One of the easiest ways to get more sales from your website is to make it easy to contact you. I work with a lot of solopreneurs and this is probably the easiest thing to fix, yet the most common mistake. There is good reason for this. There can be a number of barriers that are keeping these amazing people somewhat hiding from world and a bit inaccessible.
One of the problems that I find on many service professionals and organizations that run their business out of their own home is that they don’t have a phone number clearly posted on their website. Being that I advise my clients to always have a phone number on each and every page as well as on a Contact page, I dived in a little more to find out the reason why. There were a couple of barriers keeping people from doing so.
- Many of us coaches, authors and service professionals run our business out of our home and don’t really want the whole world to have access to our cell or home number.
- Some of us have more than one business, or we have our primary business and serve on an organization. It feels weird when people call for the organization and then we are answering the phone with our primary business name.
- We don’t want a bunch of sales people to call us on our cell or our home phone.
- Some of us just simply hate to answer the phone.
Believe it or not, there are many people (your prospective clients included) who still like to use the phone. There is something intimate about hearing that person’s voice and being connected this way.
As a Gen Xr myself (those that are 34-54 years old), I am one of those people. Almost daily I go through the scenario of trying to get in touch with someone. First I look at the website and look for a number to call. I hunt around for a bit then go to the contact page. There might be a form and I might use it, but I don’t really like that. Then I hit social media and see if I can find a number. If I am ready to do business with someone, it really should not be that hard. Many would move on to the next site or the next resource.
So what is the solution to this quandary? One resource I share with all of my clients facing this issue is using Google Voice. If you have a GMail account, then you have access to this. Here is a list of benefits for using Google Voice:
- Free
- Route to any phone number you want
- You can change the routed number any time you want
- You can set a voice mail greeting
- You can decide when it redirects to your designated number and when it goes directly to voice mail
- You can use your computer to call out
- Voice mail messages will get transcribed and then sent to your inbox
- Will accept text messages
- Calls coming through that number are identified in your caller ID as such
- Relatively easy to set up
- Can create a local number
- Relative control over the phone number itself
Once you get your Google Voice number set up, you can splash that number everywhere!
- Business cards
- Website
- Social media
- eMail signature
To get started with Google Voice go to: https://www.google.com/voice. They have some good videos there to help you get started.
If you are looking for ways to get more sales from your website, feel free to call me at 612-516-5388 (Yes, that is my Google Voice number) or if you don’t like using the phone, click here to contact me.
