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In addition, inbound calls give you the opportunity to represent the human behind the brand, gain access to your leads' deepest concerns, and better understand who your ideal leads are and what their desires are.
Thus, it’s no wonder that optimizing your business website for calls is so closely tied with increasing your site’s conversion rate. In fact, studies show that over 50% of users frequently call a business and that sales calls have a conversion rate between 30% and 50%.
As mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide (Statista), and 60% of smartphone users report calling a business directly from search results (Think with Google), optimizing the site’s design to boost lead calls became an even greater priority for business owners.
Therefore, this article discusses 12 website design tips to help you align your site’s looks and increase your chances of landing an inbound call.
Inbound calling represents a lead’s outreach to your business through a phone call. These calls can come from existing customers - via a customer service call center - or prospects, i.e., site visitors looking to learn more about your products/services.
According to Invoca, marketers are ditching website lead forms and instead focusing their efforts on generating more inbound calls.
For starters, inbound calling ensures better lead quality and data accuracy compared to contact forms, as leads frequently provide inaccurate data - intentionally or not.
Moreover, communicating via phone establishes a more personal and valuable connection between your business and customers and enables a faster response time to meet your leads' needs.
So, now that we’ve set the grounds for why you should spare no effort to optimize your site’s design for boosting lead phone calls, let’s dive into the expert tips for achieving that.
What if your most valuable leads don’t have time to call your business when they need you?
Perhaps your target customers are businesses that require every corporate communication documented in detail or Millennials or Gen-Zs that loathe making phone calls?
You may feel skeptical about how website design can affect and transform the way your customers think, behave, or do business. But it indeed can.
Keep reading to uncover the best web design ideas to boost your chances of landing a customer phone call.
Creating a site that is accessible and functional via mobile devices isn’t just a way to cater to Google’s ranking algorithm - it is a foundation for providing a good user experience to site visitors.
Imagine having to pinch to zoom across the site on a tiny mobile screen to locate the business’s phone number - it’s a perfect recipe to frustrate and lose a customer.
For local businesses, mobile-friendliness is especially important, as it improves the site’s odds of ranking higher in the search engine results pages, and thus, perhaps even entering the renowned Local Pack, which instantly lists clickable business numbers.
Another commonly missed opportunity to attract lead calls is failing to design and code the phone number as a clickable button.
Presenting your business number on the website as a text instead of a button forces your prospects to switch between apps when typing in your number - which often leads to making a typo and growing frustrated.
On the other hand, a clickable phone number immediately opens the dialing app on the user’s phone, making the entire process of contacting your business effortless, fast, and satisfying.
It isn’t uncommon for businesses to intentionally drop mentioning their office’s phone number on the website. In fact, many companies, especially the B2B ones, require their prospects to request a quote or email.
But if you want your leads to contact you via a phone call, your site’s design needs to guide the users' attention accordingly.
Thus, place your phone number on every page throughout your site in an exact location, somewhere where it doesn’t overwhelm the entire design but is still relatively straightforward for users to spot a glance.
On most websites, contact info is located in the upper or lower right corners of the site, so if you want to stray away from this practice, take an extra step to put the call button in a prominent location.
Moreover, clearly indicate to users that the phone number is clickable by either designing it as a regular button or, for a more subtle approach, underlining it upon hovering.
If your business runs several international offices, ensure that every localized site version has an adequate phone number that matches the user’s location.
Smaller local businesses generally opt for mobile phone numbers, yet, it’s a wise idea to invest in acquiring a free-of-charge 1-800 phone number.
A dedicated 1-800 number will make your business look more professional in the eyes of your customers; plus, you don’t have to worry about you or your employees jumbling the phones and answering leisurely to a potential customer.
You might feel disheartened by overtly displaying the contact info of your business’s different departments on the website. After all, many businesses do well with only one automated number, which transfers the callers further to the designated department.
Yet, think about your own UX during these moments. Long response times, catchy tunes repeated over and over again, the reason why you called in the first place slipping from your mind.
To mitigate customers' experience when contacting your business, make sure to include all relevant phone numbers in your site’s design and name them accordingly.
So, if, for example, your customers should ever need to reach out to your business’s customer service, they should be able to find that branch’s particular number on your company site. Or, if you want leads to contact your sales department, you should place a direct number on your web page.
Moreover, in case you’re running both a retail and wholesale business, ensure both divisions' contact info is displayed correctly.
Long waiting times and transferring calls between departments make for poor UX and a lack of streamlined communication in your team, so make sure to prevent such blunders.
Give your leads a friendly nudge to dial your number by using provoking CTAs. Sure, a good old “Contact Us” can do the work perfectly fine, but there are plenty of opportunities to be creative.
Make sure that your CTAs are relevant to the content of each specific page. So, if you’re integrating your phone number into a blog post, tell the reader to call you for more information or advice on your expertise.
Of course, your entire website copy, along with the calls to action, should align with your business’s brand identity. So, to help you craft alluring CTAs that perfectly fit your brand’s tone of voice and persona, you should turn to useful sources for crafting a branding strategy.
Be clear as to what outcomes customers can expect during a call with your business.
For example, you might be tempted to embellish your CTAs and inadvertently offer what you cannot provide to customers in a single phone call.
To prevent your prospects from feeling let down, be explicit in your site copy and state whether they can expect a rough project cost estimate or a detailed quote.
Moreover, customer service centers usually require callers to verify their identity, so if your business demands customers to state their SSN or any other personal info, make sure to state your requirements on the website and thus cut the call time.
If you want to go an extra step in optimizing your website design to boost customer calls, create separate landing pages accessible only via mobile devices that would don a call button instead of a contact/request a quote form.
This way, you’re guiding your potential leads to contact you - in a way that is effortless for them.
Besides, leaving customers with too much choice may even be counterproductive for your lead generation efforts.
For example, a visitor given a choice between a phone call and a contact form may postpone their communication to later - and potentially never - if they prefer writing instead of calling.
However, only allowing them to call you when visiting your site via mobile - or at least by highlighting the possibility of calling you compared to other contact options - will serve as a gentle push for your site visitors to perform their action right away.
Sharing complex information regarding your services or products or discussing project details can sometimes be troublesome to do via a phone call.
Moreover, certain businesses require all their company info to be carefully documented and in written form, prompting employees and managers alike to communicate with other companies solely through emails.
Luckily, there are many call recording tools to help you later seamlessly transform your recorded calls into clean, legible transcripts.
This way, your prospects will give you a ring even if they have to share intricate and meticulous info with your business.
Implementing structured data to your website offers many benefits for boosting your site’s performance.
Organizing website data helps search engines understand the context of information on a web page, thus returning more accurate results to searchers.
Structured data enables Google to understand your content better and faster, increasing your site’s click-through rates, search visibility, and voice search rankings.
Moreover, structured data can be invaluable for your lead call efforts, especially for local businesses that strive to appear in Google’s Local Pack.
Lead magnets refer to any free item or service given by businesses to gather prospective leads' contact details, such as trial subscriptions, white papers, newsletters, free consultations, etc.
Marketers leverage these lead magnets to generate sales prospects. Thus, lead magnet materials are a fantastic place to include your phone number and other contact info.
As a result, your potential customers will love your valuable materials and thus be keener to reach out to you when in need of your service.
User behavior online is unpredictable, which is why you should never complete your website design without conducting in-depth A/B testing.
Test out different variations of call button design, CTAs, and locations on your landing pages among an equally distributed audience and integrate the findings into your site’s design.
Staying connected with prospective customers is vital, as customers have never before held such high expectations when communicating with businesses.
Whether it’s a customer service request or an inquiry regarding service costs, phone calls are a quick, effortless, and personal way of interacting with your audience.
The tips above will help you design your business website to encourage your site visitors to call you and take a step closer to becoming your brand’s loyal customers.
