Imagine this: You finish reading this blog and send an email to your marketing team for a 30 minute task. In the coming weeks, your wedding inquiries on your website increase by 400% for all of your store locations. Too good to be true? The results will vary but it happened for our company. And I’m going to share exactly how our floral shop in St. Louis increased our web conversions by a whopping 430%[1] (yes, you read that correctly). So what should be in that email to the marketing team? Two specific tips:
1. Lower The Number Of Homepage Links
“Decision paralysis” happens whenever a client hits your website and has unlimited options and information. Is that small blurb of text about what flowers are available in August helpful? If the client’s wedding is in August, maybe. Otherwise, it’s distracting from your client being able to raise their hand and start the conversation.
Your site should have a separate weddings / events page and, if possible, each location should have its own “homepage.” This homepage should have very few links. Websites with over six links on the homepage make it difficult for a potential client to navigate and leads to a higher bounce rate. How do you decide what links to add?
Consider what things are important to your clients and your company. The Curate team has spoken to thousands of florists around the world and has consistently seen five things that potential clients typically look for on a wedding florist website: an about section, samples of the work, reviews, a cost estimate of some sort, and a way to contact you. That’s five links to work with and makes for a very easily navigable website and helps minimize your website’s bounce rate.
This does take much more than 30 minutes but is definitely worth it. What can your marketing team do in 30 minutes to improve your conversions? Change your CTA.
2. Transform Your Call-To-Action (CTA)
This is the change took us less than 30 minutes of work and raised our wedding inquiry rate by 430%. The call-to-action (CTA) on your websites are probably as exciting as processing flowers for the weekend but it’s extremely important.
Here’s the truth: the ”Contact Us” page with a form on it has never been a call to action for customers. It’s more of a last resort for a desperate couple who has no other way of contacting you.
We had the exact same CTA prior to updating our site. Our shop, Twisted Willow Design, focused completely on weddings and events. When breaking down our channels of what was sending in leads, our contact form received 5.8 inquiries per month from January to October of 2015. Then we tried something new. In the month after adjusting our CTA, we received an eye-popping 25 inquiries on this form.
So what did we change to get such dramatic results? Something so simple, you won’t believe it:
We changed the name of the page.
That. is. it.
Instead of calling it “Contact Us,” we changed the name to “Check My Date.” We had enough leads that we thought our website was broken.
Something magical happens when you shift the conversation to be about the client instead of your company. By asking about THEIR date, you’re talking their language. Yes, clients DO need to be impressed with your work and presentation. Once they have that though, a simple, effective CTA that’s about them gets them engaged into the conversation.
The best part? It’s just a Curate form that goes directly into the event management software and allows our sales team the ability to immediately follow up. There was no need to revamp anything but the page name and title.
Want to know what exact questions we ask on that page?
Click the button below to download the step by step guide and start increasing your online conversions.
-----
[1] For the numbers nerds: The numbers are based upon our January to October averages of website inquiries for 2015. We had 5.8 website inquiries that came in on our page. We released the website on October 28, 2015 and the numbers are reflective of the month following. We advertise on The Knot, Wedding Wire, and Style Me Pretty but didn’t change any of our advertising levels. November is starting booking season so there should be a slight uptick in inquiries compared to the year average.
