How to 10x your phone enquiries through your website by using UX design principles

How can applying UX design principles increase phone enquiries through your website? This is done simply by addressing user experience (UX) in web design. By considering common UX issues, such as unclear value propositions and call-to-actions, and suggesting practical solutions like optimising for mobile users and considering user behaviour. Applying these principles can significantly enhance user interaction and lead to more phone enquiries. For detailed strategies and insights, read the full article below.

More Phone Calls Through Your Website

As a business owner, if you are investing in your new website, one of the basic functions you are probably looking for it to do is generate more potential customers through phone calls or email enquiries, right?

Unfortunately, the truth for most websites is that they don’t perform well in that department, which shouldn’t be the case.

In this article, we’re going to tackle this issue head-on a even provide a little tip that could 10X your phone call enquiries through your website, based on our experience applying it to client websites. You just need to apply some basic user experience design principles.

But first, we have to throw in a small caveat.

Essential For Any Online Success

For a website to be successful, it needs two ingredients: traffic and conversions.

You can’t get sales without both of these things happening on your website. So as we are talking about getting more engagement on your site, we are naturally talking about the conversion part of the equation, not the traffic generation.

For a lot of businesses that have a website,  one of the biggest stresses is getting traffic to it in the first place, real people going to your website. This is one, if not the biggest, problem with websites in general, and one which is very common.

Surprisingly, however, it’s often ignored to the point that the website itself is forgotten about and scratched off as a required business expense that didn’t work, or the owner is completely oblivious to the fact that it’s getting no traffic, given that most don’t even track their analytics. I digress.

However, the traffic part of the equation mentioned above is a separate issue which we won’t be covering in this article.

How To Get Click-Through Rate

So… let’s just say for arguments sake that you have been able to grow traffic to your website to a pretty steady number, you know this as you use analytics to at least track what traffic you are getting.

However, you might still be stressing, because despite having a steady stream of people looking at your site, you may not be getting many or very few new enquiries.

This can be really frustrating for a business owner, especially if they have invested in any kind of traffic generation, such as SEO campaigns or regularly adding content to the site through blog posts etc.

But here’s the thing: there could be multiple reasons for that traffic not converting into enquiries, including the message used and the keywords chosen on your site, which may well be attracting the wrong type of audience.

But let’s just suppose that the message is right and you were giving great value and providing solutions for your visitor, yet you’re still disappointed with the amount of leads you would like or expect…

What to do then?

This is actually a common issue and something that a lot of site owners struggle with. No matter how much they tweak and how they change the wording or call to action, they still struggle with getting those all-important new customer enquires, despite them visiting the site.

Most people are not aware of a certain discipline in website design called UX, or user experience. It’s really important for you as a business, as it deals with the way in which a user interacts with your site.

Four of the most common problems a website suffers from, which can be identified as UX design issues, are:

• Value proposition on the site, so the user doesn’t know what to do or what the benefits of using the site are.
• What action do they need to take, as often its not that clear?
• Building enough trust with the user through reviews, testimonials and social proof
• Mechanisms by which you can warm up prospects, position yourself as a trusted business to buy from, and nurture a user through the use of funnels.

As web developers who understand UX design, we feel that it is important to think outside the box when trying to study a website and understand how a user might interact with it.

User Experience: Best Practice.

One of the biggest issues we see with a lot of sites can be explained by a couple of factors: out-dated web design legacy practices still being used and the inexperience of some website designers, who may not understand the mechanisms of a commercial website and how it should be looked upon as a contributor to revenue and profit.

Just by simply considering the potential traffic source of a site one can change the perspective towards a design and immediately improve how it works. An example of this would be the consideration for designing your site for mobile devices.

Given mobile traffic accounts for around 60% of the internet, it’s still bizarre that a lot of website designers broadly design sites for desktop, but crucially don’t change the overall design functionalities to account for that traffic source.

Google’s mobile-friendly tool Tool Is A Robot.

While these sites are responsive in design as confirmed with tools such as google mobile friendly tool and the green check of approval, nevertheless, you have to remember one thing. Google’s mobile friendly test is automated, and while it is a pretty complex, it basically looks for media queries in the code of the site for different screen sizes, which are the unique identifiers to show that the site is built with the prerequisite responsiveness in mind.

What it can’t take account of, however, is the way humans might interact with the site in the wild.

This is a huge deal, as given the limited real estate on mobile screens, together with how ergonomics works on mobile, this remains a huge blind spot, even though most designers have taken the time to make sure the site functions, as far as they can, on all sizes of devices.

But as we know, looking good and being effective are two separate disciplines. A classic example of form over function instead of form following function.

In essence, this is a user experience issue and the type of thing Google is looking for as part of it’s overall quality score, but so too are your website visitors, and ultimately, the ones with a metaphorical credit card in hand, ready to spend money, with the only barrier being your website and their experience using it.

Ergonomics and laziness.

One thing we have found that works well for our website clients is to look at the mobile version in a different light and to view it as an app from a functional point of view. We also draw inspiration from other apps or websites that work well on mobile and then try to incorporate some of that functionality into a client’s design, but crucially, we hide it from larger screen versions of the website where it would have no value whatsoever.

Most web designers, for example, will keep the same call to action on the mobile version as the desktop or tablet version of the design. This often means that a “call us” link, which is a pretty common element of any business website, is in the header of the site. But if you think about how you use your phone, this is actually counterintuitive, as you normally use one hand to cradle the phone, then use your thumb of that same hand to tap the screen.

Following this design principle will result in the call to action in the header being out of reach to most users who haven’t got longer than average thumb or unusually small phone screen.

We know that as a whole, humans are lazy, and from a user experience point of view, if something is harder to do, even by just a little, such as having to reach further with your thumb, its not going to happen in most cases, that goes for a call to action on your mobile too.

So our recommendation is simple, always consider how users are going engage with your website, and modify accordingly. In this instance our solution is to add a call button at the foot of a sites mobile screen, it’s that simple.

So If your site is getting any traffic at all and you want people to call you, do this and you should expect to see an immediate uplift in calls.