Conversion on your website occurs in part through navigation and strong calls to action. This leads your prospective customers comfortably through your site to find what they need. Conversion is considered any action which leads the customer closer to a sale. This could be a request for quote or even a CAD download. When you increase your conversion rate, you increase your sales and ROI!
Usability in Navigation
Usability studies tell us that a visitor should be able to reach what they are looking for within 3 clicks of landing on your website. For large websites, this number can be a little bit higher, but the user must feel like each click brings them closer to what they are looking for.
Learned Conventions in Navigation
Navigational conventions are another key component to visitor usability. A visitor expects to see certain things in certain places in a website. For example, if they want to get back to the home page, then typically they just click on the company logo. If your logo doesn’t do this, then they have to search further to find the link back to the home page. Having conventionally named pages is also important to this. Your contact information should be on a page called “Contact Us” or some variation on contact. If instead you have your contact information on a different page, it is still important to link to it with a “Contact Us” link so that visitors know where to go to get contact information without hunting for it. A website visitor is more likely to search for a competitor than work harder to make their purchase with you.
Don’t disable the users back button!
Another important navigational convention is to not direct users into a page that doesn’t have any navigational options. There is rarely a need to open a link in a new window, and when you do so you disable the browsers back button. The only time that you would want to open a link in a new window is when it is leaving your website. The thought process behind this is that your website will remain open, so that the visitor can return to it when they are done.
Left-hand Navigation
Navigation times have been shown to be faster on websites that have their primary navigation menu on the left side of the page. This is another convention that users have come to expect from websites that they visit.
Convert Visitors into Customers
The goal of a website is to answer visitor’s questions, and assay their concerns as quickly as possible so that they will advance in the sales cycle, or convert. Conversion on a website can be anything from downloading a document to purchasing a product or service through an e-commerce system. Conversion is done through calls to action.
Calls to Action
A user who is browsing your website may be interested in a product, but at the same time, may not want to go out of their way to find out more information on it. Having a request a quote on this product or add product to cart link on each page in an appropriate location, as well as in the upper horizontal navigation, will make it easy for users to take that little step to conversion.
For industrial companies, another form of call to action can be “download CAD drawing” or other file. This assumes that the user is going to incorporate the part into a project that they are working on, which in the end should result in a sale.
Combining Navigation and Calls to Action with Technology
A great way of helping the customer find what they are looking for, as well as convert them once they have found the exact product they need, is through the use of a Product Selector. This works through a series of choices about the specifications of the product they are looking for. Through the answers that the visitor provides, a list of possible products is generated, allowing them to then select the product from a list of a few or single products rather than a full product line of configurable items. At the end you provide a way for the visitor to add the product to their cart, or to request a quote on the product they have narrowed the selection down to. Because the customer has provided information and is vested in the process they are more likely to convert by almost 40 percent! | 
