Nowadays, ALL and I mean ALL roads to sales go through your website at some point. You’ve probably invested hundreds upon thousands of dollars on branding and marketing to get your prospects to your website in the first place. So when they do visit your website, say “nice site,” and leave, you, me, and countless other companies have just lost an incalculable amount of revenue. If I hazard to guess, there is no other place in marketing where that much lost revenue and sales opportunity are being proverbially flushed.
Why am I going so far as to call it bleeding sales opportunity? Isn’t that a bit grotesque? While it may not be a great dinner topic, bloodletting means letting out blood, which, if not stopped, means bleeding to death. That is exactly what your website is doing to your business.
The cost of losing out on sales prospects is incalculable. On average, only 3% of your website visitors fill out a form and make themselves known. That leaves 97% of website visitors a massive sales opportunity. You can’t afford to miss out on these potential sales after all of the time and money you spend on getting them to your website in the first place — it’s like leaving all the windows open in your 10,000 sq. foot mansion while the heat’s on full blast in the winter. Almost sounds like the lecture you probably give your kids, right? (And if you’re like me, it’s a lecture you give on a daily basis until they finally move out and pay for their own damn heating bills. Ha, now I said it.)
So why are you missing out on so many qualified potential clients? Because, because, because we have too many sales opportunities we don’t want our sales people to have to work overtime?
Stop listening to your web designers — most of them are not marketers. Your web team may have argued that multiple CTAs and other conversion tactics will look unappealing on your site. Don’t listen to them. No matter how great looking your website is, prospects won’t convert if they aren’t given the sales opportunity they need to do so.
Don’t listen to your team in this particular matter. Group think leads to more bloodletting. If you don’t believe me look at all the largest corporation websites. They have the most team members with the most ideas, but they are the worst violators of this principal. I have sat in on countless meetings where team members make very compelling points to get rid of website conversion methods. It shocks me that so many businesses still are not using CTAs and forms to get prospects to convert. How do you expect them to take the next step when you don’t invite them to? Does Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote come to mind, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take?” And a bit of Forrest Gump mixed in for good measure: “That’s all I have to say about that.”
You can’t convert what you can’t see. Unfortunately the 3% of visitors who are filling out forms is like looking at the tip of the iceberg. You think it is the whole thing, but 97% of it is underwater … and it’s easy to forget it is there. So many companies believe that Google analytics is all they need. Again, more group think amongst web developers. Sure, Google Analytics is free. But what good are “free” analytics that don’t tell you what companies are visiting and what they’re interested in? Free is a high price to pay for a tool that lets your prospects or website leads slip away.
One of the reasons I love the concept of business blogs so much is that just the blog alone attached to a website solves a lot of the conversation problems without having to re-develop a whole new website. Problem solving content keeps visitors engaged, establishes your organization as thought leaders and problem solvers, and each blog post is like a living, breathing website asset which gives your visitors many opportunities to make contact at their peak of interest.
Let’s all stop throwing away the money we’ve invested in marketing and branding. You need the right mindset and unwavering commitment to modern website marketing. If you’d like to chat further or learn more about getting better conversions, feel free to reach out to me at 970-223-6565 x 101 or marc@activeblogs.com. Or, simply schedule a quick 15 minute program demo today!
