3 Simple Steps To Use Your Website To Get More Customer Calls

Many customers still like to pick up the phone when contacting a business. In fact, 60% of us would rather call up a business than use other forms of contact (such as sending an email or visiting a business location in person). This is because phone calls can provide customers with the information they want immediately, instead of having to potentially wait hours for an email response or spend time travelling to a business location.

Phone calls can also have their benefits for businesses. While emails can be less invasive and easier to refer back to, phone calls can reduce time spent dealing with long back-and-forth email exchanges and could possibly allow you to be more personable than in an email (which could help you to generate more reliable leads).

Your website can be the perfect tool for encouraging customer calls. It’s likely that most customers wanting to find your number will visit your website to do so, however you may be able to generate extra phone calls through your website by finding ways to convert browsing visitors into callers. Below are just a few ways to attract more customer calls via your website.

Use click-to-call buttons

Over half of internet usage is via mobile devices. With more potential customers than ever using their smartphone to access the internet, it makes sense to tap into this technology by making websites more mobile-friendly.

One effective way of doing this is to place click-to-call buttons on your website. Click-to-call buttons are a type of call-to-action button that can allow mobile users to instantly call you by tapping a button on your website. When clicked, the button opens up the user’s call app and automatically dials up your number.

This can have many advantages over providing your phone number as text:

A button prevents the need to manually dial up your number, saving customers time and potentially preventing some customers from misdialing your number.

A button is clearer to see and more inviting than simply providing your phone number in text form. You can use bold graphics and add text such as ‘call us now for a free quote’ to engage visitors.

Buttons can allow you to more easily work out where your leads are coming from. You can capture website analytic data every time a visitor taps on a click-to-call button - this could allow you to work out exactly which callers found you via your website. This itself can allow you to optimise your content marketing on your website to generate more calls (as explained in the next step…).

Click-to-call buttons can increase the conversion rate of a website by 200%. Consequently, it pays to add these buttons to your site.

Use analytics to optimise these buttons

It’s worth considering the precise placement of click-to-call buttons on your website. Using website analytics, you can work out the best areas of your website to place buttons to get the most calls.

For instance, if a particular page is getting a lot of views, it might be sensible to add a click-to-call button here. Even if it’s a blog post, you should still take advantage of the additional traffic on this page by placing a button at the bottom. Heat mapping software may even allow you to work out which parts of a page visitors are hovering around the most - this could prevent placing buttons on dead zones of pages.

Having click-to-call buttons across multiple pages could help you to work out which pages are most effective at generating calls. You may find that a page with few views still manages to generate a lot of phone calls - by using SEO or PPC marketing to attract more visitors to this page, you may in turn be able to then increase the amount of calls.

Split testing could be another content marketing tactic to consider to help you get more out of each click-to-call button. This involves creating two copies of the exact same web page but with slight variations in order to find out which one is more effective. By creating two versions of a webpage and changing the placement of the click-to-call button between them, you can work out which version is more effective at generating calls. Split testing can also be used to test out different styles of button - which could include different colours, different sizes, different fonts or different wording of text - to see which variant generates the most calls.

Increase calls by encouraging other forms of contact

While it may seem counter-intuitive, promoting other forms of contact such as email may help to also generate more phone calls. An email correspondence could lead on to a phone call in some cases. For instance, a potential customer may have a lot of information that they want to relay to you and they may find it easier to do this via email. Once they’ve talked to you via email, they may then feel more comfortable calling you up.

For this reason, make sure that you have an option that allows customers to message you. This could include providing your email address in text or you could add a form feature that allows customers to submit their query as a form (this allows you to then call them back in your own time).

Chat boxes are also very popular nowadays, allowing customers to message companies and get an immediate response via instant messaging. A chat box conversation may lead on to a phone call in some cases and so it is a useful feature to add to your site.

The takeaway

Click-to-call buttons are one of the most effective ways to generate more customer calls using your website. By using analytics and split testing, you can optimise these buttons to increase the effectiveness of them - including finding the right placement and working out the best style of button. On top of this, it’s important to still promote other forms of contact, which may still lead to calls.