Does your website have a £300 million button?

No one likes bad websites. If you can’t find the information you’re looking for in a nano second, you’ll simply click away and find it somewhere else.  Your website is great: all the information a potential customer needs is right there at their fingertips, with no need to click onto a competitor’s site.

But what if I told you that just by adding one button to your website, you could potentially create a rich stream of vendors, keeping you busy with valuations for evermore?

Let me tell you the story of the $300 million button.

It began when a major retail website, let’s call it eSell, discovered they were getting a lot of abandoned shopping carts. This is when a customer clicks to buy, but doesn’t complete the transaction. eSell approached a web developer to help them fix the problem. At first glance, eSell’s checkout looked great; nice and simple; but it had one step that customers just didn’t like – the login.  Right before they could pay for their purchases, eSell had a login page requiring the customer to enter their email address and password.  You wouldn’t think this was such an issue, would you? After all, lots of websites ask you to login before you buy.

The web developer set up tests and watched what people actually did. Their reluctance to fill out these fields surprised him.  When asked why she had abandoned her cart, one shopper told him, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.

The developer discovered that new customers were worried about giving their details, in case their inbox was bombarded with marketing messages.  If a returning customers forgot their password, it was just too much trouble to retrieve it.  The result? Thousands of abandoned shopping carts. And millions of dollars lost.

The developer knew what to do immediately.  He changed the Register button for a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.
The results were instant and mind-blowing: the number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000 million.  All for the change of a button.

Where’s your £300 million button?

Your website is different; you’re not selling anything.  You don’t have to worry about failed transactions and abandoned shopping carts.  What you do need to worry about, is invisible customers.   These are visitors who drift through your site, clicking here and there, but disappearing without you ever knowing who they are.  It’s like having a fishing net with big holes in it. Your fish are simply swimming away.  You need something tasty in the net to grab their attention, and tempt them to stay for long enough to at least identify themselves.

Look at your website. Is there anywhere a potential customer can give you their name and email address, and have you given them a reason to do that? You may have a Register for updates area, but isn’t that just for purchasers and tenants, so you can send them the latest listings? Think about whose details you actually want: vendors and landlords.  Yes, you probably have a Book a Valuation form, but I bet you don’t get any enquiries. They just aren’t ready to take that step.

Look at my site for sellers:  you’ll see that in exchange for an email address, I give away my Selling Secrets.  In this way, my list of vendors grows by hundreds each year.  In fact, if I were an estate agent, I would probably have no need to canvas or advertise for new vendors. My list would be enough.  What would a button like that be worth to you?

If you’d like to have a chat about this, drop me a line at sam@samashdown.co.uk – I’d love to hear from you.

What to do next: Do you get my Supertips? They’re jam-packed full of great tips and marketing strategies just like this one, and best still – they’re free! Get yours here -> www.samashdown.co.uk/samsupertips

Speak to Sam: If you’d like to know how I think you could improve your marketing, just answer a few short questions here and I’ll tell you if and how you could be more effective.