How to quickly and easily generate more enquiries and sales from your website

Whether you are selling face-to-face, writing an email or creating a webpage the same basic rules apply. 

And one of the most basic rules is to ‘ask for the order’. 

In fact, if you’ve ever employed sales people who could not, or did not ask for the order, the chances are they had a very short career with your business. 

Website Mistake #1 

For some reason most webpages, on most websites, make exactly that mistake. They conclude with… er, that’s right, you guessed it… nothing at all. 

Many websites and webpages fail to effectively ask for the order, and subsequently fail to generate the enquires and leads that they should. 

In most cases, this can be quickly and easily resolved by adding a simple sentence to each page. 

What they should at least conclude with is a simple sentence with a strong call to action. 

After all, if you can persuade someone to read your page, you owe it to them to suggest the next step and you owe it to yourself, and your business, to ask for “the order”, whether that is placing an order, sending an enquiry, signing up to a newsletter, requesting a special report or another appropriate action. 

Almost every page on your website should end with a sentence like this one… 

“To get started, to request a proposal or to find out more – please call us now on 01234 567890, enquire through the website or request our special buyer’s guide.” 

Do yourself and your business a big favour and check your website now. 

Website Mistake #2 

You may look at your website and say… 

“But we have our phone number at the top of the page in the banner, we have a contact page accessible by the main navigation bar, and we even have some graphic banners down the side of each page offering our newsletter and special reports – surely our site has strong call to action”. 

That may be true.

It may also be true the visitors are using these call-to-action tools on your site (by the way, I’m not saying don’t have these on your website, they are very effective and every site should have them). 

But…

Many website visitors suffer from ’banner blindness’. 

They come to your site, and specifically the webpage in question looking for information. 

Their eye falls immediately to the beginning of the information and starts scanning at that point – this is normally the beginning of the copy on your page. 

If (and only if) the copy is relevant, and compelling, they will then read on and many people will blank out the surrounding graphics and banners – after all that is just the marketing “bumpf” and they want information. 

If you don’t have a call-to-action sentence in your information (the copy) then you have effectively failed to ask for the order and ‘banner blindness’ reduces the effect of your other call to action methods. 

Your call-to-action sentence needs to be presented to visitors and readers where they have focused their attention – within the copy. 

The beauty of the web is that you can test this. 

Add a call-to-action sentence to selected pages, and use your Google Analytics and Google Conversion Tracking tools to measure the difference over a few weeks.