How easy are you making it for people to do business with you?

It may seem obvious to organizations that currently provide street and e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information on their website, that if you want to make it easyfor people to do business with you, you have to give them multiple ways to reach you or ask for more information.

Surprisingly, a great number of non profit organizations & businesses still make it difficult for their visitors and customers to find contact information on their sites or provide just one or two options.

Here are few tips to help you with this:

• Have as many options as possible for contacting you. Some people like to pick up the phone, others will prefer sending an email, you may even have someone that will want to send you their request via fax. Provide them all.
   
• An 800 number might be a good idea if you do business with out of state prospect. This could help you if they prefer calling and talking to a human being and they are out of state
    
• A "Contact Us" form is good but provide additional options beyond the basic First, Last & Comments fields. Based on your organization or business model, offer checkboxes or drop down selections to help your prospect narrow down their inquiry, i.e. I need some of this, this & this. It helps people pre-qualify themselves with easy checkbox so they don't have to type so much in the comments box.
   
• Other forms such as "Ask a question" or "Request more information or a brochure". Some people may not want to talk to anyone....yet. All I want to know is (fill in the blank). They are either very busy or shy and don't want to be called, they just want an answer to their question. If you have that form available, then those people will use it and you will gain from it.
   
• The staff page or team page needs to include pictures, period! People want to relate to others. A surprising conclusion from two separate A/B tests: putting human photos on a website increases conversion rates by as much as double. Scientific research backs this up, saying that we are subconsciously attracted to images with people. Look, I know you may not like how you look on photos, you believe you should look more like Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lopez and so do I, get over it, you are beautiful just the way you are and put up a photo of you on your site, people want to see you.

• Make a donation should be so easy to find and to complete that your grandma could do it without asking for help. If Grandma can complete the transaction and says at the end "that was easy" then you nailed it. Also, the donation button on the home page should be so self evident that a blind man could tell you where it is. Upper right hand corner of your home page could be a good spot for it. Button color: Along with its other A/B tests, conversion rate was increased by 34% on some test site, simply by changing the color of the sign-up button from green to red!

Remember, it's all about making it easy for people to take action!

What do you find most annoying on websites when you are looking for something?