aren’t alone. I talk with healthcare marketers all the time who tell me this. Not enough traffic, not enough people clicking an offer, not enough people joining the CRM program. There are always going to be things about your site that you aren’t satisfied with.

So, what are you doing about it?

If you’re not satisfied with the performance of your site (however you define it), you really only have three choices.

1. Scrap the website. Who’s using these Interwebs anyway?
2. Redo it from scratch. Hey, money’s no object.
3. Fix it.

I’m thinking that choice one isn’t much of a choice. Yes, you could decide to do an “un-website,” as I call Skittles latest creation. Instead of creating the content and site themselves, they’re letting you do the work by pulling in various social media discussions of the brand to make up the bulk of the site’s content. I’m going to answer for you and say, no, this isn’t for you.

That leaves choices two and three. Choice two could be an option, but as I said earlier you’ve already probably spent a small marketing fortune on the site. Should you just trash the whole thing? In some cases, the answer is yes. If your site is terrible looking, outdated, has a poor user experience, has outdated content, and may or may not have at least one animated GIF like a dancing baby, it’s time to say goodbye.

If that’s you, then start from scratch. That’s probably not many of you though. Chances are you have a pretty decent site, but one that needs a little help to reach your goals. If so, it’s time to optimize. I’m not talking about search engine optimization (a topic for a future post). I’m talking about improving what you have to make sure it’s working optimally, that is, working hardest for you.

Let’s say that you aren’t happy with the number of enrollments in your CRM program. You have data that shows that patients who sign up for your program are more likely to get a prescription and more likely to stay on the product when they do. Great. You’ve got an amazing program, but no one’s joining (at least not at the levels you’d like). Let’s assume that you’re getting plenty of traffic from the right sources and people are checking out a few pages on your site, but they just aren’t signing up. So, what’s next?

In the past, I’ve discussed the importance of having previews of what people get before they turn over their personal information. This means showing them a little bit of what they’ll get when they enroll. Maybe you show last quarter’s email newsletter. People who know what they’re getting are more likely to trade their personal information for it. But, let’s assume this isn’t your problem. You’ve already got some good previews so people know what they’re getting. Where to now? Let’s look at the path people must take to enroll in your program. Is it clear? Are their proper callouts for the program so people know it exists? In other words, are you sure it’s easy enough to find your program on your site? I know you can find it and it’s obvious to you, but is it obvious to everyone else?

There’s a simple and highly cost-effective approach you can take to figure out the problem. Thanks to the folks at Google, you can conduct some simple tests to figure out what works and what doesn’t. It’s called the Google Website Optimizer. A catchy name it ain’t, but its a powerful tool (and it’s free). We’ve used this for several clients to determine the best location of buttons, whether lists should be expanded by default or by click only, whether a link is better suited on the right or left side of a page, if content should be above or below the “foldl,” and many, many other details. It’s all these little details that together have a big impact on your site’s performance and whether or not your customers are, in our example, signing up for your program.

What Google Website Optimizer does it very simple. It allows you to create multiple versions of the same page and determine which is most likely to give the desired effect. You can do a simple A/B test or a more complex multivariate analysis that considers multiple options working together. All you need to do (or have your digital agency do) is create the different combinations and include the tracking codes provided by Google. Then, sit back and watch the results come in.

To make this a little more clear, here’s an actual example from one of our clients. We wanted to improve the number of people who clicked a link (in the form of a button) that lead to a certain product information page. The conversion rate was good, but could have been better. We thought about different options, which mainly included resizing the button and its location on the page, but didn’t know which option was best. Enter Google. By using Google’s tool, we discovered that by simply changing the location of the button, we could improve conversions (the percent of people clicking on the button) by 50%. Here’s what the final report in Google Analytics looked like:

Here you can see the conversion rate of the original button placement (2.59%) and the conversion rates of the two test pages as well. In Combination 1, we put the button on the right side of the screen, above the “fold.” In Combination 2, we put the button below some introductory text, which put it below the “fold.” The results were a bit surprising, as the test showed that putting the button below the fold was the best option. 50% better in fact. Thinking more about it, this makes sense. We were asking people to move to the next step without having all the information. They wanted to read some details to see if they needed to go any farther. Putting the button before the text (as was done in the original and Combination 1), didn’t give people the chance to learn before asking them to do something more. For those who ignored the button and then read text, when they got to the end of the text and were ready to take the next step, there was no button for them to click. Therefore, button after the text. Makes sense, right?

It may all sound like a lot of minutia, but these little things make all the difference when you’re trying to get people to follow your conversion path. Your ideal path isn’t necessarily theirs, so it’s essential that you try to understand their thinking when designing the user experience of your site. If you don’t get it right at first, you can always test and improve, as we did in the example above. Your site should never be static and unchanging. You should always be looking for ways to make it better for your users and for your performance metrics.

This may appear to be just a bunch of tiny details…it is. But, that’s what oftentimes makes the difference. Let’s look at it with some numbers. Let’s say that a certain conversion might be worth $20 according to your data (PS: pretty low by healthcare industry standards). Your previous rate was 2.59% (like in our example). You have 1000 visitors a day. You increase your conversion rate to 3.90%. Each day, that’s an extra $262. Each year, it’s an extra $94,320. Consider that it cost our client around $10,000 to do all the work necessary for this test and you’ve got a quick ~9 to 1 return on your money. As a pharma company, your conversion value is probably in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and your traffic numbers might be higher, so the $94,320 extra per year quickly becomes much, much more.

Here’s my point…you can improve what you’ve got already and see a major impact with very low investment. As you make more and more changes, they bring a cumulative effect until your site is working as it should and bringing the returns you expect. So, if your site’s results are a little sickly, don’t give up on the patient. There may just be a simple treatment that a skilled “doctor” can deliver.

Okay…you’ve come this far in this post, so here’s a special offer to all my dedicated readers. If you work for a pharma or healthcare company (sorry, no agencies), our company, Bridge Worldwide, will conduct one of these experiments for you at no charge. Here’s the fine print…so my company doesn’t go bankrupt, I’ve got to limit the free offer to the first five companies that ask. You can contact me here. The doctor is in.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. How Pharma Should Use Search Engine Marketing
2. Ten Digital Marketing Ideas Pharma Companies Will Never Try (But Should)
3. How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD (and Your Website)