The Closing is the guidance (CTA) placed at the end of the homepage and your most-visited pages. Instead of suddenly asking, "Please contact us," it leads to a micro-conversion such as "See a pre-delivery Sheet" or "See a sample document."
What you'll learn in this chapter: What do CTAs that don't generate inquiries have in common? They ask new prospects for a heavy commitment. Lead with a Sheet that only needs to be read.
In Chapter 9, conditions were placed before price. This chapter deals with the CTA at the end of the page, which lets people who have read those conditions move on to the next step.
Toward a system that reaches many prospects with little effort. This chapter is about the switch that brings you closer to an ambitious goal without adding people. In digital marketing terms, it's about building calls to action (CTAs) and the path to an inquiry (the conversion path).
Scene: A Form with Eight Fields
On one company's website, every page ended with "Start with a consultation," followed by eight input fields.
The site got a fair amount of traffic. The pages were read well. And yet hardly any inquiries came in.
One day, a contact who had just started doing business with them explained: "At first, I didn't know whether it was even worth a consultation. There were fields for company name and budget, so I closed the page."
What that person had been looking for was not a consultation desk. It was a single piece of material that would let them check whether the company fit their project.
The guidance placed at the end of a page is not a place to secure a commitment, but a place to let people take the next step lightly.
Imagine walking into a shop for the first time, still just browsing the shelves, and a clerk asks, "What's your budget?" You'd probably slip out of the shop quietly. Websites are the same. New prospects are still in the middle of comparing. If they're suddenly asked for a consultation, they drift away. Text that asks for a commitment from the start is, in effect, ending with a reason to "not act just yet." Commitments can wait until after the inquiry.
The "exit" here doesn't mean the inquiry form. It means the last bit of effort that remains after the contact has decided, "Let's move forward with this as a matter for our project": downloading a company brochure, a long questionnaire, waiting until an assigned employee is designated on your side. Each has its reasons. But if that last bit of effort is heavy, even people who have come all that way stop in their tracks.
A Common Pattern: Every Page Says "Please Contact Us First"
Many websites say nothing but "Please contact us first," whichever page you open. Then you get a situation where the pages are read well, but inquiries don't increase. Even without changing the content, simply changing how heavy the guidance is can change how inquiries come in.
Separate the Guidance by Stage of Consideration
For new prospects: Guidance to view a Sheet that resolves concerns about specifications (a micro-conversion).
For advanced prospects: Guidance toward a consultation on specifications (the main conversion).
Figure 12. Separate the guidance for new prospects and advanced prospects
Placing heavy guidance and light guidance side by side makes the difference clear.
Heavy guidance: "Please start by consulting us about your order." Below it, eight input fields.
Light guidance: "In two minutes, you can view the Sheet of project conditions and specifications that we hand to clients before delivery. Before contacting us, please take a look at just this."
Read the two pieces of guidance again, slowly, side by side.
Which one makes you a little wary after reading it?
Which one makes you want to open the next page, almost without thinking?
The contact at a new prospect may be hesitating in exactly the same place, in exactly the same way.
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