It is all very well having lots of traffic on your website, but if there is a significant drop-off between visits and conversions, then something isn’t working.

These days, your website is your most important sales tool. Giving your business a 24/7 digital presence, acting as an online brochure and even allowing customers to transact directly.

If you have done the job of effectively driving the RIGHT customer to your site, you should be able to expect a certain level of conversion. If your conversion rate is low or inconsistent, it might be time to undertake a basic CRO Audit (conversion rate optimisation audit).

Given the assumption that the prospect has landed on your website for a reason, perhaps a targeted social post or an organic search, then let’s consider WHY they haven’t pulled the trigger to get in touch.

Is the customer journey clear?

Put yourself in the seat of your ideal customer and follow the journey from start to finish. Consider the starting point and begin from a social post, email, or search engine result and follow the steps your prospect would be taking. You can use Google Analytics to view your highest entry and exit pages.

It is important to remember that your prospect might not know (or be ready) to jump straight to the contact page and instead will be reading your content, visiting service/product pages and working out if you are the right partner for them.

Don’t make any assumptions and check if you have the correct call-to-actions (buttons, forms or links) at respective parts of the journey, i.e. if the user has just read a particularly strong case study, are you asking them to get in touch to achieve similar results? Or expecting them to find their own way to a contact page?

Make the journey as easy as possible for your users and think critically about their purchase behaviour at each point.

Does your form work?

Rule number one of CRO is to make sure that prospects can actually convert when they want to.

You wouldn’t believe the number of sites that we audit that have a broken form, meaning that the ‘nicely warmed-up/ready to convert prospect’ is left frustrated.

As part of your best practice website maintenance, you should be filling out a dummy form submission every few weeks to make sure your form is ACTUALLY working and that the data is being sent to the right place, i.e. an email notification to your sales team, or an integration with your sales/prospect software – HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.

Are you asking the right questions?

Here’s a critical question – How much information do you really need from a prospect for them to become a lead?

It can be tempting to ask all the questions under the sun, but the longer the form, the longer the process for the user.

If you get a lot of leads that are a waste of time, then feel free to layer on the pre-qualification, i.e. how big is your team, where are you based, what is your turnover, etc.
However, if you are trying to top up your sales funnel, then you should only be asking for as much data as needed to conduct a follow-on call or meeting.

Tools such as Typeform are brilliant for analysing which questions are important as you can track the drop-off and success rate of each question.

Does the prospect have any concerns?

When speaking to any Business Development or Sales team, it is common to see a familiar thread of ‘queries’ or ‘push-backs’ that they hear from prospective customers.

Depending on what your business does, these frequently asked questions could be anything. From ‘what technology do I need in place’ or ‘what is the average contract length’ to ‘what is the price’ and ‘how soon can we get started’. Speak to your sales team and consider how you could preempt these customer concerns. You don’t necessarily need to divulge all of the answers if they depend on the client, sector or service, but you can give an indication to minimise a prospect’s concern.

By tackling these potential ‘enquiry blockers’ head-on you will be able to begin your sales journey one step earlier and encourage a 1-on-1 conversation to confirm exact details.

 

If you have conducted a thorough check of the above, but still aren’t seeing an improvement in conversion rate, there may be bigger issues with your website!

Feel free to apply for a free, no-obligation website audit by filling in the form below!

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