“Is your online shop empty?”
My immediate answer was no; we have lots of traffic visiting our website and it’s growing every month. What the person asking the question actually meant was empty of staff rather than empty of potential customers, which is a much more interesting question.
In today’s world we all spend so much of our marketing budget driving traffic to our website. Whether it be SEO, Google Adwords, Social Media, traditional Advertising or the many other methods of marketing communication available, most of us now understand that it’s important to drive traffic to our website.
That’s all very well, and, as an online marketing company, it’s nice to see more and more organisations utilising online marketing in this way. But what’s just as important is what happens when a potential customer arrives at your website. How do engage with them? If you have a sales team how do they know who is visiting your site so they can get in touch with them? How do you turn a browser into an enquirer or buying customer? What happens once a potential customer leaves your site? Will you ever hear from them again or are they off to browse (and buy) elsewhere?
It all comes down to the fact that we are so concerned with driving traffic to our websites that we often forget that we also need to turn traffic into solid business. So many websites, even really well designed websites with great content, aren’t geared towards actually generating enquiries.
Think of your website as a physical shop, showroom or office. Driving lots of traffic to your website is great but it’s like buying a prime retail space on Oxford Street and forgetting to staff the shop. If there are no sales staff there to assist, no cashiers to put the sale through and no customer service advisors to help with any queries, then the chance of that potential customer actually buying something is pretty slim.
A website is a great opportunity to generate qualified sales leads for your business, and your sales team should be focused on dealing with the potential customers that have already visited your website.
But how do I know who’s visited my website?
There are lots of online software systems available that let you better track the potential customers that have visited your website, but there’s actually a much easier way to engage customers online:Do something more than ‘Contact Us’
It never ceases to amaze me how many websites have no other means of capturing enquiries than the age-old ‘contact us’ form. Think how uninspiring a ‘contact us’ form is. Consider the effort a customer needs to put in to explain their enquiry, fill out their details and press send. It might not sound like much effort but it’s enough of a barrier to stop many people making an enquiry.
Now begin to think of much easier and more inspiring ways you can capture prospects visiting your website. Here are some examples of great ways to do this:
- Have a live chat feature on your website. Many potential customers have questions they’d like answered and a live chat feature provides a simple and easy way to get their questions answered.
- Post additional literature and information on your website that customers need to download. Before they can download it ask them to fill in a short form with basic details. Then you have a way to know that person was on your website, and that they are potentially interested in your product or services.
- Be more inspiring with your web forms by thinking about what your customers actually want. We have a ‘free SEO health check request’ form on our website. 10 times more customers get in touch with us through this form than they do through our contact us page. What’s even better is that the SEO health-check review actually gives us something to talk to the potential customer about when we call them. It’s a much greater ice breaker than “Hi this is Ryan from Brinn Marketing and I wanted to tell you about some of our great SEO services’
What do you do on your website to increase enquiries and conversions? As always, any new tips and ideas are welcome.
Comments
boring, thing. Thanks for giving some great ideas on how to do this a bit differently!