If you can’t get your customers to respond to your website, you are wasting traffic. If the phone isn’t ringing, the emails aren’t coming in, or the web sales are quiet – you may mistakenly believe that your website isn’t getting enough traffic. Check your traffic stats – you may actually find that people are visiting the site, they just aren’t making contact with you.
Here are 5 tips on how to improve your website conversions –
- What is your Call To Action (CTA)? This is a commonly used term, but not everybody thinks enough about what it is. It is quite simple: what do you want your customers to do when they come to your site? Make that thing obvious and easy. If you want them to click a button, make it big and bright. If you want them to call you, display your phone number large, obvious, and connected with a message that tells customers you want them to call! It sounds obvious, but we have actually had clients tell us they aren’t getting enough phone calls from their website, to find that the phone number was a small piece of text buried away on one page of their site.
- Review your content’s focus. What messages are you sending your potential customers? One common mistake is from website owners who use all their website content to talk about themselves, putting themselves on a pedestal. But what are your customer’s needs when they come to your site? Are you showing them that you know who they are, that you have a product that solves their problems? Your website isn’t all about you, it should also be about your customers and what you do for them. As the saying goes, Bob doesn’t want a drill, he wants a hole.
- Long content tends to be the enemy of conversion. While this isn’t a hard and fast rule – it does depend on your product and your market – as a general rule, if your page looks like it is going to be an effort for the customer to figure out that they are in the right place to get what they want, then the chances are that they will leave to go somewhere “easier” – especially for smaller purchase items. The idea of conversion is to remove as much “friction” as possible, and a friction point can be that your page looks like the customer needs to read an essay or news article. Write down what you think needs to be said, then strip out everything that isn’t truly necessary for the customer to know at this point in time…. and then halve the text! That is usually how much text you need. Exceptions to this rule are usually when you are chasing buyers for bigger ticket items (ie they want to be educated on the item before buying it) or buyers for products who tend to do more research first. Even then, your content still needs to be clear, well-spaced, and to the point. Use bold, headings, and images to break it up.
- Reduce the fields on your contact forms. If your CTA is asking people to fill out a contact form, strip this down to only what you really need to know to make contact with them. Ask yourself if you really need to request all those fields – each one you ask for is more time you want them to spend in order to reach out to you. Strip it down to the bare essentials and you’ll find that people are far more likely to get in contact. You can use your forms as a “funnel” – less fields is a wider funnel for leads. If you find yourself getting a high number of lower quality leads that are wasting your time, tighten the funnel – include some more “qualifying” fields on your form, such as asking the client’s budget range.
- Videos. If you have a video that can concisely and accurately explain your offering, this tends to help conversions a lot. In the same way that content can hurt conversions (because people don’t want to read too much), if you can help them by summarizing everything in a video then you’ve gone another step further. This can also help build trust and credibility – you aren’t just a faceless website, you are more “real” because the customers can see and hear you. Make sure your video is in the same style as your content should be – focusing on the customer needs and the results they want, not just all about you and how great you are.