Information Vs Converting Websites: How to Choose Which Is Right for Your Business

Information Vs Converting Websites: How to Choose Which Is Right for Your Business
By Nicholas J Godwin

In this day and age almost every business, regardless of size, has a website to help inform customers and differentiate them in the marketplace. However, among the millions of websites out there, they can broadly be broken down into three primary categories of site; e-commerce, information & converting.

The e-commerce sites speak for themselves and are built with the specific purpose of selling physical goods to consumers through large, searchable databases of products. However, the differences between the other two; information and converting, is less clear.

The key differentiator between them is what their purpose is and how they fit into your marketing plan. This in turn is deeply impacted by your customers' (or even industry's) buying habits.

Information websites: As the name suggests, the purpose of these sites is to give information to a prospect.

This is typically taken to the extreme in the sense that these sites are typically most appropriate for either products/services with a high degree of complexity (e.g. production machinery), industries that typically won't have decisions made on the basis of information alone and will need to be supported by a second process (e.g. a test drive in the case of a car purchase, or a viewing for real estate).

In these cases, the sale is almost never made prior to this additional process and so the purpose of the site is to help the prospect become as informed as possible about what they are looking for to aid in the later stages of the purchase.

It's very common to find brochures/information packs to download on the website (again, giving lots of detail to help the consumer make a decision).

Converting websites: By contrast, a converting website is likely to be very short on information because the purpose behind the site is to 'convert' a prospect from a visitor to an interested potential customer.
This is done via a call-to-action.

A call-to-action could be as simple as an enquiry form or quote request, or as complex as a limited function or free trial of the product. However, in recent years, the most common has been to offer a free gift (e.g. an e-book giving valuable information about whatever the subject of the site is) in return for your contact and email details.

These can all be highly effective ways of ensuring that 1) your website is drawing leads to you to follow up with and 2) you are only following up with those serious enough about your product/service to have taken the action that you have determined would be valuable to your target market (this is a very important point - the call-to-action must be congruent with the overall message of the site in order to genuinely draw prospects).

Neither an information site nor a converting site is better when simply considered side by side. However, the key question is which is better for you?

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