So, you've had a great website designed, you've even managed to do well on the search engines so your website is receiving lots of visitors. Now you want to convert those visitors into customers.
There are many things you can do in order to encourage them and I will add articles in the coming weeks to cover these. Today, I want to talk about telephone numbers as it's a surprising area that many website owners neglect.
I was watching a video on YouTube of Rory Sutherland, a fascinating chap who is an expert in marketing. He expressed surprise that many website owners hide their telephone number. The reasons for this are obvious, customers who contact you by email can be dealt with much more efficiently than customers who call you on the telephone. It's often quicker and more importantly, you can queue up any information requests and answer them at your leisure whereas the telephone requires an instant response.
However, this so-called logic fails in two important areas. Statistically, people who contact you by electronic means (email, text message etc) convert at an average rate of between 0.5 to 2 percent. People who contact you by telephone convert at a rate of 20 to 40 percent. This is such a huge difference that it should be a reason to emblazon your phone number all over your website right now. The second area is that it makes your company look dodgy:
One of the things you have to do with your visitors is to get them to trust you. Hiding your phone number suggests at the very least that customer care is not important to you and at worst that you aren't even a real company. So display it proudly.
I don't even know if that is a real word but it should be. Make sure that wherever your number appears on your website, clicking it on a mobile phone opens up your phone's app to allow you to call right away without typing in the number. This is very easy to do so if it doesn't happen on your website, speak to your web designer now.
I no longer have a landline at home. I only have a mobile number. This is becoming increasingly common as the old reasons for having a landline are slowly going. However, for a business, I strongly recommend that you have a landline. This is especially important for local businesses. The fact that my number for Net Quality starts with 0115 tells Nottingham customers that I am based in Nottingham. Another step forward in getting the visitor to trust you.