If you are running your own business then your website should be the hub of all your marketing efforts. As a small business owner, your website is just about the most powerful marketing tool you have. Your website should have a pulling effect. It should pull your customers in and keep them there long enough to convince them to become a customer, growing your business in the process.
The common biggest mistakes small businesses make with their websites that they end up losing their valuable customers, and how you can easily overcome them. Your website is losing customers due to some of the points are explained below;
- There is no call to action:-
- Every website needs a goal because everyone wants to make a sale.
- If you have designed your website to be mostly informational, there are many chances that you will never define your call to action.
- A call to action is simply asking your site visitors to complete some task that you can define as a goal.
- Sometimes you might want that your customers pick up the phone and call you. In that case, you might have a very large text box that says “call us today”, followed by your phone number.
- The simple step of telling them to call you has been shown to increase calls drastically, as opposed to simply displaying your phone number.
- Your website is all about you:-
- When businesses come up in the market with the copy that will go on their websites, they usually default to talking about themselves as a business.
- Unfortunately, your customers do not really care about you, or even what you do. They only care about how you can help them.
- So try to be specific, and speak briefly and clearly about how and what you do or sell will impact their lives for the better.
- Tell them what they will get, and more importantly, what that will do for them.
- You are forgetting the people who are just looking:-
- As many as 96% of the people coming to your website are not yet ready to buy the product that your company is offering.
- They might be keeping your product as an option and come back later after researching.
- Unfortunately, they will probably forget once they decide to pull the trigger.
- So, by just pushing for a quick sale in the short-term, you may be missing out on the long-term benefits.
- In order to fix this problem and stay in the minds of your prospects throughout their decision-making process, then you will want to get as many emails as you can.
- By this way, you may continue to market to them through email and Facebook re-targeting until they are ready.
- But also before you simply add a form inviting customers to sign up for your newsletter, you should come up with some sort of incentive you can offer in exchange for the email addresses.
- This will dramatically increase the number of emails you captured, and also it will increase your marketing reach.
- Outdated or ugly design:-
- A website in horrible need of a redesign not only looks bad, but it also makes you look bad as well.
- A poorly designed website will ruin your credibility as a business, scaring would be customers right into the arms of your competition.
- So, try to find a web designer or agency that not only has a great eye for design but also who knows a lot about what makes a good user experience.
- After all, a website that looks great, but not designed in a way that is easy to navigate is not going to help you very much.
In the end, just make sure that you have a goal for your website and business too and that will help you to achieve the overall objective of your business. Then try to design everything around that organizational goal. Make your website as easy as possible for your site visitors to say yes to what you are offering. If you are able to do that, then you can take your website from a glorified brochure to a fully functional lead generating machine.