In the world of digital marketing, traffic and SEO gets a lot of attention.
Don’t get me wrong. Traffic is important. But, it’s not only the amount of traffic you get that will determine the success of your plumbing business.
Conversions are the name of the game. Doubling your conversions is a lot more cost-effective than paying to double your traffic.Â
Here’s how you take the traffic you already have and increase your conversions to grow your business.
Simplify Your Plumbing Forms
Simple forms get more conversions than complex forms. Removing a single field from your form could boost your conversions by as much as 26%.
As of 2020, the average number of fields for online forms is five. I recommend paring your forms down to include only the information you need. Often, you will need only the lead’s email address and first name. You can use progressive profiling to get other details over time.
In the complex form below, do you really need their title, address, how they heard about you and if they would like to join your email list in the first contact?
Sure you need the address to go and do the plumbing job, but you don’t need it in the first contact.
Some times, asking for more info brings you fewer but better, more qualified leads. Make your all the forms on your plumbing website easy to complete so your lead does not abandon partway through. 83% of people abandoned this complex form.
Grow Your Plumbing Email List
Many businesses make most of their sales from their email list. It’s no different for plumbers.
That’s not a surprise, because people need to know, like and trust your business before they buy services from you and this can take between 6 and 11 interactions.
The low price and high use rate of emails make it an ideal channel for building trust.
You need a lead magnet of some form. Go for something simple like a repair checklist, a cheat sheet or inside secrets to drain clearing for example. Just don’t waste time with an e-book or webinar!
Once you have your lead magnet, these two changes will help grow your email list.
Add a Popup to Your Site
Popups have a terrible reputation, that’s unfair. Why? Because some websites overdo it. They set up repeated and intrusive popups that drive people mad (like the SEJ Site below!).
The key is to add a single popup to encourage people to sign up for your list or fill out a lead form. These tips will help get prospects on your list without being too annoying.
- Time the popup to appear 15-30 seconds after a visitor lands on your page. That way, they’ll have time to read some of your content before it appears.
- An alternative is to trigger the popup when a lead scrolls to a certain point on your page – 30% of the way down for example.
- Trigger the popup when the visitor is about to leave the page
Make it easy for people to close out of the popup and make it stay closed.
You can also have a static call to action on the page where they can get your offer later if they want to.
Add A Third-Party Signup Service
You may have noticed that a lot of websites have an option allowing visitors to sign in using a third party. The most common options are Facebook and Google.
Social log-ins simplify the conversion process. You can add a social log-in using a simple plugin such as Facebook Login to your WordPress site. Research shows that using social log-in can increase your conversions by up to 20%.
Put Reviews And Testimonials On Your Plumbing Service Pages
Reviews and testimonials have a powerful effect on how people interact with your website. I have seen conversion rates treble by simply adding reviews and testimonials to a landing page.
Think about it:
- Do you actually ever buy items online when there are no reviews?
- Would you buy items when there’s only a one or two-star review?
Do you care about reviews?
I suspect you do.
It’s the same for potential customers:
- Ninety-two percent of people read online reviews
- Nearly seven in ten say reading positive reviews makes them trust the business more.
This is mostly because people don’t trust businesses and marketers now. That comes from years of over claiming ‘were the best/cheapest/fastest’ etc.
Prospects now see business controlled messages as not always true. Whereas customer testimonials and referrals work. They are like word of mouth referrals from friends.
They are important because instead of having to trust what your business says, your plumbing customer gets the information from other real customers who confirm they:
- Have spent money on your plumbing service and
- Feel good enough about dealing with your business to bother writing a review.
They are invaluable and having good reviews and testimonials on your website will significantly increase your conversion rate.
Cut Excess Content
A lot of businesses make the mistake of using the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to web design. They don’t realise that much of the content serves as a distraction from the main aim: conversion.
In the example below, it seems that getting a phone call about drain unblocking is the main conversion goal. But that’s hidden in all the other clutter on the page.
The best way to identify content that’s not serving your goals is to use a heat map or a click map. You’ll be able to spot the sections of your page that aren’t grabbing visitors’ attention.
The goal should be a simple, focused page with a clean, easy-to-navigate design.
Improve Your Call to Action
There’s nothing wrong with a simple call to action. After all, “Sign Up” and “Subscribe” can get the job done. The problem is, words like that are neither direct nor enticing.
This plumbing business has a call to action to Get Your Quote Now. It stands out and is clear and enticing for someone who comes to the page looking for a solution to their plumbing problem.
One easy way to increase your conversions is to spice up the calls to action on your site. Here are some suggestions and statistics:
- Turning your CTA from a link to a button can increase conversions by 45%.
- Adding an arrow to direct people to your CTA can increase click rates by 26%.
- Using a person to look at your CTA as above. It makes people look where the person’s eyes are looking.
- Use first-person wording (e.g. Schedule my free consultation). This can increase conversions by as much as 90%.
- Put your CTA lower down the page. People prefer to learn as much as they can about an offer before completing a form.
Address Potential Objections
It’s a marketing truism that your content must overcome obstacles in a potential customer’s mind to make a sale. That’s as true when the goal is conversion as it is for sales.
Ask yourself, what are the most common objections my prospects might have to buying my plumbing service? Here are some examples:
- Overcome a price-related objection by offering a money-back guarantee.
- Overcome fears about getting poor service from a plumber by adding reviews and testimonials to your page.
- Overcome FOMO objections by comparing your drain-clearing service directly to other options like chemicals, trenching, or pipe relining etc on the market.
Always Be Testing
Whatever you do to improve conversions, it pays to run A/B split tests if you have enough traffic to get an answer in a few months. Test things like:
- Headings
- Offers
- Words on the page
- Calls to action
It’s easy to do these days, and I’ll bet you learn something each time. We use tools like Thrive Leads and the free Google Optimize to help do this. They are easy to install and set up on your WordPress website, so let me know if you want to do that.
Multiple Steps To Improve Conversion Rates Are More Than Additive
So there you have it, seven ideas you can put into action.
If your conversion rate is currently 5% and you implement each of these seven ideas and improve the conversion rate by just 10% each time – here’s what happens.
The first time your conversion rate will increase to 5.5%. But at the end of the seven tested changes, it will be 9.75% (nearly double) due to the compounding effect.
It’s worth it to focus on conversions and it’s normally a lot more cost-effective than paying to double your traffic.