How to Grasp Your Audience’s Interest with Great Menus

Run-of-the-mill menus may actually turn your perfect audience away. Once they get to your website, they need to quick (very, very quickly) see how they can find what you want. Menus need to assist you in telling the story of who you are and what you can do for the visitor.

Examples of Improved Menus

Changing the “About” Menu Item

Instead of simply saying “About” or “About us”, see what would best keep your audience’s interest:

  • Why We’re Helping since 1997
  • Who we are
  • Who the Heck are We
  • Why We’re Still Here

I’m being outrageous with the above examples but it’s only to illustrate that you can play with the “About us” menu item and get creative, all the while sticking with your brand’s tone.

Now, How About Changing the “Services” Menu Item

“Services” is an ok menu title but there’s a lot that can be done here as well.

You know better than anybody else what you truly offer, right? Well, express through the menu items exactly how you would say it to someone.

Again, some wild examples to get the create machine going:

  • Let’s say you’re a dentist: you could either just say “Crowns” or you could say “How we do Crowns”. Changing this single menu item could actually inspire you to change the others.
  • Clothing company: instead of “T-Shirts”, how about “Our Ts”, “T’s of all Sizes” or “T-Shirt Department”
  • Though they may not be the best examples, I could go on with more but you basically get my point. The marketing concepts behind this have to do with instant association of the visitor’s desire/wishes and your business. We simply don’t have much time to create that “bond”, only but a very few little seconds.

    When do I know I Should Work on My Menus

    You have to look at the analytics of your site. One clue could be a high bounce rate. Also, if you have decent traffic to your site, it could simply be a case of people not responding to what you have when they should.

    There’s a few ways to go about those changes. You could a) change all your menu items at once or b) test just one menu item and see how it goes. Also, if you have software testing softwares such as vwo.com you can easily test those changes and see what version of your menu performs the best.

    Also know that it is very possible that your plain “About us” and “Services” menu items still do better. Being too wild will also confuse people but being too generic sometimes can loose an audience.

    Note: You shouldn’t change your “About” page URL each time you make a change. If you “About” page URL was www.mywebsite/about-us/ keep it that way. It’s your “About” page after all.

    So Here’s your Website Menu Homework

    Go to your website and see how you can improve your menu items. Keep in mind your audience, are they serious business people or more of a chill crowd? The process is quite interesting as you will see your website feeling totally different only by changing your menu items. You don’t even need to change the design.

    Then once you have made the changes (or you are using a testing software), you need to allow enough time to see if it improved your goals. A high traffic website could only take 2-3 weeks to test, whereas a low traffic site could be 4-6 weeks.

    The goal is to optimize your website traffic and know that improving menus is one of the secret tricks of the trade.

    Happy testing and if you have a chance, please let me know what worked for you.

    🙂
    Patrick