What does that mean? What is “customer contact?” How will I know if I’ve finished optimizing? Let’s address these questions and what you can do right now to make your business look better and convert more customers online. Think of your website as a kind of introduction: much like a business card, handshake, front lawn, or voicemail message, it has the potential to tell people a lot about you right off the bat. Customer contact is how your business’s touchpoints affect your customers in 3 ways:
- How customers find you and your business,
- Whether or not they want to contact you, and
- How they get the information they need to contact you.
An effective website should do all three of these things. In terms of the first point, your domain name, business name, SEO, local directory listings, review sites, social media profiles, and other links should all make it as easy as possible for customers to find you. Together, these make up just about every way you could reasonably expect someone to find you online. In this case, optimize means that.
Second, your website should make people want to do business with you. In marketing, we say that it should convert people, which means the same thing. Your website needs to be trustworthy, help and inform the customer, and make them confident that you have what they need. Common ways to look trustworthy are including reviews, badges and awards from accrediting organizations, pictures of you, your product, and/or your service; what makes you unique, examples of your work, how many years of experience you have, and most importantly, proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation in your website.
Finally, your website should provide customers with the information they need: your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number). Business name, business phone number, e-mail address, physical address. So simple, but so many businesses fail to make this information obvious. If you don’t have other content on your website– a blog, photo album, FAQs, etc.– this information should be on screen at any given moment. If your website does have other content, let that be the focus on its own page, saving the NAP for the homepage, contact page, “about us” page, and footer.
If your website isn’t helping with customer contact, what’s it doing for you? Taking these simple steps, even just one or two of the elements above, will reap big rewards for your business, making it that much easier to get new customers.
Call or e-mail bizmktg.com, the marketing machines, to learn more: (800) 808-0249 or info@bizmktg.com.
