As part of my Google Optimisation experiments, I made a few changes to a number of my web site pages.  Now, I don’t get a lot of traffic, so it takes a while to see if anything makes a major difference.  But, I have seen one metric drastically improve overnight.

It’s on my contacts page.

I actually thought my contacts page was pretty good.  I had all the boxes ticked including:

• My company details listed – with my business address, and location
• Not making the contacts page ask for mandatory sensitive information (i.e, phone number is not mandatory)
• A clickable email address – in case people wanted to just, you know. . . email me
• A simple web enquiry form in case they preferred web form communication
• The company number with the internal dialling number in case phone was their preferred method of communication.

Despite all of this, the bounce rate was still at around 70%.  70% of people who made it to my contacts page never made contact.    I could not understand why.   I tried various versions of the web page – sometimes with the web form on the left, sometimes on the right, sometimes with the phone number in bold – I was only seeing differences of around 3 or 4%.

Then I added something – just a bit of text – to my contacts page.  Immediately, my bounce rate reduced to 20%, and the number of enquiries jumped.

When I think about it, it was silly not to have this text on my contacts page in the first place.  After all, people visiting my site don’t know anything about me, just as your visitors do not know anything about you.  I am asking them to provide their details to me, and they have no idea what I am going to do with them.

Which is why I think the following statement on my contacts page (in plain sight, directly below the contact form) has really helped get more people contacting me for business meetings:

We hate spam as much as you do!

We promise that we will never sell, share or trade your details. Ever!  We won’t even add them to any mailing list that we run.  We will contact you about your enquiry, and that’s it!

Now it could be said I should be adding them to a mail list and emailing them, but I have never had the time or motivation to create regular newsletters – I prefer the personal touch.   And so far, its working!