This post is for people that want to increase sales and leads through their company website.

There are many reasons that we would want to engage customers in a conversation rather than just giving them information about our company, products, and/or services. I will leave these reasons for another post. For now I want to show you how to engage customers in a conversation on your website.

When is the last time you filled out a feedback form?  Most of the time, if a website does not meet your needs, you make sure to let the website owner know, right? I’m sure you must either look for a feedback form, or use their contact form or email address to get in touch? Okay, if you didn’t get the sarcasm, I’m sure that you probably don’t provide feedback when a website does not meet your needs or wants.

On the flip side, you probably find it difficult to get feedback from visitors on your website. If you haven’t thought about getting feedback on your website, you should. This would allow you to improve the website, and your service so that you can attract more visitors and convert more of them into paying customers. Please read on before putting a feedback form on your website.

In a conversation, we constantly pause to see if someone is still listening.  A feedback form on your website probably does not give the impression that there is a live human listening and waiting for a response. If you phone someone and ask a question on the other hand, or even send an email and ask a question, the person that is being asked knows that you are waiting for a response. This is a very important difference, and will determine whether you will get feedback from your customer or not.

You need give the visitor/customer the impression that someone is waiting for a response.

You should really consider applying this concept on your website.  Some companies already use a great technique to do this. As soon as the website loads, a pop up will say “We are available for a live chat, what do you want to know?”.  These are a great way to engage customers.  Before they even bother searching your website, they have the opportunity to tell you exactly why they are visiting your site. This saves them time, and allows you to engage in a conversation. You can also have a video of a real person asking the visitor if they need help and directing them to a form on the site where they can type in their question.

Once the customer is engaged, it is much easier to get their contact information, whether it is an email or phone number, so that you take the conversation in the direction that you want and be more effective in satisfying your customers’ needs.  So I encourage you to think of ways to initiate a conversation with customers on your website, in combination with a form that asks for a name, and email or phone number so you can help you customers buy from you.

In a future post, I will discuss the benefits of engaging customers in conversation versus giving them a “pitch”.  I’m sure you can already think of some benefits.

-Frank

How much do you charge to make a healthy profit?

It is difficult to decide on a price, and too easy to lower your price so that your customer will buy your product or service. What you should really consider is “what is valuable to your customer?” and “How valuable is it to your customer?”

If you can show your customer how they will get back more than what they put in, the amount they put in is not as important (as long as they can afford it). This is the best pricing strategy. Always charge as much as you can, while still showing your customer how they are getting a great deal!

Here is an example that will show you how to be profitable. You figure that it will take about two hours making a video advertisement for a customer. It is a very simple idea, and only requires $30 in props. How much do you charge? There are a few things you need to consider:

1) what is the customer’s budget? Ask them! Remind them that they need to save some money for promoting the ad, or buying advertisement space.

2) Take one third of the budget. Does that much money pay for enough time and material that you can complete your work?

3) What does the customer get out of it? Make sure the customer knows this, and gets excited about it. Remember, this is their initiative, If they want a product or service, it is because they want something out of it. For the example we are using, the customer might expect to make 5 sales worth $10,000 in profits from people that visit their website. Can you give them what they expect? If not, that is ok! You just need to manage expectations, and explain the value that they are getting. First ask them “how many people need to visit yourwebsite to make a sale?”  Based on this number, you will know how many people you need to send to get 5 sales.  Even if they do not make 5 sales, as long as you make sure they get the number of visitors they expect, they will feel like you did your job.

I will probably add to this post later… It’s getting kind of late.  See the copyright notice in my last post, it applies to all posts.