If you’ve had a website for a while you’ll realize that there are two factors that really determine the success of a website: traffic and conversions. While generating traffic to your website is a whole can of worms, converting visitors is a lot simpler. In essence, the amount of traffic you have is totally irrelevant if you’re not able to convert that traffic.
Even if you have a million visitors a day, if nobody is buying anything from you, calling you to seek out your services or signing up for your email newsletter your website is essentially a failure. Today we’re going to talk about 5 things you could and should be doing to increase conversions on your site.
What’s really important?
Before we even get to the techniques, I just want to say that in my humble opinion that while traffic and conversions are both hugely important, conversions are more critical. The math is pretty simple. If you have 1,000 visitors a day and convert at 10% that means you’re getting 100 new customers/leads/subscribers per day vs a site that gets 10,000 visitors a day but only converts at 1% – which gets the same amount of leads/sales, etc.
I’ve had the pleasure of setting up landing pages for my clients who have seen a conversion rate as high as 35% (which is typically unheard of in any industry). That client was able to buy expensive traffic from Adwords and Facebook for his site because his conversion was so good that he didn’t really care what the traffic cost.
1. Create a strong call to action
To keep it plain and simple, people need to be told what to do. If you’re looking to get calls for your business, put a “call now” button in BIG BOLD type at the top of your website with your phone number in a font that’s very easy to read. If you’re looking for people to sign up for your newsletter you should have a big “Sign up for our Newsletter” button at the top of the website.
It’s not that people are stupid, it’s just that there’s a ton of things that they’re doing when they surf the web and often times they will be multi-tasking. Someone may be researching about something while simultaneously considering hiring someone to just take care of the issue for them. They might have several windows open to different websites and actually forget if your site is informational in nature or if you’re a service provider. If there’s a clear, bold call to action that tells them what to do it helps with conversions.
People are shy
Also, some people may not realize that you want them to call. If you have a professional website that looks very polished they might think you’re too busy to take their call (that happens to us all the time). I remember when I first stumbled onto a great site called Backlinko.com that talked about Search Engine Optimization and right there on the contact page the owner of the site said that he takes time to respond to each and every email personally. I wasn’t going to email him but after reading that I thought why not and gave it a try. Sure enough, within a couple hours I got a personalized email response and ever since then that guy has been on my list of truly amazing marketers.
2. Add Social proof
Whether you’re a store or a local service provider, showing people that you’re good at what you do helps build confidence. This is also known as providing social proof. The best social proof is verified by third-party sites. If you’re a local service provider this could be Yelp or Google Business reviews and some industries even have their own rating sites like Angie’s List for home-improvement specialists and Martindale Hubbel or AVVO for attorneys.
If you’re new to building your online profile, however, you won’t have these built up quite yet so putting links to empty social proof sites won’t do you much good. Another thing to do is have a page of testimonials on your site from past clients. Most people understand that testimonials can be faked, however, so it’s always good to get video testimonials when possible (even if you just take them with your cell phone). Short of that you can always get photos of people to at least try to ground your reviews in a little bit of authenticity.
3. Have a phone number listed prominently
Although this is partially covered in our first tip, this is so important that we added it again here so we can dive into this a little bit more. The ultimate lead for a local business from a cold source that hasn’t been referred to you by an existing client is a phone call. The one exception may be if you have a brick and mortar location and then it’s a walk-in.
Having a large phone number on your site tells people that you want them to call you which is inviting, but also if you’re targeting your local area having a phone number with a local area code signals to your client-base that you are a true member of their community. For local professions like plumbers, florists, etc we often suggest changing out their toll free number for a local number as it tends to convert better.
4. Offer an irresistible promotion
If you’re looking to build new customers we always highly recommend creating some kind of promotion that would be irresistible. While a free consultation is always a good stand-by if you can’t discount your services we’ve seen much higher conversions with an actual figure or percentage discount.
Note that you can offer this to NEW customers only if you’re concerned that your existing client base would take advantage of the promotion. This really works to grow your customer list and it was what Groupon was founded on – but in this case you wouldn’t have to pay the hefty groupon fees.
5. Create a sense of urgency
If you are going to create a promotion one thing we always suggest is putting an expiration on the promotion. A great way to do this on your website is with a countdown timer. If people see a GREAT offer and then right next to it a ticking clock that counts down the days/hours/minutes to when that promotion ends they often find it very difficult not to call.
There are lots of free timers out there online that you can create and place onto your site with a little bit of coding knowledge, or you could hire a web developer (like us – wink wink) to create this kind of code for you. If you are a do-it-yourself type here’s a link to a free html countdown timer you can install with a simple iframe embed: https://www.timeanddate.com/clocks/freecountdown.html
Best of luck with all your call-to-action tactics and we wish you high conversions and loads of leads for the future.