Your website says a lot about you. Everything from color themes to formatting tells your members or customers about your brand. And if your website says the wrong things, you’ll find yourself losing loans to web-savvy competitors.
To say the right things about your brand, your website may need a redesign. Here are seven easy ways to refresh your website and send the right message.
1. Cut the Copy
People don’t have the time or attention to read endless paragraphs. They’re looking for the easiest, most efficient way to accomplish a task. A Nielsen Norman Group study backed this up, showing people scan rather than read when they surf the web.
Condense copy into short taglines targeting consumers’ problems and offering solutions. Use bullet points and numbered lists to make your copy less intimidating and more easily scannable.
2. Make Your Calls To Action Easily Visible
As a credit union or community bank, you probably think of yourself in terms of service rather than sales. But it’s an undeniable fact - you have to “sell” loans and accounts. Use calls to action to ask for the sale.
Calls to action are your “open an account” or “apply for a loan” buttons. They should be immediately visible when someone enters the website homepage. They should also look different than other links and appear multiple times.
3. Simplify Your Menu
A confusing menu will make consumers give up on your site pretty quickly. According to one statistic, 38% of people disengage from websites with unattractive formatting.
Use clearly defined categories, such as “loans,” “accounts” and “services,” to spruce up your formatting. Try to avoid nested lists as much as possible by making all options visible in one dropdown. In other words, don’t have a second list show when you hover over an option in the first list. Check out our work with Kelly Community Federal Credit Union’s website to see what we mean.
4. Establish Consistency Throughout the Website
Website consistency broadcasts your level of professionalism.
Inconsistent logos, color schemes or fonts between web pages will look sloppy, which could make consumers uneasy. Scam education teaches consumers to distrust inconsistent or “unprofessional” websites, so avoid this effect at all costs. Use consistent design to immediately establish trust.
5. Carefully Select What Goes Above the Fold
Websites aren’t newspapers, but what goes above the fold still matters. Content “above the fold” is homepage content consumers see without scrolling down. And this is important too, since consumers form website opinions in 50 milliseconds.
Our recommendations? You’ll want two calls to action, one in the top right corner and one in the center of the screen. You’ll also want to write a brief special offer placed over an image of your target audience succeeding, presumably after using your credit union or community bank. Look at the OE Federal Credit Union website to see how they show construction workers (their target members) achieving goals.
6. Put the “About Us” On a Different Page
There’s nothing wrong with having an “about us” section, but it can leave a negative impression if placed incorrectly.
A big “about us” on your homepage sends the message “we’re the hero.” Everything on your homepage should make the consumer the hero. Put “about us” on a separate page, and people will seek it out once they're committed to your brand.
7. Display Testimonials
Do you look up reviews before buying something? Yes? So do your consumers.
Give them reviews right on your homepage! Testimonials provide visions of the future to consumers. If they see other people’s success, they’re more likely to believe they’ll have success too. Look at our work on Aurora Credit Union’s website to see a homepage testimonial talking about the credit union’s hospitality.
If you tried these tips and you’re still not seeing the results you want, consider an On The Mark Strategies website redesign today. We’re website refresher experts, and we’ll make sure your site says the right things about your brand.
