Or pay for it twice in the long term
Supporting my clients, I often do a sales journey with them, seeing where potential customers may encounter them as they look for that service or product. Have you done this with your company?
As we go through the journey, we start to see opportunities where our customers may land and click and read, but then leave again without a trace, except for on our HotJar or Google Analytics.
Even though the internet seems to be full of popups and ads like GDPR, cookies or those annoying overlay whatnots, it’s still important that we utilise similar tools. A lot of website owners often don’t want to have such things, yet unfortunately this may lead them to missing out on potential customers.
Where’s your call to action?
Think about it. If someone has made it to your site, then they are interested in you. Perhaps they came through a link from a news article, a social media post or even directly googled or came to your website. In any case, they want to know more about you, and are ripe for one more popup.
This popup isn’t going to be an advert though, it’s purely to gather their information so you can keep them informed about your company. You would have seen these call to actions on many sites already, and they generally fall into two areas:
- Newsletter sign up — you put in your name and e-mail and ta-da you’re on the mailing list for the next newsletter.
- Something for the customer — maybe it’s an e-book, maybe it’s a discount or even a free consultation, again you put in a name and e-mail for the pleasure.
Yes it’s one more popup, but it’s such a valuable one for you and your potential customer as well, so just make sure it’s easier to use or to close than those ones where you can’t find the ‘x’ or there is no ‘x’!
Think about how you can make it appear at a natural point in the customer journey, like on a specific page for example.
When you’re out of stock
This isn’t the only place where I see my clients miss out on potential customers. Supply chains are tricky things, and some companies might find themselves without stock.
So what do you do then?
Change it to ‘Out of Stock’.
That’s the response or the writing we see on most websites. A big slap in the face with a cold fish first thing on a Monday morning. Gone is the customer’s chance of instant gratification with that purchase.
What could you do instead?
- Leave the stock availability but extend the delivery date like Amazon do *cough*.
- Change it to “Out of Stock” but with a button to ‘Notify Me’ when it’s back in stock.
- Rebrand it as presales, with an expected shipping date in the future.
Each of these methods means that sales or leads will continue flowing in, and even if you are having supply chain issues you can start engaging with the customer and keep them informed about the situation.
If you go for the “Notify Me” option you can add them to your mailing list, make sure you tell them when stock is arriving and even make them feel extra special for clicking that button by offering a discount or some other promotion to push them over the line.
There are many other ways to ensure you don’t miss out on leads, which is why I always recommend using analytic tools that are available. This can help you track which pages they visit and how long they spend on them, thus enabling you to decide where to place your call to actions.
If you need help putting your customer journey together, then pop up to www.ensoco.co.uk and contact us whichever suits you!