Get Engaged with Visitors on Your Website
Who was it that said “turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is reality”? It’s been a much-used expression for many years and certainly holds true today.
You could adapt the saying slightly and apply it to your website too. “Number of visitors is vanity, number of enquiries is sanity, but the number of sales is reality”. Because at the end of the day, how many people visit your website is completely irrelevant if they’re not taking any action on it – if they’re not making an enquiry or purchasing something (in the golf club world, that’d likely be a tee time booking).
So how do you convert vanity-traffic to your website into something a little more meaningful for your business?
Here's our top-5 tips to get your website working better for you for offline sales.
1. A strong call-to-action
We see so many websites that look lovely but have no obvious endgame. Pages that are beautifully designed and with some wonderful pictures and copy, but then they just fizzle out at the end - there’s no “what next?” for the visitor. It’s a like travelling a road to nowhere.
The big question to ask of all your website pages is “so what?” – and then answer that question at the end. You’ve got the best golf course in your area – brilliant, but so what? What should I do about that as a visitor to your site?
It often isn’t complicated – “click here to book your tee time” or “complete the form below to arrange a tour”. The point is though that there’s an ending of the users experience on your website that’s tangible.
2. Don't spill all the beans
The truth is, when it comes to products and services exclusively sold offline, you can tell visitors to your website a little too much. That sounds bonkers right? But if you can’t buy it online the last thing you want to do is give enough information for the website visitor to make an informed decision over whether to pursue their interest further. Why? Because lots will decide they don’t want to – and they’ll click off your website never to be heard of again.
3. Get their contact details
Never miss an opportunity to capture the data from your website visitors. If they click-off without providing their contact information, there’s no way of knowing who they were and you can’t target them in your future marketing efforts.
Take the big ticket-sales for instance that can't be purchased online. The website user is probably going to want to learn lots of specific stuff about your product/service. So how about asking for an email address so you can send them your brochure by email. Better still, how about asking for an email address to give them access to the restricted web page where they can download the brochure for themselves.
4. Use trackable mechanisms of enquiry
There are various different mechanisms you can use to allow a website visitor to make contact with you. The most obvious and popular ones are:
- A telephone number
- An email address
- A social media account
- A chatbot
- A webform
However, of those 5 - only 2 can easily be tracked in terms of monitoring the volume of inbound enquiries and sourcing what page that enquiry came from – the chatbot and the webform. That’s important information for when you start looking at your pages content and call-to-action.
Webforms also have the additional benefit of allowing you to guide the kind of information you’re after. Think about a date-based product or service for instance. If you’re webpage is asking for an enquiry, it would be good to know the date the user would prefer. This is all info you can add into the webform.
5. Use trackable mechanisms of enquiry
The more clicks a user has to make to get in touch, the less likely they will be to do so. In this way, “clicks” are your enemy and every effort should be made to reduce them to as few as possible when it comes to making contact with you.
Every website should have a “Contact-Us” page but using this as the one and only page where you can make contact with the club is just lazy. Cut the click out and add a webform at the bottom of every page instead – then it’s there, ready and tempting the user to make that enquiry.
Also, don’t overload with webform fields. It would be nice to get the name, email, telephone number, golf club name, address, inside leg measurement and first-born child’s hair colour – but you’ll never get it. People just won’t bother. We’d recommend just a name and their choice of contact medium - either email or telephone (or both, if they were that way inclined). You can go back for more in-depth information on them later, for now, all we want is the ability to make contact with them directly.
Hang on – you said webforms were good because you can guide the kind of information you want?
Yes, they are, and you can make fields voluntary or compulsory. If you were interested in their inside leg measurement, you can ask the question, but just make it a voluntary field that they can ignore if they’re precious about that sort of thing!
Just a little thought and a bit of tinkering with your business’s website pages can have a powerful impact on its performance and start yielding the really productive stuff – the inbound sales enquiries.
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