image courtesy of Roadside Guitars
This is the second article in a series entitled “A Systematic Approach to Bridal Shop Marketing“. In the last article, I showed you how to build your bridal shop lead machine. If you’ve completed that step you are now driving tons of traffic to your web site and it’s time to start thinking about what you want all those visitors to do. Whenever I consult with folks about the design of their website, I always start off with the same question. “What is the purpose of your website?” So, what’s the purpose of your site? If you answered that by saying “to impress brides or help brides learn more about my shop”, then I challenge you to rethink that.
For non-e-commerce sites, I have yet to find a better purpose than converting website visitors into in-store traffic. Studies have shown that the most effective way to convert a site visitor in to a lead is with a clear call to action that can be performed immediately.
The days of web users randomly surfing the web is coming to an end. The Web is a selfish place. People don’t have time to read the same old sales messaging about beautiful and exquisite gowns. Besides, they’ve already visited a hundred other sites with essentially the exact same wording. Web surfers today scan pages looking for something specific. Most have no interest in links such as “What We Do” and “Who We Are”. They only care about what you can do for them. Keep this in mind when you are creating your web content.
Great web content is active. It lets you buy, subscribe, donate, apply, submit, contact, discuss, get help, or get involved. Every time you write a piece of web content you should also write at least one call to action at the end of that content.
A link is a call to action. Think carefully about your calls to action. Are they clear and precise? Are they making the right statements? And, most importantly, will they result in more foot traffic in your bridal store.
You have to tell your users what they can do on your site. Avoid rhetorical questions and get to the point. “Request an Appointment”, “Watch a video”, “Sign Up”, “Join Us”, are all effective call to action statements.
So what are the top 3 call’s to action on your website? If you’d like to share your calls to action, add a comment to this post!
I’ll close this post with a case study of our shop’s website (Bel Fiore Bridal an Atlanta Bridal Shop) as an example. Take a look at this excerpt from from our home page and then read the reasoning behind and the placement of these calls to action.
If you look closely you’ll see 3 calls to action on the home page. Each targets brides in various stages of the buying cycle. The main call to action is “Request an Appointment”. This is aimed at brides who are ready to start visiting bridal shops. The next call to action is “Sign up for a free bride tank”. This is aimed at the bride who is still surfing the web and assembling a list of atlanta bridal shops that she’d like to visit. We want to be one of those shops, so we encourage her to engage with us by giving her something tangible to leave our site with. The final call to action is to connect with us via social media.
One important thing to note here is the placement of these calls-to-action. User studies show that people digest web page content in the shape of an “F”. So you’ll see our primary call to action is right in the middle of the page with a BIG BUTTON, followed by the sign up form and social media to the right.
As an exercise in examining your calls to action take a look at these sites and try to locate their calls to action:
Project Management Software – http://basecamphq.com/
FreshBooks for Blackberry – http://www.bookkeeperapp.com/
The Knot – http://www.theknot.com/
Follow the links below for the rest of this series:
- Part 1: Your Lead Machine
- Part 2: Conversion Principles
- Part 3: Measuring Conversion
- Pre-Appointment trust building and differentiation
- Fostering post-sale word of mouth
Stay tuned via Email, RSS, or Twitter. You are not going to want to miss the continuation of this series.