Is Your Website Driving Customers Away? [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 89]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

00:00:00:00
Speaker 1
Alex, it's finally 2025. And if your website is not pulling its weight, we have to start making changes. So we're going to talk about some simple things that we can do that not only work for your business, but your customers. And those four things are.

00:00:23:02
Speaker 1
We have a really exciting announcement for all of our viewers and listeners out there. The new book, Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan and the team here at impact comes out in April of 2025, which is really exciting. But, you know, it's more exciting. You can go right now, today to endless customers.com and preorder your copy. And if you do so, there's all sorts of great bonus content that you're going to get that you wouldn't normally get if you don't preorder.

00:00:49:04
Speaker 1
So again, go to Endless customers.com and preorder your copy today. So you can learn how to earn trust and win more business in the age of AI.

00:00:58:01
Speaker 2
Welcome back to Endless Customers. I'm your host, Alex Winter. And today we're joined by Vin Guyot. A he's a coach and also head of web strategy and a friend. Vin, welcome back to the show. Great to be here.

00:01:07:12 
Speaker 2
Alex. Yeah, I'm excited to have you. Guess what we're talking about today.

00:01:10:15 
Speaker 1
Shocker. It's probably going to be websites.

00:01:12:11 
Speaker 2
Oh my gosh I love talking about websites though. It's it's an important it's probably the most important piece of any business out there. And for people to interact with your business.

00:01:21:22
Speaker 2
but the topic today is the four biggest things for website experience and conversions.

00:01:27:01 
Speaker 1
That's it. Yeah. And this is something that we can put the clickbait title on say is for 2025. This is stuff that has to be true no matter what year it is, no matter what your website is doing.

00:01:36:19 
Speaker 2
Erroneous.

00:01:37:14
Speaker 1
We see this on almost every single website, critique or website throwdown that we do. These are four things that will have an effect on your businesses. Bottom line, these are things that your customers want to see. And if we do this correctly, you will see stronger conversion rates from the stuff that we see.

00:01:55:11 
Speaker 2
Who doesn't want that? Everyone does. And it's not like it's 100 things or 20 things. It's four things it's for. We're keeping it simple.

00:02:00:19 
Speaker 1
They're pretty simple. They're pretty.

00:02:01:19 
Speaker 2
Easy. Yeah. Okay, so can we just I think we should just roll up our sleeves and, like, get right into it. Let's do it. All right. So what's so. Yeah, what's number one.

00:02:08:09 
Speaker 1
The first thing. And this is one that we're going to spend a little time on okay. You should not have a contact us page in your navigation.

00:02:15:02 
Speaker 2
Really.

00:02:16:04 
Speaker 1
Yeah okay. So I'm not saying you shouldn't have a way for people to get in touch with you. Let's clarify.

00:02:21:03 
Speaker 2
That's what I thought you were. That's where I thought this was.

00:02:22:12 
Speaker 1
It's not it. Okay. We need to have a sales conversion point in the navigation. So if you look at that main navigation bar, you start with your logo. That's always going to. What does that bring you back to Alex. The home page homepage. Yeah. And then we end it with the sales motion. So it's got to be request to quote request an estimate.

00:02:39:23 
Speaker 1
Talk to us. Get an expert whatever it is. Right. It's got to be that button. And I say button specifically at the end of your navigation. It should never be contact us. That's everything. That's general. That's people looking for an address for a fax number. If you still do that type of thing. But it's not where we can optimize for the sales journey.

00:03:00:04 
Speaker 1
And that is a very big thing that we talk about. And I see it on almost every single website that comes to us. Yeah, you should still have a contact us page. It should not be the most important thing in your call to action. It should not be the thing that we drive everyone to.

00:03:14:23 
Speaker 2
Yeah, like it could be in the footer. Something like that. It doesn't need to be up front. So you're really talking about getting strategic with that, that header bar, what buttons are up there that people click on. And not having like a million different tabs and options. So it's like the Cheesecake Factory menu of craziness and nobody knows what to do.

00:03:30:09 
Speaker 1
That's it. Yeah. You have too many options up there. They're not going to choose. So contact us. Drop it in your footer. Drop it under about us in your main navigation in the drop down there. That's fine okay. People will go there when they are looking through that part of the journey. Sure. But the last thing in your navigation should always be, how do I get in touch with sales?

00:03:47:18 
Speaker 1
How do I start that sales motion? Because it has a lot of things that need to be addressed before they're going to be warm enough to actually do it.

00:03:55:06 
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00:03:55:22 
Speaker 1
And when we get to that, there are specific things that if you go and take action on now, you will see immediate improvements in the follow through of that page in the output of that page.

00:04:07:15 
Speaker 2
Yeah. So when you say sales conversion page, what does that look like? Like what can you paint that picture for me I'm a noob I don't know like what is what is that. What on that page what it should be expecting to see.

00:04:17:20 
Speaker 1
We're going to call that number two okay. Because you shouldn't have a contact us page. But you should have clarity content on that sales conversion page okay. It has to be clear, we as humans don't like giving anyone our information. No one likes filling out forms. No one likes reaching out cause you don't like getting sold to.

00:04:35:01 
Speaker 2
Yeah, I don't get spammed. No. No, thanks.

00:04:36:23 
Speaker 1
We don't want to get spams. We don't want to get three phone calls from the sales dude that's trying to one call, close us. And taking that anxiety away and actually calling it out and saying, hey, this is what's going to happen specifically, once you fill out this.

00:04:51:03 
Speaker 2
Form, right?

00:04:51:22 
Speaker 1
We're going to call you in 30 minutes, 15 minutes. We're going to call you right away. That's something we do. We'll call you within five minutes. Usually if you fill out that form.

00:04:59:10 
Speaker 2
Right.

00:05:00:03 
Speaker 1
So we need to actually say what that looks like, make it crystallize both in text and in video, so that we can hear a human that I might interact with. If you go to our site, you're going to see Becca talking through what the experience is going to be, what those conversations will look like, and ultimately what the outcomes should be.

00:05:18:20
Speaker 2
Yeah. So really just setting the expectation.

00:05:20:23 
Speaker 1
It's being human. Yeah. I want to know what goes on. I, I talk with our team about this experience a lot. I went through the giant calculator on Home Depot website looking for a project quote, and I went through probably 10 or 15 questions, answering things, giving them details, and I schedule the conversation. I took that next step.

00:05:42:01 
Speaker 1
I did the hallmark of that journey. I actually booked time with a human and I was like, alright, cool. Yeah, I gave them all the time. I spent the, the, the minutes that I needed to give them what they needed. I should be able to show up. I should be able to have a quick conversation, get a rougher estimate of what I'm going to get because they still didn't give me numbers.

00:06:02:16 
Speaker 1
So frustrating. All I got met with was a gatekeeper, and it was a waste of my time filling out the calculator like, oh, we got to do this, this and this. Why didn't you tell me that upfront? Yeah. Why didn't you tell me that I was scheduling time with someone to schedule the next appointment? I would ask you why?

00:06:17:01 
Speaker 1
That you're doing that? That's crazy. Yeah.

00:06:18:21 
Speaker 2
We're going to have a meeting about the meeting. Right? The meeting that we're going to have.

00:06:21:20 
Speaker 1
Yeah, I canceled the next conversation. Like, you frustrated me so much on that first one, because my expectations were light years away from what was actually going to happen, and all it would have taken was some text, maybe a video, anything to say. This is what you will actually see when you click that button.

00:06:40:14 
Speaker 2
Yeah. But you know, that's a good example because we talk about this a lot in the show. We had Marcus on the show recently, and we talk a lot about how you were ready to make a buying decision. And you, you had a project you're working on. You're trying to get some answers, like you were ready to go, and now you're probably not going to do your business with Home Depot because of this experience.

00:06:57:11 
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, I was tire kicking it anyway, but still.

00:07:00:22
Speaker 2
That didn't help the it didn't help the situation at all, I guess as well.

00:07:04:02
Speaker 1
How often do we in a home improvement business in a SAS company? We don't look at those little details. Right. And that on a website, most companies don't try to bring that human element, that deep level of expectation and clarity that we can bring to our content. That's what can really set us up against the competitor that's down the road.

00:07:25:19 
Speaker 1
If we're outlining specifics of what they're about to experience.

00:07:30:16 -
Speaker 1
Take some of the anxiety out of the equation.

00:07:32:09 
Speaker 2
That's it, that's it. Then it builds trust, which is what this is all about. Build trust here. That's it. So number. So number two is clear and consistent calls to action.

00:07:39:23 
Speaker 1
Yes okay. So as we look at driving people to that sales conversion page. So do not contact us. We're going down into that sales conversion page number one. Yep. No matter what we are doing we need to make sure that it's it is as clear as possible. It's not just learn more. It's learn more about solution. It's dig into pricing for solution.

00:08:04:10 
Speaker 1
And some folks are sitting there rolling their eyes saying, then I have a button. I can't put an essay there. No, but we can get it as short, sweet, and simple as we possibly can. So instead of saying something that's longer, see pricing pricing estimator view our pricing estimator. Give them that little extra versus just learn more. Learn more about this solution and it helps.

00:08:26:12 
Speaker 1
And you'll see it in the data. In the click data. When you test one button versus the other, that extra little level of clarity does bring people to click to the next step.

00:08:35:07 
Speaker 2
That's interesting. Yeah. Do you ever I just have to ask this because I'm like, nerding out with you now is like, do you ever ab test buttons? And you go like, let's try two different like pieces of copy and see which one's more effective in like heat heatmap or something like that.

00:08:46:20 
Speaker 1
All the time. And I love geeking out with that because what I have seen work for one client and one industry does not resonate with the other. And then it goes down to the way that you even talk about things on those conversion pages. On the solutions pages. They just won't resonate in the same way across different industries.

00:09:05:06
Speaker 1
So you should not only test your button color, you should test the way that you're talking about your button. The text on your actual buttons. So your copy, your color, the positioning of different buttons. Tried all the pieces. We really need to get back in the high school science and just test anything, geek out over it and see what works so we don't do that anymore.

00:09:27:15
Speaker 1
But the the biggest thing with your calls to action, along with that conversion copy is keeping them consistent. We need to and Donald Miller talks about this in Story Brand. You have your primary. You have your transitional. It's your sales motion and your education play. Yes. If they're not ready to click to get a quote, an estimate, whatever that is, you have to give them a lifeline to go deeper into the journey.

00:09:47:23 
Speaker 1
Otherwise they're at a dead end, right?

00:09:50:14 
Speaker 2
And then they bounce and they go somewhere else to get what they need.

00:09:52:16
Speaker 1
And that's it. Yeah. There you will only have a person say, I'll keep going a little bit further. So many times before the like, I'm just done. We're going to go elsewhere. And that's where you see bounces and exits come from your website. So the more lifelines that we can give them, the more threads for them to pull and the clearer they are that there are threads for them to actually pull, they're going to keep going with that.

00:10:15:17 
Speaker 1
Yeah. And we had a client recently and this hits on a lot of the things that we're talking about here. They didn't have a more structured conversion point for their consultation. It was more of that general contact us feel right. They were getting service quest through it. All these different things. We had them optimize it for clarity. They put a better video on there.

00:10:36:09
Speaker 1
They added some additional content there, and they went up from I think it was like a 4.5 submission rate to almost a ten. They they almost doubled it simply by adding more clarifying expectation content, getting a stronger video up there and making it feel like it was the right place for you to land when you're that part of the journey.

00:10:55:19
Speaker 2
Yeah. Wow. That's incredible.

00:10:57:11 
Speaker 1
It's it's all of the pieces that go to a what feels like a considered buying process and the right journey for the actual user. We had similarly right after a launch previously, it was a very general contact us page brought in some more clarifying expectation elements there. Organic traffic alone on that page is converting at. Let me just I don't want to say the wrong stat, it's actually 18.75%.

00:11:24:16 
Speaker 1
Wow. So on those pages you're going to see a range from 10 to 25. You want to obviously be higher because if you're getting them there, they should be converting. Right. But that quickly after launch, seeing a 10% overall and an 18.75% organic conversion rate on that page, it's enormous. People want human content. They want to be met and sold to, like they're not dumb.

00:11:47:08 
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00:11:47:21 
Speaker 1
Treat them like you would treat a person sitting across from you and tell them, hey, Alex, this is the stuff that we're about to go get after once you give me your information. Right. So often we guard that and it can breed some mistrust. Like, why aren't you just telling me what this process will look like?

00:12:03:14
Speaker 2
Yeah it does. It makes it feel like you're not painting the whole picture. And then that's when you start to fill in the blanks yourself. And when you assume things like that, it can it can lead to bad outcomes. It really can. So I think that's an important piece. So I love that you're you're seeing these these conversions or I'm sorry, these what are the numbers called.

00:12:23:23
Speaker 2
What we call that submission rates. Conversion rates. Yeah I so I love that you're seeing these conversion rates and submission rates going up. So it's very clear that instead of a contact us page we need we need something much more direct. We need something that's much more human and simplified. So we got steps one and two down. What's the third step or what's the third piece of this puzzle.

00:12:41:14 
Speaker 1
So step one no contact us. Step two I'll say is clear content can clear content on your most important pages. So not that contact us that sales conversion.

00:12:52:00
Speaker 2
Yeah simplifying the the copy number three.

00:12:54:11
Speaker 1
Let's get those calls to action consistent. Let's get them clear. Let's get them organized like we've been talking about okay. Number four for the experience and to help folks get through this without any weird load or anything like that. We have to have optimized images. It is almost 2025, and we still have websites that have giant images on their website.

00:13:13:18
Speaker 1
And I'm all for beautiful photographs, but you can't have a 2 to 10 megabyte image on a website. And we're getting geeky on this. At the end of the day, images need to be small. The smaller the file size, the faster they're going to load for your website, and that gives you better experience and it pays dividends. It's good for SEO, it's good for the user.

00:13:34:10 
Speaker 1
It's good for conversion rates.

00:13:35:19 
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's such an important piece too because I think everyone the default, at least for me because I'm a video and and picture guy myself. So it's like I want the highest resolution, the highest quality possible. And that is important for certain formats. For this format, it's not as important as load speeds and load times because of how it affects everything you just mentioned.

00:13:55:12
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00:13:55:21
Speaker 1
And listen, I am not saying that you should put up a Pixely Grain League garbage looking picture on your website. That's. No, not what I'm saying. Yeah, but there is a give and take. There's a threshold where you can use different tools to get to that threshold, and you're not going to have any quality loss. There's a few tools that I use.

00:14:13:17
Speaker 1
The one, if I'm using HubSpot that I always recommend.

00:14:17:03 
Speaker 2
It's going to ask you this because when you whenever you compress images, you lose quality. Whenever you compress video, you lose quality. So there's like always finding that balance of like making it not look to garbage because.

00:14:27:14 
Speaker 1
There's a variety of ways to do it. You can use tools like After Effects or Photoshop to compress things. You can use free out of the box tools. There's a website called Optimus Zilla that you can upload like 20 images and download them compressed, but it's all manual stuff.

00:14:44:03
Speaker 2
Yeah, I got one too. It's like it's called like Free Convert and it's a website you go to and the same thing for videos and images, but it.

00:14:49:16
Speaker 1
Does all the stuff and it compresses. But you have to actively remember to do that, and it takes time to get those where you want them to be.

00:14:57:02
Speaker 2
Right. And if you have hundreds of images that you have to have on your website, it's not fun. No, that sounds I'm already getting anxiety just thinking about it's not great.

00:15:05:09 
Speaker 1
So for our clients that are using HubSpot, we always recommend a tool called Pixel Compress. It's by one of our friends, Franco at Narrative SEO.

00:15:13:14
Speaker 2
We love Franco.

00:15:14:10
Speaker 1
And the tool does it for you so you can manually have it do all of the ones in your HubSpot portal, but then it will automatically continue to optimize them. So if you miss an image and everyone's going to miss an image from time to time, it will automatically compress it and it goes to a certain threshold that they have seen where it shouldn't over compress.

00:15:35:20
Speaker 1
But if it does, you can, with a snap of a finger, literally click a button and it goes back to the original. So you can manually do it.

00:15:43:10
Speaker 1
But it is one of those. Image optimization is something that is often left by the wayside for anyone in content. It's usually in the craziness of the day. We're trying to get the article up, you miss an image, and then you realize, hey, I forgot about the image compression on all of these. And now all of these blogs are these pages are a little bit slower than they should be.

00:16:05:02
Speaker 1
Now I have to go back and spend time to re optimize it. The tool takes the guesswork out of it. It's just going to be there, it's going to work, and it's going to continue to optimize and keep things as fast as they should be from an image standpoint.

00:16:17:08
Speaker 2
Okay. And just one more time. But that tool is called what.

00:16:22:03
Speaker 1
Pixel compressed IO.

00:16:24:00  
Speaker 2
Pixel compressed IO nice. And it plugs in with HubSpot, which.

00:16:26:13 
Speaker 1
Is right in the HubSpot marketplace.

00:16:28:03
Speaker 2
Yeah. That's okay. What else should people be thinking about for optimization? As far as load times? And like, I think for me, because I'm not a web expert like you and I know we're getting nerdy here, but like, why is that important? And I know surface value. It's like if I, if I click on a link to go to a website and it takes more than a few seconds to load, I think something's broken arm looking at my Wi-Fi going, like, is my router messed up?

00:16:48:12 
Speaker 2
What's like in so like.

00:16:49:11
Speaker 1
It's a part of it. It is. It's we we expect instant gratification in this day and age. And if the website takes longer than three seconds or you're not sure if it's actually loading, you're probably not going to stay there too long. Yeah, I was on a client call and they asked me to pull up a competitor's website to take a look at something that they thought was interesting, and I started to load it and the thing flashed like it was going to load.

00:17:14:03
Speaker 1
It sat there for a second, and I literally said, guys, is this normal? And they said, oh yeah, it just takes a while. Why? That's not an okay response. It just takes a while. Yeah. No competitor site. We were trying to get some information and take a look, but if I'm a consumer, there is no way that I'm going to sit there and wait for your site to load.

00:17:34:04
Speaker 1
I'm just going to go somewhere else where I can get the experience that I need and get it fast. Forget about mobile. That website probably would have taken ten minutes to load a mobile, but that is what we are still serving. Some folks. So yes to everything you said, Alex. The longer the sites take, the more you're going to wonder if it's going to give you the right stuff.

00:17:54:19 
Speaker 1
You're probably going to end up in the back button if it takes too long. No one wants to sit there and wait. And we see that in the bounce rates. We see that in exit rates. And you can look at all of this data and say we need to optimize this this page.

00:18:08:16
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah that makes sense. So that was going to be my next question, which is a perfect segue right. You helped so many companies build websites. You coach them and train them on how to position the content, what's important versus what's not. Everything we talked about what happens when companies get this right and they start to implement these things, like what changes.

00:18:25:17 
Speaker 2
And I'm just curious if you have some examples, maybe you can share. Yeah, I just that just really show why this is so important.

00:18:32:00
Speaker 1
It's it's interesting because once you get the right content playing with the right white website, playing with the right sales process, and you really start seeing it's to spin, right? We look at that graphic from endless customers and it is that real.

00:18:46:19
Speaker 2
The flywheel.

00:18:47:11
Speaker 1
It's a flywheel for a reason. Yeah. So you start seeing things like organic starts picking up. You see organic conversion rates be the strongest out of any of those other channels. And I said the for that recent client launch that we had after launch, organic is converting at 18.75%. The average of all their channels is ten. Organic is, if not the highest.

00:19:10:20
Speaker 1
I think it's their second highest currently, and that's the most a month after launch for them.

00:19:15:01
Speaker 2
Yeah. So that's only that's only going to go up as time goes on.

00:19:17:20
Speaker 1
Right. And it's a thing that we now have a benchmark and we can say okay seasonally where should we be at. What things can we go test. Do we need to go run some experiments on buttons? Should we test some new messaging or copy to keep that where we are seeing it be its strongest? And you're not always going to have a consistent conversion rate?

00:19:36:11
Speaker 1
That'd be crazy. It's going to ebb and flow.

00:19:38:06
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00:19:39:08
Speaker 1
But what we do see, we see folks coming in organically off of blog articles, learning, educating. And this happened for, a recent client as well. They had an organic lead that landed on an article, jumped on the homepage, went to a solutions page, then literally down the navigation. They don't have a pricing page yet. It's one of the things are getting up in the new year that human would have clicked on the pricing page in the journey, had it been in the navigation, because they went down the funnel, right?

00:20:08:12
Speaker 1
And then they converted.

00:20:09:14
Speaker 2
Right?

00:20:09:21
Speaker 1
Exactly as we said, from basically homepage all the way down to sales motion. And it's a brand new organic lead from them.

00:20:16:20
Speaker 2
Yeah, I like that. We're talking about the user journey though, and it's so important because I think a lot of businesses think they know what the journey is, or they design it the way they want it to be, but just because you think it or you want it to be that way, doesn't mean that that's what your customers need or addresses the fears, worries, concerns that they have.

00:20:33:07
Speaker 2
So really mapping out that that path step by step and having that in your navigation,

00:20:39:00
Speaker 2
it just is clicking for me. Like this is all making a lot of sense.

00:20:42:23
Speaker 1
It is where we show them their literal journey. It's their path. It's it's not just the links to pages. It should be the navigation, the map of where you need to go to get the right information to make your purchasing decision, whether we are a fit for you or not. Yeah, that's the journey for you to find out.

00:21:02:20
Speaker 1
Yeah. And oftentimes websites can become selfish things instead of what should be the most human act of sales love in the world. We're going to be transparent, we're going to be kind, and we're going to guide you, take your hand and say, hey, Alex, you got a problem you need solved. Here's how we solve problems. Here's how you can trust us to solve your problems.

00:21:24:02
Speaker 1
Here's a little bit about us, and here's how you actually take that sales motion. That's your navigation. Soup to nuts mic drop.

00:21:30:16
Speaker 2
Just like boom, there it is. Wow. Okay, so this is now my favorite part of the show. The one thing time for the one thing. And then we'll recap everything. But what is the key takeaway from this conversation? People out there watching out there listening, what would you tell them if you only had one thing you could tell them that they should really focus on from this combo?

00:21:48:07
Speaker 1
The biggest thing that you can do right now, as soon as you're done listening to this episode, go review your most important pages. Most important, from what you believe to be most important, most important from the user standpoint. And if you don't see the clarity, if you don't see what your next step is and understand what it's going to look like, you have work to do.

00:22:11:03
Speaker 2
Got work to do, get after it. All right, so just so that we can do this, let's recap the four pieces one more time so everybody knows what's up. Yeah.

00:22:17:18
Speaker 1
So number one no contact us in your main navigation unless it's under about us. If your nav ends with contact us. Change that to a get started request a quote that sales conversion page. That's your number two. So number one no contact us. Yeah. Number two have a sales conversion. Page number three we need to make sure that we are giving clarity to our calls to action.

00:22:40:20
Speaker 1
Yes. No more. Just learn more. Learn more about insert your service. See more about insert your service. Give that clarity. See what works best for you all. Test those calls to action.

00:22:52:08
Speaker 2
Yes.

00:22:53:02 
Speaker 1
Number four optimize your images. So we're serving a vast experience for our users images. The biggest killer of speed. Use a tool like a pixel compress. Like I mentioned Optimus Zilla. It's a free tool online pixel compress if you're using HubSpot. That's one that I've seen.

00:23:10:07
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00:23:11:01
Speaker 1
And start optimizing those load speeds for your users so that they can use the call to action in the right way. They can get to that new service page, and they're seeing that clarity content on that page. So they know exactly what steps to take.

00:23:24:22
Speaker 2
Amazing then thanks for sharing all your knowledge and insights. I feel like I learned so much every time we talk.

00:23:29:22 
Speaker 1
Of being here.

00:23:30:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, well you're welcome anytime. And for everybody out there watching and listening, you know what's up. This is endless customers. I'm your host, Alex Winter. We'll catch you on the next episode.