Make Your Website Work Harder for You!
I remember about 10 years ago I was talking to my sales rep for the yellow pages. He kept trying to get me to spend more money on phone book ads. I told him that by 2016 no one would be using the phone book anymore ( I didn’t fully believe it, but I thought it would be a possibility. Fast forward to today and it is really amazing how true that prediction was. I have spoken to many granite shop owners who don’t realize how important it is to have a good web page. However, the large shops have been investing money in this area for years. If you don’t have a website, then you need to get one. But just putting up a basic site just doesn’t work anymore. You have to make sure it is a tool that converts visitors into customers. There are several ways to improve your website’s conversion rate, and while many are simple in theory, you may be well served to use the services of a pro. I use a company called digitalharvester.com to help me. When talking to they guys over there I found a couple of things everyone should implement.
Use Call Tracking.
If you are using multiple lead sources to generate traffic to you granite shop’s web page, then you want to make sure you can trace your leads to the different channels. This used to be an expensive proposition, $50-$60/ month per line could add up fast. Now, with VOIP technologies, you can get different phone numbers for less than $10.00/ month and some are even free! (Sort Of). I know some guys that were spending a ton of money on mailers that they thought were bringing in business, but when they added tracking, they found that 80% of their leads were coming from their website. They took that wasted money and put it into a better converting channel.
Analyze your Google Analytics data.
Once you have your site up, you need to be able to see what people are doing on it. Google has powerful tools that can help you to see if your pages make sense, by showing where your customers go in the site, where they came from, what were they searching for to find you, etc.. All this Data is important so you can improve the customer’s’ experience on your site and hopefully call you to do the job for them. This can be a difficult thing to learn, so I have chosen to get professional help. I like to stick with what I am best at, selling the best stone tools around, (ahem), and let the people who know what they are doing take care of these things.
These are just a couple ideas that should help you in your search for more of the higher quality customers you all want. In the past, advertising was this black hole that you threw money into and hoped that you would get some back. So many people were wasting so much money on mailers, phone book ads, newspaper ads, etc., and not getting anything out of it. I hope you will all make the jump to the digital age and get a site if you don’t have one, and improve the sites you already have to turn them into cash generating machines.