How Life Science Companies Can Improve Their Website Conversions
Can your life science website be the main driver for leads and sales?
Many sciences, academic or healthcare companies don't consider their website to be a critical marketing tool. YOU are missing a massive opportunity. If you are not working on maximising your website to drive sales and enquires then you will get left behind in the online marketing space. Many of the well known dominant large tech and software companies are entering the healthcare space and you can believe they will be using their website to position themselves quickly within the market.
This is why closely considering, improving and tracking website conversion rates is key to driving business online.
Creating a life science website is just the start of promoting your business online. It is the foundation on which to build your brand, increase awareness and drive sales. That being the case it should continue to be refined and evolve for maximum impact. That includes increasing conversions and improving your website overall.
What is website Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of optimising your website 'user experience' to get more of your visitors to take a specific action. That action could be:
- Request a sales call
- Download a trial
- Request a sample
- Download a white-paper
- Buy a consumer product (for eCommerce healthcare)
- Subscribe to your newsletter
- Sign up for a download
Conversion Rate Optimisation is certainly an art rather than a science, even for the scientific community. Converting more visitors to take an action requires great design, a creative approach, patience, knowledge and regular refinements.
A cornerstone of the Conversion Rate process is having the right data and insight so you can make the right decisions. That being the case it should be a constant and continued process of optimisation across your life science or healthcare website.
The elements that need attention vary from life science website to life science website, however, you will need to have access to the following expertise and skill sets;
- Analytics and data
- Web design refinements
- Graphic design expertise
- Copywriting expertise
- On-page SEO
- A way of optimising your pages to track certain elements.
- and perhaps work on A/B split testing.
You need some basics.
On a basic level your Life Science website is going to need:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Tag Manager
- And you may need Google UTM
Once these are connected, set up and running you can start to collect conversion data.
Your audiences journey.
In the busy and distracted online world, not everyone takes the same route when finding and visiting your website. Tracking their journey and then what the do when they reach your destination will help you to understand their discovery process and help you to improve and refine your website design and content.
You need to decide on the metrics you want to improve. This is going to be different for each Life Science, Biotech or Healthcare company. Having a set of metrics, even a simple set, is a good start.
Think of your website visitors going on a journey.
Types of conversions.
Some stages of their journey require a greater action or a smaller action. More or less commitment on their part as they get to know you and the benefits of what you provide to them. Your visitors don't want to be sold to at the early research and discovery phases. They are seeking information and guidance.
That being the case, your visitors will need several visits to your website before they take your final action. Micro Conversions that can be measured consist of a low-investment of the visitors time, something quick and straightforward, such as - download an ebook, subscribe to a newsletter, read a few blog articles that inform and educate. After a certain amount of interactions (which could be up to 10), a Macro Conversion which can be measured - requesting a demo, a sales call request, trial sign-up or direct sales enquiries.
Setting a baseline.
Decide what metrics are important to your business. What are the main goals for business growth or awareness, do you want to increase trials of your healthcare app, do you want clinicians to request a demonstration of your medical device? What would be a good measure alongside direct sales? Perhaps reviews are important as a reassurance and trust factor.
You need these so we can have a clear measure of success or where improvement is needed. Be realistic. Once these are in place we can work with you to define what will drive visitors to reach these goals. We can develop and create the necessary website content and assets to drive interactions.
How about some quick wins.
Take an objective look at your website and see if you can identify any 'quick wins'. Working on the following can lead to increased conversions very quickly.
- Do you need to rewrite some of your website copy for extra clarity and be more concise about benefits rather than features?
- Can you offer a short-term incentive - a time-limited giveaway, a number of limited discounts?
- Can you work to improve or adjust your Calls-To-Action on all pages?
- Would it be useful for visitors to create a set of Step-by-Step instructions?
- Any forms on your website, can you make them shorter and targetted?
- Can you improve or increase the trust factors on your website?
What type of data should I be looking at?
You need to tailor the data based on your specific business goals, however, as a guide, these are some of the data you can track and measure within Google Analytics.
Audience
- sessions
- users
- returning visitors
- bounce
- time on page
Traffic
- organic
- PPC
- referral
Segments
- device
- location
- screen resolution
Take them on a journey of discovery.
Designing your ideal user journey on your website will lead you to natural ways to improve conversions. Being in healthcare, life science and biotech you will have a range of audience profiles and they will each need to be guided along a journey of key touch points.
Using Google Tag Manager you can track actions and interactions along these key touch points. Then user goal tracking and user flow information to see what is happening along the journey.
Follow a scientific approach.
Science is full of hypothesis, an educated prediction that can be tested. With that in mind, why not create a hypothesis to follow - a method of experimentation. This will help you follow a process, retrace your work and either look for improvements or, if successful, repeat across other areas of your website.
Split testing.
Trying A/B [split] testing is a way of testing where two or more elements of something on a web page runs at the same time and then studied to determine which performs or converts better. You will need a good amount of traffic to your website to perform split testing.
If you have a product or marketing landing page can test elements to see what can increase the action to a goal. Using the method of A/B Testing, you can either create variations of page element like a headline or a call-to-action button or create a very different design and then present that variation to a group of visitors to your website.
Running split testing with small changes to your pages can improve your user experience and increase engagement. The more time someone spends on your website the more they discover how you can help them.
The Takeaway.
It's time to make a start. The sooner you can start to refine your website and your visitors experience the faster you can drive business.
Learn from the results, try and test. Iterate and refine. This won't be a one time fix, repeat the process to consistently improve your digital strategy and convert more visitors into customers, partners, investors and advocates.
If you are serious about increasing website visitor engagement, driving enquiries and sales, email design@arttia.co.uk and we can run a conversion audit and highlight any immediate improvements you can make.