One of the unfortunate realities of the ecommerce space, is that website owners often get caught up focusing solely on how much traffic they’re able to generate, without any real focus on what they’re going to do with that traffic once they receive it. A fact about website traffic that is commonly overlooked, is that it’s only really useful if it leads to website conversions. Now this may be a website enquiry, a particular website goal, or in some cases it may just be traffic if your business model is solely based around advertising, but you absolutely have to have a strategy in place to guide your website visitors down the path of making a website conversion from the moment they reach your site.
For the focus of this article, we’re going to look at 10 unique methods you can use to boost customer enquiries on your website. This article is going to focus on the goal of generating a customer enquiry on your website, and how you can best position yourself to increase the number of enquiries made on your website each and every month.
10. Intelligent popup’s (not annoying customer evasive tools)
Popup technology has come a long way in recent years, with some really interesting customizations possible for the common popup. Gone are the days when it’s acceptable to have a popup appear each and every time a website page loads; now through a combination of clever cookie and JavaScript based technologies, popup services can use a variety of methods to track your visitors behaviour, previous interests, and visitation frequencies to serve them a popup on any preselected aggressive or non-aggressive frequency you’re comfortable with.
At Job Stock, we use a fairly non-aggressive popup strategy to generate increased customer email registrations, but can still prove very successful. From the moment we implemented this strategy, we saw a 300% rise in email registrations upon doing so. Our service is completely custom built, however you may like to try services such as Popup Domination on your website for some pretty cool popup implementations.
9. Placement of customer enquiry forms
Placement of customer enquiry forms has developed a lot in recent years, with a number of developing methodologies that the web community is embracing to boost customer enquiries. From fixed position forms, to scroll dependent forms, article base forms, left/right column forms, and footer enquiry forms, there are a plethora of options for you to choose from when it comes to placing your forms on your web pages.
One strategy that many webmasters are using is multi-form placement. This may mean placing a form on the footer of all of your webpages (which is a traditionally less successful form placement), and complimenting that with a fixed position form or constant left/right column form. In general, most websites or blogs will place form elements on their sites in a couple of locations, but fixed position placement is becoming more and more popular, because it remains part of the viewport at all times regardless of whether the user has scrolled down the page or not, increasing time of visibility, and likelihood a conversion will be made.
8. The fields you use in your customer enquiry forms
Research shows that in general the less fields you have in a customer enquiry forms, the more likely someone is to submit the form. However what’s really valuable is consideration of factors such as engagement rate once you receive a customer enquiry: specifically with regards to use of the first name field. Large marketing campaign data has shown that if you intend on using your customer enquiries as email marketing data following a submission to your database, emails sent out with the first name field used to personalize the email often receive much higher click through rates. As you can see on Job Stock, this is a common element of all of our enquiry forms, and is a mandatory requirement for a successful submission. Generally we implement just the first name and email fields, as we have found that this produces the best customer enquiry rates for email submissions, and not much more than that and a message field for contact page submissions best practice.
7. Be open, honest and transparent
Internet users these days are no fools. They’re experienced enough in general to see a scam a long distance away, and if not, you need to treat them with the respect they deserve in your marketing efforts. Be upfront with your users and advise them that you won’t on-sell their details, that you’re not going to constantly bombard their inbox with useless sales oriented pitches, and ensure them that unsubscribing is always an option. If enquiring with you means that you’ll definitely follow up with marketing emails, be transparent about that. Users like to know what they’re getting into, because in most people’s cases, the poor actions of others have made them skeptical of supplying details online. If you’re going to build trust and a business relationship with someone who enquires about your services online, then ensure you’re completely honest right from the start, and do not change your terms of service with regards to email distribution or marketing without updating your database of contacts.
6. Timing is everything
Previously we discussed how important it was to limit the number of fields you have on your enquiry forms, but what’s even more important, is that when you test your form, you feel that you and your customers are able to easily complete the form in a timely manor. Of course it’s difficult to suggest how long that may be, but for an email registration form, no longer than 15 seconds would be ideal, and for a contact form submission, try to aim for less than a minute, although this greatly depends on how much time is spent filling out message fields.
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