A Good Use Of Your Small Business Website Marketing Time
I sincerely hope that you have a website for your business, and that this brings in leads to your service business on a regular basis. You do, don’t you? If not, then that is something that you should put at the very top of your list for fixing as quickly as possible.
A decent website for any professional service business, or any business providing a service, is absolutely critical. How can you expect someone to believe that you are the best service provider for the area for which they need help with if your website is out of date and lacking in high quality content and a decent, up to date design? Everyone will review your website before contacting you, so if it is not of high quality, the person in question is highly likely to move on to the next service provider on their list, and you won’t even know about them.
As a short aside, quality content is far more important than the design element. A website with hundreds of pages of quality content will bring in far more visitors and far more leads than any website which is beautifully designed but has very little content on each page (even though a website designer will always try to tell you otherwise).
Anyway, back to my main point, if you do have a website that is working well for you, here is something you should be doing with it on a regular basis.
First, you should have your contact form easily accessible on the right hand side of every page, or if this is not possible, clear links or buttons to it throughout the content and on the right hand side.
Why? Well, in my experience of selling services, approximately 60% of visitors prefer to fill in an online enquiry form at first as opposed to picking up the telephone. If you don’t have an easy to locate contact form you are missing out, hugely.
Once you have a contact form, this next tip will greatly improve the success of your website marketing.
Test changing the words on the enquiry form. This should be incredibly easy to do if you use email marketing software for the contact forms on your website (I recommend that you do as it allows you to collect lead contact details so you can follow up more than once and makes split testing of different content on the form simple).
So what should you split test?
- The words at the top of the form (e.g. Free enquiry versus Contact Us);
- The amount of information you collect from the visitor (shorter generally is better, but there is always a balance to strike; your minimum requirements should be name, email address, phone number, nature of enquiry); and
- The words at the bottom of the form (‘Send Free Enquiry’ usually works better than ‘Submit’).
Why should you test all of this?
Because it will significantly increase the amount of leads that you receive from your website marketing activities, that’s why.
I can tell you that whilst the universal figures for website conversion are that 2% of all visitors to your website will contact you, it is nowhere near this high. From my experience of working on the marketing of hundreds of professional services websites that the figures is generally a lot less than this, often below 1%.
Therefore, anything that you can do to encourage more website visitors to contact you is crucial. Split testing the wording on your enquiry form can improve the amount of enquiries dramatically, so I strongly advise you to do this.
To find out which email marketing software I recommend, along with other incredibly practical service business marketing tips, simply enter your details into my split testing website marketing form below (I always practise what I preach😉