#8: The Science Behind Turning Website Visitors Into Property Enquiries
Published on 18 July 2010 under
Conversion Optimisation
Three years ago I was approached by a very large real estate organisation which had spent (hold your breath for this one) over £100,000 developing and optimising their new website! That’s an awful amount of money for anyone to spend on a website but despite this they weren’t generating anywhere near enough enquiries to justify their extreme investment.
They contracted my services and I immediately got to work understanding what they had done so wrong.
With this website they were doing something very strange, which no-one else was doing at the time. To an extent their lead-capture method was actually working, even though it went against everything I believed should and shouldn’t work.
I will explain exactly what they were doing a little later in this tutorial, as aside from the fact that they didn’t really have enough traffic, their lead-capture system was inherently flawed...and they weren’t too keen to change it.
What do I mean by lead-capture?
Lead-capture refers to the process used to grab the details of the visitors to your website. Although not every visitor to your website will happily hand over their email address or phone number, having the the proper systems in place to grab as many contact details of your visitors as possible is truly at the heart of online marketing.
If your website isn’t “capturing” leads then it’s simply not working for you. It may look great and it may rank well, but if you can’t convert those visitors into customers then you might as well not bother.
So often overlooked
I come across it all of the time. Most people put very little thought in how they are going to try their best to entice their visitors to hand over their details.
I’ve already discussed how trust is such an important factor in preparing visitors to give you their details by putting them at ease and removing their objections. Now you need to direct them to where you want them to go on your website and ASK them to hand over their details.
You NEED your visitors to interact with your website and get in touch with you. This tutorial is probably the most important so far in the series so you really need to digest it and understand what you need to do to effectively capture leads on your website.
Understanding online buyer behaviour
Most property buyers will begin their research online. They generally visit a variety of websites and portals checking out what’s available in the area they are interested in buying and also to compare property prices.
This is the same as people do when they are shopping. They go in and out of shops seeing what’s available in each one, and often, but not always, going back to the shop where they previously saw something of interest.
Your website is your shop on the Internet. People will pop in and out of it as they check out what’s on offer. Every time someone leaves your website they may never come back. That potential customer is possibly gone forever. Maybe they didn’t find anything of interest at that time or simply got frustrated with your site.
Most of the time, however, it’s because you haven’t given them anything to do or asked them to do something. If you don’t ask you don’t get.
Many people seem to be scared about asking their visitors to hand over their contact details yet most will happily do it if there’s something in it for them.
Understanding what drives your customers is imperative in how you structure your lead-captures of “calls to actions” on your website.
If you’re targeting property investors then your message will be different to if you were just targeting buyers in your local area. All these visitors have different needs and it’s how you fulfil their needs that determines how successful you are at capturing their details.
There are various ways of doing this so let’s begin looking at each of these in turn with some great examples in use today.
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