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Transcript

Fix the Leak: Turn Website Traffic Into Leads · Modularity Podcast

• 0:00
  A thousand people visited your website last month.
• 0:02
  Your phone rang five times.
• 0:05
  So where did the other nine hundred ninety five go?
• 0:08
  And the usual answer is, "I need more traffic."
• 0:11
  So the owner buys more ads, pays for more SEO, posts more on social.
• 0:17
  But that's almost always the wrong diagnosis.
• 0:20
  Traffic without leads is rarely an acquisition problem.
• 0:24
  It's a conversion problem, which just means a low percentage of visitors are doing
• 0:29
  anything once they land.
• 0:30
  Let's put numbers on it.
• 0:32
  The cross industry average website conversion rate is about 2.9 percent,
• 0:37
  and a healthy service business usually lands between 2 and 5 percent.
• 0:41
  Plenty of small business sites sit well below 1 percent, often around half a percent
• 0:46
  or lower.
• 0:47
  At half a percent, 99 out of 100 visitors leave without calling,
• 0:53
  booking, or filling anything out.
• 0:54
  Here's why that matters for your wallet.
• 0:56
  A thousand visitors a month at half a percent is 5 leads.
• 1:00
  Double your traffic and you pay twice as much to get 10 leads.
• 1:04
  But lift that conversion rate from half a percent to 2 percent,
• 1:08
  and those same thousand visitors become 20 leads.
• 1:12
  You didn't spend another dollar on advertising.
• 1:15
  The bottom line is that paid traffic needs a landing page that actually converts.
• 1:18
  Otherwise you're pouring water into a bucket with holes in it.
• 1:22
  Doubling traffic to a leaky site doubles the waste.
• 1:25
  So why does the bucket leak?
• 1:27
  Speed of judgment, mostly.
• 1:29
  One widely cited Stanford finding says about 75 percent of people judge a company's
• 1:34
  credibility based on its website design.
• 1:37
  Another claim that gets repeated is that people form a trust impression in about 50
• 1:42
  milliseconds.
• 1:43
  That's faster than you can read your own company name.
• 1:46
  Now, I'd treat those exact numbers as rules of thumb rather than lab certainties.
• 1:50
  But the direction is clear.
• 1:52
  A first time visitor decides in a few seconds whether to stay.
• 1:56
  In that window, the top of your homepage has to answer three questions.
• 2:00
  What do you do?
• 2:01
  Who is it for, and where do you operate?
• 2:05
  And what do I click next?
• 2:07
  Most small business homepages fail question one.
• 2:11
  They lead with something like "Excellence in service since 1998."
• 2:15
  Nice, but a plumber and a pet groomer could both say it.
• 2:18
  Compare that to "Emergency plumbing for homeowners in Erie,
• 2:22
  same day service."
• 2:23
  One of those tells you what happens next.
• 2:26
  There's a good test behind this.
• 2:27
  MarketingExperiments, the research arm of MECLABS, ran a test for a large Canadian
• 2:32
  bank.
• 2:33
  The control page had a clear headline, then a pile of tabs for credit cards,
• 2:38
  safe deposit boxes, business banking, even a cell phone offer.
• 2:42
  The version that stripped all that out and stuck to what the headline promised
• 2:46
  produced a 200 percent lift in conversions over the original.
• 2:49
  Their mantra is "clarity trumps persuasion."
• 2:53
  Which is a polite way of saying, stop being clever.
• 2:56
  Nobody ever called a contractor because the tagline was poetic.
• 3:00
  Okay, so what do you actually fix?
• 3:03
  Start at the top of the homepage.
• 3:05
  Write a plain headline that says what you do, who you serve,
• 3:09
  and where.
• 3:10
  Under it, one short line about the outcome the customer gets.
• 3:14
  Not your process.
• 3:15
  The result.
• 3:16
  Second, pick one main call to action.
• 3:19
  When a page has three buttons of equal weight, people freeze.
• 3:23
  One button, high contrast, above the fold.
• 3:26
  And please retire the word "Submit."
• 3:28
  Try "Get Your Free Estimate" or "Schedule Your Inspection."
• 3:32
  The button should tell the visitor what they're getting.
• 3:34
  Third is the form.
• 3:35
  Every field you add is another reason to quit.
• 3:38
  For most service businesses, three to five fields is the sweet spot.
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  Name, a way to reach them, and a short description of the job.
• 3:45
  You don't need their full mailing address, budget, and timeline before you've said
• 3:49
  hello.
• 3:50
  You can ask those questions on the phone, where you can actually explain why you're
• 3:54
  asking.
• 3:55
  Fourth is proof.
• 3:57
  About 93 percent of consumers read reviews before buying.
• 4:01
  But a lot of sites bury testimonials on a Reviews page nobody visits.
• 4:06
  Research cited by one web agency says placing trust signals like testimonials,
• 4:11
  star ratings, and badges near your call to action can lift conversions by 15 to 34
• 4:17
  percent.
• 4:18
  Treat that as a range from one source, not a promise.
• 4:21
  But the logic holds.
• 4:23
  Someone is about to hand over their phone number to a stranger,
• 4:26
  so show them proof right at that moment.
• 4:28
  And fifth, check it on a phone.
• 4:31
  More than half of web visits are mobile.
• 4:34
  If your phone number is plain text or an image instead of a tappable link,
• 4:39
  someone has to memorize it and switch apps.
• 4:42
  Buttons should be big enough for a thumb, roughly 44 by 44 pixels.
• 4:47
  Here's a simple way to test all of this.
• 4:50
  Pull up your own site on your phone, with one hand, and try to book yourself.
• 4:54
  If you get annoyed, so does everyone else.
• 4:57
  Good.
• 4:57
  So, three quick wins for this week.
• 5:00
  One, take a screenshot of just the top of your homepage.
• 5:03
  Show it to someone outside your industry for five seconds.
• 5:07
  Then ask what you do and which button they'd click.
• 5:11
  If they can't say, rewrite your headline in plain English.
• 5:14
  Two, log into your website's back end and delete two or three fields from your main
• 5:19
  lead form.
• 5:20
  Three, take your best five star Google review, one real sentence from a real
• 5:25
  customer, and put it right next to your main button.
• 5:28
  Here's the takeaway.
• 5:29
  Before you spend another dollar chasing more visitors, plug the leak in the
• 5:35
  storefront you already have.
• 5:37
  Your next best customer may have already visited and left.
• 5:41
  And if you want help auditing your site or putting any of this in place,
• 5:45
  you can learn more at modularity.us.