When it comes to generating new enquiries, your website has three jobs:
- Turning visitors into prospects
- Signposting away those people you aren’t right for
- Pre-selling the visitor on why you might be the right adviser or planner for them to work with
For the first of these to happen the visitor needs to take a call to action, which might include a button, link, form, or text prompting the visitor to take a certain action.
So, what are the right calls to action to include on your website?
Your website might look beautiful, with perfectly written prose, but if visitors aren’t offered the right calls to action, then it’s neither use nor ornament as my old gran used to say. We’ve thought about this long and hard, and believe that most financial planner/adviser’s websites should contain three calls to action.
1. Your telephone number or ‘call us’ button
Assuming your preference is for potential clients to pick up the phone, then this should be your main call to action.
There’s an opportunity here to make the life of the 25 – 30% of people who will view your website on a mobile phone easier, by configuring the number to be clickable.
2. An online method of contact
Not everyone wants to make contact by phone, others won’t be able to:
- Some people will visit your site at work and be unable to make a confidential call
- Others, such as people who have been recently bereaved, or who are nervous about talking to an adviser or planner, might prefer a more ‘arm’s length’ initial approach
Of course, if your only call to action is a telephone number, you are relying on the people visiting your site outside of normal office hours to remember to call when you’re ‘open’.
For these reasons we always recommend including a call to action which allows the visitor to make contact without picking up the phone. That might be as simple as including an email address, with a contact form being the obvious alternative.
Either way, you need to make it easy for your visitors to make contact on their terms, not yours.
3. Staying in touch
Some visitors might not be ready to arrange a meeting but would like to stay in touch as a way of evaluating whether you are the right adviser or planner for them.
A regular newsletter is the perfect way of achieving this aim. The visitor can sign up, hear from you each month knowing they can unsubscribe any time they like.
Clients could also continue to interact with you via your social media channels. Be careful though. If a website visitor heads over to your Facebook or Twitter page, there’s no guarantee they will connect with you or even return to your site. Social media platforms make money by keeping visitors on their site, not yours!
Where to add your CTAs?
Ideally, your telephone number and email address, or at least a link to them both, should be included prominently in the top right-hand corner of your website. All too often we see links to social media platforms here though.
We strongly discourage doing this.
It’s the prime spot for important calls to action. Why add links to sites whose very purpose is to monopolise the attention of people and prevent them from returning to your site? Social media should ideally be used to push people to your website, not the other way around.
Next, we also recommend including contact and newsletter sign-up forms on your homepage, as well as on other popular pages on your site. If you’re unsure which are your most visited pages head to Google Analytics, it’ll tell you all you need to know. At the same time, it’s worth checking that you’ve included the 10 pages visitors want to see. You can understand which these are by clicking here.
Every site needs a comprehensive contact page too. This should include a:
- Telephone number
- Email address
- Contact form
- Office address
If you meet clients in your office you should make their life easier by including a map, directions, an image of your office (so they can recognise it) and information about parking.
Finally, we also recommend adding testimonials to your contact page. Once people are there, it’ll do no harm to remind them why they should get in touch
One CTA you should use very carefully (or not at all!)
We’ve all landed on a website’s homepage only to be met with pop-ups. Sometimes it just a single pop up, on other occasions you will get asked to sign-up to a newsletter, download a guide, or chat online.
Think very carefully before including a pop-up on your site. There’s a real danger that you will alienate your visitors to the point where they give up and leave.
Unless your pop-up is generating new enquiries, we recommend against adding one to your homepage. Frankly, it’s selfish; you’re focusing too much on what you want the visitor to do, rather than their needs.
If you must include a pop up, then only do so in certain circumstances. For example, when the visitor has spent a minimum period on your site or looked at a minimum number of pages. At least then you know they are reasonably engaged and may welcome hearing from you.
Monitor your CTAs
We often talk about the importance of monitoring your new enquiries to understand where they are coming from, the return on investment you’re generating and so on.
It’s equally important to understand which of the CTAs is being taken most often on your website. Allowing you to make changes based on evidence rather than guesswork.
What now?
Head over to your website and check your calls to action:
- Are you using the right ones?
- Are they in the right place?
- Are your visitors taking them?
If you can answer ‘yes’ to each of these questions, congratulations, you’re doing well.
If any of your answers were ‘no’ then consider taking this call to action and emailing hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or calling 0115 8965 300.
