What impact has your website made on the success of your plumbing company? If it’s less than you’d hoped, you’re not alone. What you need to do is increase your website’s conversion rate—this is the percentage of people who follow through on an intended action on you’re website (e.g., fill out a contact form).
A conversion rate measures key touchpoints in the customer journey running up to a plumbing lead becoming a paying customer such as the percentage of people who see your Google ad and join your email list.
Measuring the conversion rate of your plumbing website (and all your online marketing campaigns) allows you to refine your marketing efforts because it’s clear what is working and therefore what you should double down on as well as what isn’t working and needs to be improved or ditched altogether.
If your conversion rates aren’t where you want them to be, engage in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to strategically improve your marketing impact. It’s an efficient way to generate more business. It’s not just about driving more traffic to your plumbing website and hoping visitors follow CTAs. It focuses on maximizing the percentage of new customers converted from existing traffic and improving your return on investment by reducing the average cost of new bookings for your plumbing services.
So, how do you get started with CRO as a plumbing business?
What Is a Good Conversion Rate for a Plumbing Business?
As you start tracking your conversion rate on your website and comparing conversion rates for different marketing strategies from social media to SEO to search advertising, it’s helpful to have a benchmark. You’re never going to convert 100% of leads. What is reasonable to aim for?
The average website conversion rate is 2-5%. So for every 100 website visitors, you can expect between 2 and 5 people to convert. It can be higher for other digital marketing channels. For example, the average conversion rate for Facebook ads is 9.21% and the average conversion rate for local SEO is up at 80%. Research into the average conversion rate of the specific marketing strategy within the home service business industry before setting Conversion Rate Optimization goals.
How to Improve Conversion Rates for a Plumbing Business: 8 Tips
Whatever other digital marketing strategies you use, your website will be important. A lot of customers check out a business’ website before booking to get a better idea of what the business does, their services and pricing, and their reliability. Your website has the potential to be a conversion powerhouse. You can do just that and convert a higher proportion of leads using these conversion-boosting techniques.
1. Strengthen Your Calls To Action
To get more potential customers to take action, ask with a compelling call to action. Across your website, throughout your landing pages, and at the end of your social media posts, ad campaigns, blogs, and anything else you put out, clearly state CTAs. What are you asking them to do? Why should they follow through with it? How do they do that e.g. is there a certain link to follow or address to email?
2. Engage In Reputation Management
What people are saying about your business will influence whether leads interact with the business. Good reviews boost conversions by boosting trust because potential customers are going to trust the opinions of your previous customers more than they trust what you are saying about your own business. Missing out on online reviews means missing out on revenue.
Keep track of customer reviews by replying to new reviews, asking customers to leave reviews, and sharing positive testimonials within your marketing materials as social proof for your plumbing services. Our user-friendly online review management tool can help you stay on top of this. Case studies build trust effectively and lean buying decisions in your direction.
3. Add a Live Chat Function
Before a potential customer is ready to make a booking, they might have questions. If they can’t find the answer, they are very likely to click away from your website in frustration and look at another plumbing company. Be there to answer questions when your customers are weighing up using your services by adding a live chat to your website.
As leads are browsing your website to make a decision on whether to book a service from you, they can talk to you right there. Our live website tool helps our customers generate up to 11x more inbound leads from their websites. That will do a lot of good to your conversion rate.
4. Utilize Videos On Your Website
It’s more likely than not that potential customers will be looking at competitor plumbing companies. You can help your business to stand out and close the sale by adding videos to your website. They add interest, convey information effectively, and are a compelling way to share your message. Also, videos help with search engine optimization, supporting lead generation as a bonus.
5. Shorten and Simplify Forms
The delivery of HVAC services often involves forms so you can get the information you need to give an accurate quote or prepare for a job. But forms can create a negative experience for potential customers, leading them to click away from your website without converting. Your customers want to get their boiler serviced, not share their whole life story.
Shorten the forms on your website as much as possible to make sure filling them out isn’t arduous while still collecting vital information. Our website contact form tool allows you to reply to submissions via text which is effective for closing the sale.
6. Encourage Action Through Pop-Ups
If you want to grab the attention of website visitors and prompt them to take action, use pop-ups. They get visitors to focus on the message within the pop-up. Using compelling copy and a powerful call to action, you can win a conversion. Keep in mind that pop-ups work best with short and sweet marketing messages. So it can work well for building email subscribers or notifying potential customers about a special offer.
7. Make the Benefits of Your Services Obvious
Your leads shouldn’t click away from any of your marketing campaigns, especially your website, wondering why. Why you and why now? The benefits of your plumbing services should be so clearly obvious that potential customers can pick up on it after skim-reading one post or one webpage.
Figure out the unique benefits of your service by profiling your customers. Note their problems, priorities, goals, motivations, and most nagging pain points so you can address them in your marketing efforts and fill your website with what your customers need to see to say yes.
8. Improve the User Experience
With so many other things fighting for the attention of your leads, the only way to maintain their attention and motivate them to take action is by providing a positive user experience. Engaging with your plumbing business, finding key information about it, getting in contact with your team, and confirming the sale should be easy.
Minimize any potential delays, confusion, and resistance to avoid losing leads to distractions such as your competitors. Key elements of the website user experience include load time (no one likes to wait around for websites to load), design and layout (it should be easy for them to find what they’re looking for), and functionality (they want to book a service in the minimum steps possible).
Optimizing your conversion rates can take some experimentation. Give yourself time to get it right, learning from the impact changes make on your metrics to refine and improve your marketing efforts.
How Podium Can Help Optimize Conversion Rates for Your Business
At the end of the day, it’s about making every interaction with your plumbing company conversion-worthy. Make taking action an easy yes. As a lead conversion platform, we have all the tools you need to streamline, simplify, and automate customer interactions so you can win more leads and repeat business.
Get all the social proof you need to convert customers with our online review management tool for collecting and responding to reviews. Try out our Google Reviews link generation tool to make it easier for happy customers to share their experiences. Be there for potential customers when they are making a buying decision by adding our webchat to your site. See it in action on your website here. Capture website leads with our contact form tool. You can request a demo to see how effective responding to submissions by text is for boosting conversion. Help your website fulfill its full conversion potential with Podium.
