With new business never easy to come by, why would you put off a potential customer?
Here are a couple of tips…about contact forms and content on your website.
- Forms
There was a time when someone had a ‘eureka moment’ and thought that contact forms would be a great ‘customer data acquisition’ tool. Ask your potential customer to enter: Name, Phone number, Address, Number of employees, and any number of personal bits of information, so they could propagate a database and build a profile. Then someone suggested that some people might not want to add all that personal information and it might impact new customers enquiring, so they put an asterisk by some of the little boxes saying ‘you don’t need to fill these boxes in’.
That all makes sense, right? Well actually no it doesn’t. Contact forms are always a turn-off. They inhibit response and reduce dramatically the chance of you getting an enquiry, let alone a sale! There is an exception and it’s where it’s advantageous to collect data in preparation for a transaction, or you’re buying something online.
For the sake of clarity, this is what I mean by a ‘contact form’
Finally, from the potential customers’ point of view, contact forms don’t live in their email account, so they’ve not got a record of it.
So what should you do? Well, it’s pretty simple. Sure, have a contact section and tab in the navigation of your website, but then just have an ‘Email us’ link that launches YOUR email client. That might be Outlook, Apple Mail etc.
If you’re not sure what I’m mean, just get in touch, I’ll gladly steer you in the right direction.
2. Blogs and information on your website
If you have knowledge and skill, share it for nothing and make it easy for your website visitors to read, download or print! Blogs, factsheets, opinion pieces – anything that portrays you as an expert helps build reassurance and increases the chance of a quality conversation.
This cartoon sums it up admirably!
Now the point here is a classic Catch22. You’re the expert and you don’t want to give your skill and knowledge away for free! But if you don’t, your potential customer will never know.
And if they are going to try and ‘do it themselves’, they’re not really going to be clients anyway.
If there is a conclusion here for both 1 and 2, it’s that getting business is never easy, so don’t make it more difficult.
If you’re unsure and you’d like to know more, or if you don’t agree with my point of view, I’d be happy to have a chat with you.
