How to convert a Website Enquiry into a Sale
April 4, 2019
Every business, no matter the size, product type or target market, has an ability to grow and expand through intuitive online marketing. We live in an internet-dominated customer experience – it's almost a given that a company large or small will have some form of online presence to connect to their customers. At a basic level, websites have been around for years and continue to thrive as expansive marketing platforms.
A website often acts as a ‘virtual storefront’. A customer may visit a website before they’ve even set foot in a brand’s physical environment, or the businesses may only have an online presence! Through websites, a brand can have global reach, grow their business through online lead generation and sales, and maintain a strong level of customer engagement.
The Impact of Customer Contact
A customer enquiry is the first step towards a potential sale. This could be an e-newsletter sign up, a form submission, a phone call encouraged by a website’s ‘contact us’ page, and even the ‘chat to us live’ tools that are becoming a common customer connectivity measure. Enquiries play an integral part in growing a successful business, both on and offline.
Just getting potential customers to visit your website requires advertising, marketing and an overall sense of your brand's presence. Once a customer visits a site, there are many factors that further encourage the sales process. It’s key to understand the importance of an effective and customer-focused user experience, in order to drive a relevant message that will ultimately result in a customer wanting to know more.
Optimising the Sales Journey
The core driving force to any growing business is a well-defined sales funnel, which lays out the customer experience relative to how you will interact with them at every level, from awareness, through to consideration and ultimately conversion.
A simple conversion funnel process is made up of three main steps:
- Creating awareness for your products and services
- Building interest in what you have to offer, and increasing a want or need by educating them on how you can help solve their problem
- Encouraging the desired action for their stage of the buying process
Once your sales funnel has been developed, you need to consider how your online presence supports this funnel and your conversion goals, and how to engage and convert website visitors. Having a website is great, but it needs to work for the purpose you’ve intended, and for the reason’s users are visiting your site.
There are many considerations involved in developing your website to meet the needs of your consumers. This includes offering clear value, keeping your site updated and responsive, making user pathways intuitive and decision-making easy, and with clear calls to action.
To ‘convert’ the sale upon receipt of an enquiry can be completed online, through strategic email marketing activity or offline buy your sales team via a phone call, online meeting or an in-person meeting to secure the sale. Having an appropriate internal process to capture the lead and do something meaningful with the enquiry in a timely fashion is critical in translating the enquiry into a sale.
Set your website up for Success
Your website needs to educate users, solve their problem, and facilitate a meaningful interaction; whether that be an enquiry or a transaction. A key part of understanding how users are behaving on your site is to track their activity, and discover what elements of your website are encouraging further interactions, enquiries and transactions.
A tool like Google Analytics is essential for any business with a website, so you can optimise your web content, layout, and calls to action that fulfil your business goals.
By learning about what your target audience needs and creating meaningful and relevant content that addresses that need, you can help your visitors and start to build a helpful relationship with them.
The two most important elements of your website are your user experience and the content. The content will inform the client of everything they need to know in order to make an enquiry or transaction, and the user experience ensures that information is easy for the user to find. Your content may include your USP, design features, case studies, testimonials, reviews and more.
The team to drive your Online Business
Located in the heart of South Melbourne, Web Force 5 are a tech team unlike any other. Driven through a diverse combination of creative, intuitive and data-savvy tech experts, Web Force 5 strives to ignite and expand your brand’s online presence.
The heart and soul of Web Force 5 is the development of an integrated CMS that business owners can utilise to establish their online presence. Extensive functionality has been built in, including E-commerce, CRM, email marketing. You also have the ability to create and edit webpages easily, meaning you can update or add new content as often as you like. In addition, they can provide you with a dedicated account manager to make sure your site is achieving your goals.
Web Force 5 can customise your website to align with your sales funnel to set your site up for success.