Imagine that you just bought a new cell phone and it didn’t come with any ringtones. Not even a buzzer. Now imagine that all the prospects trying to reach your business were calling you on that phone.
They have your number, but no way to connect with you because your phone doesn’t make any noise to signify their interest.
That’s exactly the way most websites are designed. Unless something is horribly wrong, you have interested prospects visiting your site right now. They are in various stages of your sales cycle. Some are broadly researching your category and your service, some are researching you along with competitors, and some are ready to buy.
So how do they signify their interest to you?
If your website is designed like most of the sites we see, it has one ringtone, or one way for a visitor to get your attention – a “Contact Us” form that was probably the last thing the designer or developer thought about.
Which is a shame because it is the smallest distance on the internet between you and an interested prospect. Even a small change in the design of the form or the copy around the form can increase the percentage of your visitors that use it, and therefore get your attention and go from anonymous visitor to viable prospect.
In real life why does your cell phone come with so many ringtones? Because people are so different. They don’t all respond to the same thing. So if you have a lot of visitors on your site, and you have just one single response mechanism, will it be equally effective in triggering a response from all of the visitors? No… not by a long shot.
Some of your visitors give up information freely while others have to be motivated to give up information. The world of internet visitors is simply too diverse to rely on one simple response mechanism like the basic “contact us” form. Give your website different ways for visitors to contact you. Let your website ring!