How do you increase your website conversions, particularly if you have a business that sells services rather than products? How can you not only entice more people to visit your website but get them interested enough to contact you once they do?
If these are questions which are troubling you (and, let’s face it, frustrating you) here’s one bit of good news: You’re not alone! Many businesses struggle to get customers from their website and there can be many and varied reasons for this. Some of the more regular causes include:
- Poor search engine optimisation and website marketing, which leads to few visitors
- Unattractive website design
- Lack of engaging website content
- Lack of information that potential customers are looking for
- Technical issues that result in the website not working correctly
While some of these issues will take time, effort and possibly costs to fix, there are at least two things you can do quickly to help increase website conversions.
Call to action
One of the biggest mistakes people make which can cost them website conversions is forgetting the main objective of their website: The call to action. That is, what do you want website visitors to do once they’ve visited your website, or more correctly, a page or pages on your website?
While some service businesses can sell their services on line (for example, domain name registration and web hosting), for many service businesses the call to action is simply a contact. However, if you looked at a lot of service business websites you wouldn’t know it.
Obviously your website should have a contact us page or have contact details clearly visible on all or most pages, however, there is more you can do. For example, it’s a good idea to give people multiple ways of making contact, so they can choose the method that suits them. Plus, don’t forget to regularly tell people what they need to do to take the next step. “Call us for more information”, “Submit the below form to organise a quote”, “Email us and a friendly customer representative will be touch within 48 hours”.
Providing clear contact details and making sure your call to action is obvious should help to increase your website conversions.
Give them a taste
Another great way of getting more website conversions and engaging potential customers is to place a special offer prominently on your website. For example:
- Offer website visitors a free e-book on a topic directly related to your business
- Provide a free 30-minute, no-obligation meeting to discuss customer needs
- Provide a tool that visitors can use (e.g. a budgeting tool or a financial health checklist for finance businesses)
This provides potential customers with a chance to sample your business without committing; a chance to try before they buy.
A word of warning, for many businesses the special offer is to add people to their email distribution list for regular hints and news, however, this tactic rarely works. There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps most notably that many people will think you’re simply capturing email addresses so you can bombard them later with direct sales material.
I’ve tested this myself, using a typical service business website. After months of simply posting a standard ‘Sign up here and we’ll send you our regular newsletter’, and receiving only one subscription, I changed the offer to a free e-book. Almost overnight the requests started flowing. Will these people become customers and lead to the fulfilment of greater website conversions? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s certainly given my client a foot in the door.