Success by Design

A successful website conversion is when someone visits your real estate investor website and takes some action you want them to take. For investors looking to buy houses, it’s when your website visitor wants to sell his or her house and either submits the requested form or gives you a call. 

So, if you have 10 visitors view your page and one submits the form, you have a 10 percent conversion rate for that time period.

Not everybody will submit the form and call you. Let’s examine why.

• They may simply be curious about your services.

• They may be other investors just checking out the competition.

• They may be skeptical of you and your website.

• They may not have a strong enough motivation to take action.

Let’s consider the last two in more detail because they are the ones you should be converting. 

Skeptical and Anxious

One group isn’t sure about how legit you are, and the other group is not feeling comfortable enough to reach out.

How do you design your website to address these issues?  And please understand, these are very common issues for motivated sellers looking for a way out of their situations.

The way to get people to ease up, become more comfortable and decide to contact you is to provide credibility.   

You can exude credibility in various ways:

1. Include testimonials on your website.

If you don’t have sellers you can ask for testimonials, then ask your friends, family and colleagues. They don’t have to lie and act as though you bought their house. They can just vouch for your integrity. Use the person’s full name. I don’t know about you, but when I see a testimonial by “John W,” I doubt the legitimacy of it. Video testimonials are the best. It’s hard to doubt those.

2. Have your website professionally designed.

Your real estate investor website must look and work great and be easy to navigate. We’ve all been to sites that look like they were built in the ’90s. You want a clean, uncluttered website that shows you are professional. Think about it: You’re telling people you’ll pay cash for their house, so you’ve got to have a website that looks like it cost a lot of money to build.    

I’ve heard people talk about how “pretty websites” don’t convert as well, and that is just complete baloney. There are so many factors that go into conversions that an easy excuse for low conversions is that the site was “pretty.”

What usually is going on is the people offering the websites don’t have the technical ability to allow their customers to have custom-looking sites, so they spin the problem to make it seem like it’s not a problem but a benefit. Beware. 

The myth that pretty sites have low conversion rates is garbage, and we have years of data to prove it. A simple test is: Which site do you feel more comfortable submitting your information to—a nice-looking site or a site that looks like it was thrown together in a couple minutes? Always consider things from the perspective of potential motivated sellers. Put yourself in their shoes.

3. Make your site personable.

Let them know who you are, why and how you got into the business and how you want to help them. Pictures that don’t seem like cheesy stock photos work best. An “About Us” page is crucial. This is where you can tell your unique story. Don’t make it a vague, generic, corporate website. You should also include a little blurb about you on the home page as well.

4. Make your contact info easy to find.

You should have your phone number everywhere. You should also have your business address on the website. When people have no other option aside from filling out a form to get in touch with you—and cannot find a name for who is behind the site—they become very skeptical. 

5. Establish yourself as an expert.

You should have content on your website that shows you know what you are talking about when it comes to real estate and buying houses. LeadPropeller real estate investor websites is one system that comes with default content for you that does this masterfully. 

You should also be blogging. If you don’t have the time or desire to write blog articles and have them SEO optimized, LeadPropeller also offers locally optimized content packs you can purchase that can be dripped out over several months to keep your site fresh and establish you as an expert.

6. Have a fast-loading website.

Believe it or not, how fast your website loads has an effect on how visitors perceive you and your business. 

According to KissMetrics:

• 47 percent  of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

• 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

• A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions.

Source: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

OK. So those are ways of converting the people who wouldn’t otherwise contact you due to skepticism and anxiety.

Conversion-Enhancing Design

Now let’s talk about great design—something that can help improve your conversion rate by leaps and bounds.

Short forms

Large forms that ask for tons of information right off the bat scare people away. What you want to do is have short forms that only ask for the bare minimum to get the maximum number of people to feel comfortable submitting their info.

The way LeadPropeller websites work is to have a short form that asks for people’s name, email address, phone number and address of the house they want to sell.

Once they submit that form, their information is saved in your account, emailed to you and texted to you. The website visitor is then taken to a longer form that asks tons of great questions about the house and why he or she is selling. 

We’ve crafted the questions we ask in such a way that respondents are more inclined to give you their real numbers. For example, our long form asks the seller for his or her asking price and then about any repairs or updating the house needs. Then, the seller is asked why he or she wants to sell the house. Those last two questions usually get them to feel the way they felt when they decided that they really need to sell. So now that the sellers are back into the mind-set they were in, we ask what is the least they would be willing to take for a cash offer and fast close. This is almost always much lower than the asking price they mention earlier in the form. How awesome is that? The website does some negotiating for you!

Back to the two-form system. So, if the respondents fill out the first form but do not fill out the second form, you still have their contact information so that you can reach out to them. If you only have a single long form that scares people off, you have no way of knowing who they were and have lost that potential lead.

BONUS SECRET: I’ve heard other online marketers who provide real estate investor websites tell people that research shows a form with fewer fields gets higher conversions so you should remove all but the name and email address on your home page form. This is horrible advice!

You must have the phone number on your form. In the past, I’ve tested removing the phone number. Using the advice given, you’d expect to get more leads because people would be more comfortable just submitting a form with their email address and not their phone number. That’s not what happened.

Here’s what actually happened. When you only have an email address, it’s very difficult to get in touch with a seller. This is a fact. You must have the seller’s phone number. I can almost guarantee you that when I was only getting an email address, the seller would then go to another website and submit his or her information along with a phone number. The other investor was able to call and set up an appointment. Since that happened, the seller didn’t need to bother with my emails.  He or she had already talked with somebody. 

Always require a phone number!

Mobile-Responsiveness

You absolutely must have a mobile-responsive website. If you don’t, you’re going to be losing at least half the leads you could be getting, probably more.

According to SimilarWeb’s “State of Mobile Web U.S. 2015” report, roughly 56 percent of consumer traffic to the leading U.S. websites is now from mobile devices. And it’s growing.

Websites these days need to be mobile-responsive so that they look great and adapt their design no matter what device they are displayed on. There are factors to consider when designing for mobile devices that a lot of developers don’t think about. In fact, Google has a guideline for “mobile friendliness.” These design factors include making sure buttons and links have enough space around them so that it’s easy to touch them without inadvertently touching a different link or button than intended.

Google even has a tool for testing this for a site. Go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Another quick way to test mobile responsiveness is to open your desktop browser and load a website. Then click the edge of your browser and adjust the width of the window to make it smaller and see how the website adjusts. 

WordPress or Not WordPress

Some people recommend WordPress for your website. The reason why it’s sometimes recommended is because of the ease of adding content. That’s what it was built for: blogging. You can go in and write up new posts and publish them. It’s very good at that.

What it’s not the best for is creating easily customizable websites that look great and load fast. 

We had considered WordPress for LeadPropeller websites, but quickly dismissed it because of this limitation. We wanted our sites to be easily customizable (we built a custom editor for this) that allowed us to provide lots of different templates that can be tailored to everyone’s individual tastes. For the ability to easily add content to your site through blog posts, we coded up the ability to add a WordPress blog to your site with the push of a button. So now, you have a site that loads super fast, is easily customizable and looks great with an attached WordPress blog that is there for what it does best. 

We didn’t lock you into the limitations of WordPress. Please also be careful if you decide to look into a site designed solely around WordPress. These can load slower and usually don’t allow you to install your own plugins. These are huge limitations that were deal killers for us when we created Lead Propeller.