Many businesses face the same struggle with their marketing.  How do I generate a high number of qualified phone calls?  This post focuses on some best practices to increase qualified phone calls to sales and customer service representatives.

Make it easy for your visitors to find your digits

May seem pretty obvious, but many websites make it difficult to find your companies phone number.   We recommend having the phone number at the top, bottom, and contact drop down of your website.  Another good technique is to have the phone number listed below a well-written call to action on the home page or squeeze page.

Make it a click to call

Another common mistake is simply listing your business number on your website.  Take it a step further and make it a hyperlink.  This way if your potential customer wants to call all they have to do is click the number on their mobile device.  Make it easy and remove as many barriers as you can for your customers.

Business directories generate too

Don’t overlook your business directories like Facebook, Google My Business, Bing Places for Business and any pertinent directory that generates good exposure.   Make sure the correct phone number is listed on these profiles and they match up.  Adding a location?  Having a unique phone number for that location is essential to generating local business as many customers want to work with businesses in their community.

Maximize opportunities by collecting phone numbers after hours

Most business aren’t answering calls 24/7, but are getting calls afterhours.  Make sure you are letting your customers know that you will get back to them in a timely manner.  A good voice message can also give them a warm fuzzy feeling that your staff will be taking care of them during regular business hours.  Giving good information and following through with what you say will let them know you are a well-oiled machine that cares about customer service.  Letting these opportunities slip through cracks only opens the door to your competition.

Engaging content gives your visitors the information they need to take action

It is very important not to skimp on the quality of content on your website, particularly the home page.  Potential customers are searching for the product or service that fits them.  Keeping this in mind make sure that your content is simple and gets to the point of why your business is the right fit for them.  This coupled with a strong or tempting Call-to-Action is a good formula to generate calls of interest.

Don’t forget to stay in touch after the sale

It’s no secret that a customer that has already bought your goods or services is likely to make another purchase.  Listing your number on thank you pages, newsletters, and email drip campaigns is another way to make it easy for your customers to be repeat buyers.  It is just as important if to nurture your current client base as it is to generate new customers.

Track your progress!

It is nearly impossible to know what marketing avenues are working and what are not unless you know where the calls are coming from.  There is a myriad of ways that people will find your phone number and making sure that you are tracking all your campaigns will help you decide where to invest and where not to.  Whether you opt to use a full-service company software like dialog tech or opt to set up your tracking numbers it is important that good systems are in place to track incoming calls.  Inbound calls lead to business and not knowing where they are coming from can lead to an inefficient marketing budget.

The post Optimizing Your Website to Convert Your Visitors Into Qualified Phone Calls appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

TRUST TRUST TRUST!

It’s no secret that it is difficult to convert new visitors into a paying customer.  There are a lot ways that your information can get taken by the wrong people out there in cyber land.  How can we overcome this?

Build trust, Duh!

There are a number of ways to build trust, but none are more powerful than online reviews.  Using 3^rd party trusted review sources allows you to give your web visitors the confidence that other people regular purchase from and trust your company.  There are a number of review funnels that help get good feedback from your customers and promote more conversions.

Another way to instill confidence in your visitors that they are making the correct decision in choosing you is an SSL Certificate and the proper security badges.  Having an SSL Certificate is key as you are protecting your customer’s private information, but it also gives your customer a comfortable feeling that they can rest assured they are protected.   Upon checkout security seals like McAfee Secure and Verified Authorized.net can give your customers that warm and fuzzy feeling that they are safe purchasing from your website.

GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR PRODUCT PAGE

There is one place where your customer actually clicks on your products and starts down the path of purchase.  Making sure your product page has a clean user-friendly look is of the utmost importance.  High resolution and high quality images of your products will help increase conversions as it is more clear for your customers to make a decision.

Make sure that there that it is easy for your customers to navigate and answer any frequently asked questions.  They aren’t speaking with a customer service rep, but still often times have questions that need to be answered.   Software Ad ons like Snap Engage can even give you the option to chat with a live person if you are able to dedicate staff time to help with online inquiries.

IMPRESS THEM WITH THE DETAILS

Taking the extra time to create engaging discussion of your products is what drives customers to want or need your products.  Make sure that you appeal to emotions and use descriptive language that speaks directly to your customers.   Most customers are looking for products that will either solve a problem or serve to make them happy.

Product specifications are another important aspect for the analytical shopper out there.   Don’t skimp on the features and benefits when painting the products picture.  More often then note companies will entail the help of a professional content writer to get their point across.

DRAW THEM IN WITH SPECIALS AND COUPONS

Have a huge stock of a particular product you are looking to move?  Make a special highlighting this product.  Email drip campaigns with specials, advertisement on the homepage; there are a myriad of ways to entice your customers that now is the perfect time to pull the trigger on that product they have had their eye on.

Free shipping is always a great feeling at check out time.  Offering free shipping on certain products or all products will really help move the needle when it comes time to break out the credit card.

CREATE URGENCY

What happens if I don’t buy now?  If your customers can see that your stock of a certain item is getting low they will often times not want to risk losing the opportunity.  Making it clear what products you have, what products are sold out and the quantity you have them can help be transparent with the opportunity that is presented to them.  Act now or you may lose the opportunity may seem cheesy, but works.

Want to learn more?  Reach out to Shane Bader with Iceberg Web Design.

The post How to Increase E-Commerce Conversions appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) can be a daunting task. Between Joomla, ModX, Ruby on Rails, Drupal, Concrete5, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, TinyCMS, and WordPress, among others, there are certainly plenty of options to choose from.   In this article we discuss why we build a vast majority of our websites in WordPress and what advantages it has over other CMSs.

Keep Up to Date on the Latest Technology

One main reason WordPress has kept its market share over the years is the constant improvement of the application. Regular updates to WordPress have added more features that allow users to include all types of content. From Fortune 500 companies, to government institutions, e-commerce businesses and membership websites, many organizations have found WordPress a perfect fit.  At this time there are 48,225 plugins for WordPress, allowing nearly endless options for users. Getting these plugins to communicate properly with your website and each other typically calls for hiring a company who works regularly with WordPress and has extensive knowledge of it’s framework, to ensure design and functionality are implemented flawlessly.

Grow Your Market Share

We use WordPress for a majority of our projects because most of our customers are looking to have a high ranking on Google and the other major search engines. WordPress allows us to use best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), that makes it easier for us to rank our customers website. With the exposure of a being found easily on Google, we can help businesses generate a high return on their investment with their web presence. Our main goal is to solve the business needs for our customers and the SEO functionality of WordPress allows us to accomplish this by optimizing their content to rank on Google.

Don’t Let the Hackers Win

In this day and age cyber security is a top concern of any business that relies on their website to perform. Hackers are continuously trying to find loopholes to break into WordPress websites. Not to worry though, Iceberg Web Design has you covered. With regular updates being released, we stay on top of making sure that your website is updated, working correctly and protected from viscous hackers. These updates are very effective in keeping your website safe as long as you are paying attention to their release. This is why it is important to hire a professional team that works on a daily basis with WordPress and its updates to prevent hackers from disrupting your business.

Content is King in This Jungle

There is a saying “content is king” and this rings true for any successful website. To support this mantra, WordPress allows us to integrate different types of multimedia within our customers website. Then having the ability to train our clients to be able to update multimedia such as video, audio and text allows them to make changes themselves or hire us for a nominal fee. The importance of having good content that keeps your website visitors interested in what you have to offer and the information that surrounds your products or services. This is key to a healthy website that produces positive results.

Achieve Results

The ability of WordPress websites to be able to capture information from a visitor that wants to take action and talk with someone is a great feature. Building out your sales funnel is not only important for a business as a whole, but also the ability to incorporate it into your website to capture potential customers information. There are plugins that allow you to export information into email campaigns and incorporate retargeting to stay visible. Being able to incorporate contact forms, squeeze pages and your companies contact info in a creative way that spurs a “call to action” is one of the reasons why we choose WordPress so often.  Consumers want to be able to easily find the content they are looking for, reach out if they want to learn more about your goods and services and often times make purchases directly online. We find that the customizability of WordPress allows us to solve our customer’s business solutions on a daily basis.  This is why we choose WordPress for 95% of the websites we develop at our Minneapolis website development firm.

The post Why WordPress? appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Driving new business is a must for any company that is serious about their online presence. Consistently getting qualified leads, phone calls and walk-ins is a great indicator of the health of your website, but it is important to dig deeper. The industry standard to analyzing your company’s website is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is available for anyone with a Google account. It’s a tool that can guide you to finding the weakness and strength of your company’s website.

With Google Analytics you can see your most important analytics data first, like bounce rate or new visitors. Other information you can easily access:

Find out which online traffic campaigns bring the most traffic and conversions.

• Determine where your best visitors are located and what platform they are using.
• Learn what people are searching for on your site and what pages they spend the most time on.
• Visualize what visitors click on the most.
• See what content your visitors are the most interested in.
• Identify weakness such as poor performing pages.
• Determine at what point people abandon online purchases/shopping cart or when they leave filling out a contact form.
• Analyze your performance in online searches and navigation.
• Plus many more features that dive into your website while allow you to optimizing the performance of your online presence.

Whether you decide to outsource the use of Google Analytics or dedicate somebody internally, it is important to know the basic uses of the platform. Each time you log in you will see a basic overview of your audience. There are many different types of reports that you can pull to see what the strengths and weakness are of your website. Reports like the number of visitors from each country, state and city. From there, what time visitors are searching, what browser they are searching on and what page is landed on the most. For instance, Iceberg Web Design can see how many visitors search and click on our home page in relation to how many times they land on our services page. By digging deeper we can try different layouts to engage people who are seriously interested in our services.

Some of the different reports include:

Audience reports

These reports focus on everything you need to know about your visitors.   You can find details about demographics, location, behavior, technology and mobile use.

Acquisition reports

These reports tell you everything about what drove your visitors to your website. This includes what channels they came from and specific sources.

Behavior reports

These reports focus on the effectiveness of your content. You can see top pages on your website and the top entry pages. This will give you an idea of what content is giving the most effective piece of information. It also lets you know where visitors are exiting the website.

Conversions

As mentioned early you can set up goals within Google Analytics to track the conversions your website has received. By measuring conversions you can get a great understanding of the overall performance while analyzing and fixing weakness.

Using Google Analytics is a key component to getting the most of your online presence and marketing as a whole. Without diving into the numbers you are working mostly with opinion and it is impossible to develop a calculated approach. The numbers don’t lie and neither should you about the realistic performance of your website. Digging into what is and is not working on your web marketing and website will allow your business to be the most efficient in where to spend its marketing dollars.

The post Google Analytics appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Pay per click (ppc) is easy enough to understand: Every time a user clicks on your website you pay the website engine a small fee for that visitor. It is a basic concept and when done right can really generate a great return on investment for the advertiser. PPC is also good for the search engines by enabling them focus ads directly to the searchers and giving advertisers the exposure they want to generate new business. Searchers benefit from greater quality provided by the search engines that have created a formula to make sure the correct ads get to where they are the most helpful.

Google Ad Words

Google AdWords is by far the most popular pay-per-click platform over its top two competitors, Bing and Yahoo. Google holds a much higher market share and is widely known to give consistent quality information to its searchers.   Business’ bid on search terms to have their ads placed at the top or bottom of the page. They recently eliminated the ads on the right side opting to increase the placement at the top and bottom and decrease the saturation of ads overall on the page. Bidding on search terms can provide a great source of revenue if it is done right, being able to pay for each click, instead of just relying on the organic placement within Google’s search. For example if Iceberg Web Design bids on “Website Development” our ad may appear at the top of the search results. However, there is still a calculated formula besides simply bidding to the top of the search.   Simply put it is the: max bid of the cost per click (CPC) x quality score = ad rank or position. The Quality Score can be thought of like the credit score of a website relating to search quality. When a searcher searches for a relevant website term what is the click through rate, relevance, and landing page quality, among other factors.  While out bidding for the top spot is important, Google is still focused on giving the best user experience for the searchers. Having a slow to load or confusing website is going to hurt your quality score and ability to generate business online. Before diving into Google AdWord’s it is important to make sure your website is in top form.

Choosing Pay Per Click

Once establishing your sales funnel and feeling confident in your websites performance, PPC is a great way to build your customer base. If the right keyword research is done, PPC can generate qualified leads at a reasonable price.   Things to take into account when investing, is the lifetime value of a new client and your business ‘ability to convert. It has been proven that PPC can work for just about any business out there. From e-commerce, to a service based business and even brick in mortar operations that are looking to generate walk-ins and phone calls. The key is to have the right execution process. Take your time and do the necessary research or hire a professional to put together a plan to generate and convert traffic.   The efficiency of using someone who works daily on PPC campaigns can save lots of marketing investment on trial and error mistakes. As you progress it is important to stay current with the continuing changes in Google and your industry as a whole.   Gone are the days of placing adds in your local phonebook as a way to generate a consistent stream of business. Now that stream is online and PPC is a great way to generate new customers!

The post The Basics of Pay Per Click Advertising appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Optimizing the way in which your customers move through you’re sales process to being a customer is of the utmost importance.  There are many ways that potential customers may get lost while moving through the Sales process.  These are often referred to as cracks in the funnel.  Learning how to plug these cracks will get you the highest return on your marketing dollars.  

1. Don’t Discount the “No” Responses

The biggest mistake you can make with your sales funnel is throwing away the no’s to quickly.  For many sales associates, particularly less experienced ones; being told no can be difficult to process and makes them want to move quickly on to a new fresher lead.  Often times a no actually means “not right now but later”.    There is a lot of information to provide when delivering a pitch and a lot of reasons for a potential customer to say no.  Many times those moments kill the deal at that time, but that doesn’t mean they won’t buy later.   

For instance, a common objection to not wanting to move forward with a website project is that the client doesn’t have enough time right now to get the requested information together and move forward with the project.  Now it may be enticing to forget and move on to a new hotter lead.  There is a better practice to implement than simply giving up.  Create an email campaign to follow up over the next couple of months.  With this campaign you can educate the potential client with information that directly relates to their objection.  This will move them closer to the sale while keeping your name up front and out there when the buying time hits.   Finding what objections you consistently hear and creating email campaigns around education for those objections will greatly minimize this crack in your funnel.

2.  Make Sure You Respond to Leads Quickly

Another reason that you may be losing business through a crack in your sales funnel can be not responding to new leads quick enough.  Studies have shown that a lead is nine times more likely to close if you follow up within 5 minutes.  This is often referred to as “speed to lead”.  When a potential customer express’ interest in a product or service they are looking for information at that time and are ready to interact.  Waiting can provide a wide array of obstacles like moving on to competition or just losing interest.   By automating this process with a personalized email you are able to follow up immediately electronically.  Another solution is staggering your associates appropriately to respond with a call based on peak lead generation times.   Analyzing the data on when leads typically come through and creating a personalized email is key to helping plug this crack in the funnel.  A good CRM can help with the automation process when new leads come through and the follow up on old leads.

3.  Followup, Followup, Followup!

Lack of consistent follow up with new and old leads will often times let potential clients slip away.  Particularly on higher ticket products and services potential clients will not want to close right away.  It is important for sales reps to build and maintain relationships, earning trust over time.  Over time checking in and really getting to know your potential clients pain points will keep sales consistent and moving in the right direction.  It is nice to close the sale right away and move on, but just doing this will allow sales to slip away that need more information.  Closing sales right away and still nurturing the relationships that need time is a proven way to keep the needle moving in the right direction.   

To keep the follow up consistent there should be at least 5 – 12 follow up points within the first 2 months.  Automating an email campaign along with scheduled follow up phone calls will help with this.  By analyzing your follow up patterns and creating a follow up template you can greatly increase the close ratio on old business.   After every phone call try to set a follow up a time for your next phone call and keep educating with your email campaign.  Often potential clients need to be nurtured until they are ready to pull the trigger, as they wouldn’t have asked for info if there weren’t some interest.

By implementing these processes you will be able to minimize the gaps in your sales funnel.   It is of the utmost importance to getting the most out of your new and old contacts and drives the most sales.  

The post 3 Easy Ways to Fix Leaks in your Sales Funnel appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

In this two-part series, we will talk first about how leads enter your sales funnel and then how you will convert those leads into customers.

Step 1: Entering the Sales Funnel

The top of the funnel is often defined as the awareness stage, where as they are just now becoming familiar with your company, products and/or services. At this point they are typically interacting with your sales and marketing efforts. With these efforts it is important to maintain a consistent message across all levels of their interaction.

Step 2: Customers Take Action and Progress Through the Funnel

During some point in these efforts potential customers will “take action” and reach out in one form or another. Making this easy and seamless is of utmost importance to generating qualified leads that turn into clients. Some customers may want to call directly and talk to a professional. Others may want to fill out a contact form and wait for a call from you. Other times customers will want to walk into your place of business and talk face to face. Advertising these different ways to interact, while advertising the same consistent message is key to the consistent growth of your business.

The lower stages of your funnel are all about the actual sales process they experience. Leads at the middle and lower stages of your funnel are the ones most likely to turn into closed paying clients. These are the potential clients you want your sales representatives interacting directly with as to get the most out of their time.

Keep Your Funnel From Leaking

Minimizing the breaks in the funnel is key to generating consistent revenue for your business. During any point when the sale moves through your funnel, the potential customer can be lost in the cracks for a myriad of reasons. Making sure that you are addressing all of their concerns, explaining the advantages, and moving through the process with consistent messaging will minimize the cracks in your sales funnel. The more granular you focus your stages, the easier it will be to identify where the leaks are happening.

Retargeting To Maintain Interest

One tool that has proven to be a great to recapture and reengage your potential clients is the use of retargeting across multiples mediums. Taking your website as an example. Only 2% of traffic converts for most websites on the first visit.   Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion.   The design of your Website along with use of retargeting can help get the most of your visits.   Displaying your message and branding across multiple mediums will keep reminding potential customers of what they can gain from your business.  By recapturing their interest it creates another opportunity to reengage you companies sales funnel. There are lots of different tools to retarget and increase your conversions. Building your database of clients that have interacted with your website or ad, it makes it possible to continue to interact with them.

There are two types of retargeting pixel based and list based.   Pixel based is a way to redisplay your information across any anonymous visitor. List based is redisplaying to potential clients that you have gotten their contact information in your database. Moving potential clients along the funnel it is necessary to have good retargeting practices.

Join Us Next Week For Part 2

 In next week’s article, we will be talking about the sales process and turning the leads in your sales funnel into paying customers.

To learn how Iceberg Web Design can help with your sales funnel and retargeting, contact Shane Bader 763-350-8762 or email [email protected].

The post Building Your Sales Funnel and the Use of Retargeting appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.