Businesses have lots of reasons for getting a website, but losing customers is never one of them. The problem is that many businesses are losing customers because of their website.
Of course you will lose even more customers by not having a website at all. That applies to businesses that could potentially trade directly online, as well as to businesses that use a website as a corporate brochure. Your competitors have websites, and your customers use the internet, so you should have a website.
But when you build a website there are things you can do – or fail to do – that will actively prevent you from getting customers. Here are three of them.
Google did research in 2013 that found that smartphone penetration in Ireland was 57 percent, but it is the consumer figures that are the most interesting. In the seven days before the survey was conducted, 47 percent of smartphone users used their phone to research products, and 44 percent actually made a purchase using their phone.
If you are thinking that is just people on Amazon or eBay, you would be wrong. According to the survey, 36 percent of smartphone users search for local businesses on their phone.
This means potential customers are using their phones to search for your business online. But what if you have a website, albeit one that is not mobile friendly?
Users hate websites like this and are much less likely to interact with them, or return to them, but there is another problem with non-mobile-friendly websites – Google. Google has looked at the fact that users don’t like sites that are not mobile friendly, so it reflects this fact in its search results.
So let’s say you are a restaurant in Sligo and you have a great website, but it doesn’t display properly on mobile. When someone uses a computer and searches in Google for “restaurants in Sligo”, your website will appear in the search results – it might even appear at the top.
But if that same persons uses their mobile phone to do the same search, your website will not appear – Google penalises websites that are not mobile friendly when searches are conducted on mobile devices.
That’s why you are probably losing customers if your website is not mobile friendly.
Research has shown that 40 percent of internet users abandon websites that take longer than three seconds to load – that’s less time than it took you to read this sentence.
Ease of use is also incredibly important. The information on your website should be easy to find – this includes things like details of your products and services and, crucially, contact details.
If your website takes ages to load, includes annoying features that get in the way, is missing content, or the content is hard to find, you are losing customers.
Finally you should think about what you want your customers to do when they visit your website.
If you don’t have a clear call to action the visitor will potentially drift to another website where there is one, and they will take action there. So, a lack of good calls to action will lose you customers.
Here is the good news now, and it applies whether digital marketing is a small part of your overall strategy, or a significant part: fixing these issues so that you don’t lose customers is possible, and it doesn’t have to cost huge sums of money.