Websites Under Your Control Blog

You have this professionally-designed website that you can edit yourself, and you have finally achieved that goal of first-page listing on Google for some of your likely search phrases... but do the visitors to your site become customers?

Businesses that fail to "close the deal" will find that even high levels of traffic may not provide the return on their investment that they desired.

There are several way-too-common reasons why otherwise great websites don't generate the business they should. Check your own site, and see if you...

• Qualify Yourself
• Qualify the Potential Customers
• Make it Easy to Buy
• Help Them Take the Next Step

Qualify Yourself

Will potential customers want to do business with you? How will you stand out from the many competitors who are also found when someone searches Google for what you offer?

First impressions: Make sure that your website projects a professional appearance and generates trust in visitors. When someone clicks through to your web pages, they should feel they have landed on the site of a reputable business, and the quality of the site should engender confidence.

Provide your visitors with testimonials from past clients. Put snippets of these testimonials where they will be seen even if no one goes to the testimonials page.

Display relevant credentials and licenses, along with memberships in professional business associations.

Include an “About Us” page that describes the history of your company and bios of the owners and the key staff. List the qualifications of team members, and include "personalizing" things like community service and involvement.

Include your physical address and phone number. (If your address is a PO box or mailbox service, you'll have to work harder on other areas to build up the trust factor.)

Include frequent case studies or sample projects in your blog, mixed in with useful information related to your products and services.

Publish a regular newsletter, not full of ads, but with information useful to people who might become your customers.

Qualify the Potential Customers

"Qualifying potential customers" merely means making sure that there is a good match between what you offer, what they need, the location of the service, and the price.

Problem: If it isn't obvious what you offer or where, they are much less likely to ever call you.

Solution: Make it clear what you offer, and where.  (Many sites have their location in their title tags, but while this is great for Google, it is usually overlooked by website visitors.)

Pricing:  Many businesses do not want their prices on their website, for fear their competitors will see them.

Most people will not contact you for details when there is not at least some indication of pricing on your website.

We have to ask, however, whether the potentially lost "bargain-shopping" customers are as valuable as those who simply move on to the next website where they discover that the services are within their price range.

Given the many options for a provider, most people won't consider the ones who offer no pricing information at all.

Bonus: You won't waste time dealing with customers who won't spend what you ask, if you provide reasonable hints of your pricing on your website.

Make It Easy to Buy

While many service providers can adjust what they offer based on their customers' needs and budgets, many potential customers prefer to purchase packages of services at fixed prices. For the provider and customer alike, such packages remove the headache of having to make numerous decisions about many possible options.

Even if every project will be customized, start with a "standard package" and then adjust as needed.

With pre-bundled packages, the customer can often find exactly what they need on their own without the extra work on both their part and yours. The packaged services are also ideal for online purchase, since the whole bundle can be included as a single product.

Bonus: Don't underestimate the time saved when you don't need to develop a custom package with unique price estimates for each customer. What's your time worth?

Help Them Take the Next Step

Just listing your email address or phone number on your website won't cut it. (But omitting those will pretty much guarantee failure...) 

Do you need to "ask for the order" or give a "call to action" when you have already described what you have to offer and how to reach you?

Researchers have found, as reported by Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,  as much as a 900% increase in follow-through will result for walking the prospect through the next steps...

Make sure that your website includes a message calling on visitors to take action. Many websites forget this simple step and end up losing valuable sales.

 

Extra Bonus Topic: Make It Easy for Them to Keep Buying

While you are at it, why not boost your recurring revenues by offering your customers something you know they will need every so often? Make it easy for them to get automatic refills, updates, replacements, tune-ups, or whatever else your customers ought to be getting on a repeat basis.

Otherwise, you are abandoning these customers back to the marketplace when they next need what you offer.

 

Need help putting all this together for your website?

Call us at 866-640-1234, or email us at partners@friscowebsites.com.

You finally have a well-designed, professional website that really showcases the capabilities of your business. The business blog on your site is full of interesting, informative material. You are getting a lot of traffic and people are spending time looking around. But all of this isn't generating quite the results you hoped for.

What's missing? It's the follow-up.

After everything you have done to get the website the way you want it, and to get people to visit your site, the last thing you want is for them to leave without some way for you to keep in touch with them.

If they took the time to find and look at your website, they have an interest in what you have to offer — but it's pretty common that people do their research in advance, before they are ready to spend their money.

So even if they decide then and there to do business with you when the time comes, unless they remember your website address, they may never find their way back to you.

The solution? Follow up with them.

Collect their email address, and stay in touch by providing more of what they found interesting on your website, so they remember you.

Of course, most people won't just give you their email address merely because you ask. Offer them something of value in return. Perhaps an email newsletter with important information they need, money-saving coupons, or special offers. All they need to do to receive this money saving information is enter their name and e-mail.

Once a visitor leaves your website, they're gone, often forever. Capturing the visitor's name and email address lets you turn these anonymous visitors into contacts, and then you can follow up to turn those contacts into customers.

When you follow-up, monitor which of your visitors click on which links, and what actions they take on your website, so you can see which visitors are the most likely prospects (and also fine-tune the messages you send).

If you are using our standard Online Business Partner^® service, this is all built in to your service.

The unofficial results are in, with our client Patrick Fallon winning 57% of the vote for Frisco City Council.

As with most local elections, especially in "off years", the election depends on a very few voters, and yet the opportunity for a candidate to spread a message is limited, since broadcast and print media typically give little attention to elections outside the "big city".

So "getting the word out" was especially important, and a website, together with email marketing, supplemented Patrick's many other efforts to do so.

As with all the sites we set up for clients, this one allowed Patrick and his team to go in and make updates, add campaign news, and monitor effectiveness on a daily basis.

The owner of Logan Teal Salon wanted the benefits of client-editable content, email marketing, and more.

She already had a website that we had designed in the past, and did not want to change much, so she asked us to merely re-implement her website using our Online Business Partner™ technology.

For less than the cost of a couple of small website changes, we were able to convert her site and show her how to make updates whenever she wishes, with no special software needed.