Unless you have the wonderful problem of a phone that’s always ringing, as a small business owner, you rely on your website to pull in new leads. This is especially true outside of business hours. So how do you get your website to be a digital version of your top salespeople?
Avoid these 3 common mistakes and you’ll be on your way to making your website a sales superstar.
1. Lacking a Clear Value Proposition
A new visitor should be able to quickly scan your homepage and immediately understand 1) what your product or service does, 2) who it’s for, and 3) how it will benefit them.
Imagine you know absolutely nothing about your company (yes that’s hard to do!). Now take a look at your homepage. Would you understand the benefit being offered in 30 seconds or less? That’s how much time you have to communicate your offering before a potential customer bounces from your website.
2. Failing to Build Trust
It’s so easy to talk about how great your products and services are; after all your business is your passion! But wouldn’t it be so much better if your customers did that for you?
Prospects respond best to social proof like:
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Real customers giving short testimonials on how your product/service benefited them.
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Reviews on other sites (we do this on Intuit Apps.com).
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Customer Success Stories.
If you have any or all of these trust signals, that’s great! Feature them prominently on your website. We’re going to run an experiment in the coming months to see if interspersing short customer quotations with headshots on our Tour page helps or hurts our conversions. I’ll update you on that in a future blog post, or hit me up on twitter @jamilaljabri
3. Too Many Hoops in Your Conversion Funnel
Einstein said it best: “Make things as simple as possible and not simpler.”
So true when it comes to your funnel. Here’s an example: in my last role at a travel ecommerce company, the biggest improvement we made to our conversion rate was changing from a multi-page check-out process where we made buyers click through many pages and decide on extras like car rentals, to a single page where we captured only the required info to book their flight. Not only were bookings higher, revenue was also higher despite not getting cross-sell sales from car rentals and hotels.
Maybe a conversion on your website isn’t a purchase -- it’s a lead. How many fields are in your form? I think you only need 2: name and email. When you keep it simple, you’ll get more leads, and you can get all the other info when you follow-up.
Measuring the Results
So how do you know if the changes you made to your website are helping or hurting your conversions? If you aren’t already, you can track your conversion rate with a free tool like
Google Analytics, which is easy to add to your website, and you can run A/B tests with a tool like
Optimizely. We applied the learnings above to our
website redesign, and the results have exceeded our expectations.
If you have a question, comment or story of your own, please leave it in the comments section below or tweet us @MethodCRM.
Until next time,
Jamil
PS - In my next post I'll cover 3 more website mistakes to avoid so your redesign isn't a train wreck.
Illustration below is by Ron, Method's Admiral of Awesome Design.
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