Increase Web Site Conversions

Most of us have web sites for one reason – to get conversions. Conversions can be people buying stuff from you if you’re an ecommerce site or filling out a contact form if you are more service oriented. But we need to get conversions or we’re dead in the water.

I’ve seen my business increase when I’ve made it clear what I want people to do on my site. We have one client who has always relied on people phoning them. We recently added a contact form to their site which is helping them get some business from those visitors who come to their site during non-business hours.

1. Have Good Calls to Action on Every Page

You should have clear Calls to Action on every page of your site. This is where you tell people what you want them to do – buy your product, call you, fill out a quote form, or download brochures. They should be near the top of your pages and stand out from the rest of the content on the page.

2. Create a Good “Contact Us” page

You should have a good “Contact Us” page on your web site with various ways of getting a hold of you—phone, email, contact form, etc. People like to contact companies in various ways so you need to make various avenues available to them. We even have a client who has her Skype number on every page of her site because she deals a lot with people overseas and this saves money for her and her customers.

3. Simplify Your Contact Form

Most people don’t want to answer a lot of questions on a contact form, especially info that is irrelevant to the sale. You might be tempted to gather a ton of information but you should trust that you’ll be able to gather this when they are on the phone with you if they are a legitimate lead.

4. Relevant Content on Landing Pages for Pay Per Click Advertising

If you are using pay per click, you want to have good landing pages with pertinent information on it. The visitor doesn’t want to have to search throughout your site to find the relevant information they’re looking for. And the pay per click services, like Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search, grade your ad according to the content of your landing page. You could actually get more traffic at a lower cost by having relevant content on your landing page. And it will decrease the frustration of your visitor.

5. Get Back in Touch Quickly

The faster you get back to someone, the more likely you are to sell your product or service. The longer you wait, the colder the lead gets.

I help market a company that was getting about 3,500 leads a month through their web site. Before they made changes in their call center, they were taking up to 24 hours to get back to people. When a lead came through their web site, an administrative person would input the data in a database then forward the information to a sales director and then the sales director would forward it to salesperson. The whole process was convoluted.

5.5 Put Your Phone Number on Every Page

Some people don’t feel comfortable filling out contact forms or are in a hurry and just want to talk to a human. They want quick answers. And it will be better for you to talk with someone rather than going back and forth by email.

These are just five and a half ways to increase your conversions. Other ideas would be to redesign your web site it it’s out of date, use email marketing to your prospects, and offer some giveaways. I’m sure you have ideas yourself that have helped you.

But conversions are what we want and I’m hopeful that you will see more as you implement some of these ideas.