4 Ways to Maximize your Construction Website’s Performance

Residential and commercial contractors work in an extremely competitive field. For contractors with the right website and marketing solutions, there are opportunities to thrive. For example, the U.S. home remodeling industry is expected to be valued at $352 billion in 2021. Trends in commercial and industrial construction also show various opportunities, such as a demand for new offices, warehouses, and distribution facilities.

Your construction website may be brilliantly designed, optimized both for customer experience and search engine rankings. But a strong website still needs to be supplemented with tools that maximize customer engagement and boost sales.

Common Construction Website Problems

In a fast-paced world that’s overloaded with information, contractors often struggle to connect with their customers and make the best use of their website. The following are a few problems that crop up frequently:

Slow Response Times

When prospective customers contact you through your site, you need to respond swiftly. Even when their problems aren’t urgent, people are impressed by a quick response time. It shows that you’re organized, efficient, and attentive to their needs. The longer you delay, the more likely they are to disengage from you and search for your competitors.

In various ways, you may be failing to quickly gather, organize, and respond to information provided by new leads or returning customers.

Impersonal Interactions

When you contact customers, are your messages tailored to them? For example, an email addressing a customer by name leaves a more powerful impact than a generic greeting.

Your messages also need to be tailored to particular circumstances. The way you follow up with satisfied customers is quite different than how you respond to those who are frustrated or angry. Customers undertaking a large project tend to experience considerably more stress than those who have requested minor alterations to their property. You need to account for each customer’s frame of mind, the type of work they expect from you, and their current and previous experiences with your company.

Poorly Timed Messaging

There are various points at which customers may disengage from your business or come to feel as if you’re unresponsive to their needs.

• They overlook an initial text from you.
• They hesitate to call back after they receive a quote.
• They fail to receive timely confirmations about appointments.
• After a project, it doesn’t occur to them to give you feedback or leave a review anywhere.

To keep them engaged with you, it’s essential to know when and how to communicate with them at various points in the sales cycle.

Not Fulfilling the Potential of a Website

Even if your website is designed well, there are ways to improve its performance. Maybe your site isn’t effective enough at obtaining visitors’ contact information and helping you convert visitors into customers. Also, your online presence in general may need to be strengthened with a greater number of positive reviews and a more active presence on social media.

Four Website Solutions to Explore

The following tools can assist you in boosting customer engagement and website conversion rates. They’re relatively simple to use, requiring no coding expertise. They can also be integrated into your existing system for customer relationship management. We’ll highlight some of the key features of each.

Hatch

Hatch is a highly rated messaging platform specifically made for contractors who deliver home improvement. Through automated messages, it helps keep your sales team connected with leads from the moment of initial contact onwards.

Speed to Lead

On your website, you have a form inviting prospective customers to provide information about themselves. The form may ask them to describe a problem they’re experiencing, and it may tell them that you’ll reply with a free estimate.

Hatch gives you the ability to respond immediately to leads. Before prospective customers can turn to another contractor, they’ll receive a personalized email, text, or voicemail from you. If they don’t respond, Hatch will generate additional messages that follow scripts for customer engagement.

Implementing Follow-Up Strategies

Let’s say a potential customer doesn’t respond to your estimate for a project. What happens next? Hatch allows you to implement a workflow for following up with customers, discovering the specific reasons they’re holding back, and using strategies that will convince them to stick with you. Much of this follow-up process is automated, saving you time and improving your ability to close sales.

Useful Metrics

Hatch automatically tracks metrics related to both successful sales and sales attempts that never came through. Factors like price, project size, and follow-up communications are accounted for. You enjoy quick access to data on your number of weekly appointments, the percentage of sales you’re closing, and the strategies that may or may not be working for you.

PulseM

Online reviews and testimonials play an integral role in your business success. You need tools that help you manage negative reactions and maximize the chances that you’ll receive positive reviews. PulseM is a reputation management platform geared to service professionals, and it fulfills multiple important functions.

Meaningful Communication With Customers at Every Step

For retaining online visitors, PulseM enables you to use a chat widget on your website and carry the conversation over to texts. These interactions increase the likelihood that site visitors will request your services.

Before a job begins, PulseM sends personal profiles of your workers to customers. These profiles are customizable, and you can use them to highlight your workers’ skills and display professional photos of them. Profiles add a humanizing touch to an appointment reminder, and they help put customers at ease by giving them some knowledge about the people working on their property.

Throughout the job, customers are able to easily communicate with you. And when the job is wrapped up, PulseM immediately uses email and text to solicit feedback.

Containing Negative Reviews and Promoting Positive Reviews

When customers signal that they’re giving you positive feedback, PulseM prompts them to leave a review on a major platform, such as Google or Facebook. PulseM also helps you promote each new positive review, including highlighting it on your site and posting it to social media accounts.

If customers indicate that they’re unhappy, they don’t get prompted to write a public review. Instead, you receive the feedback and respond to it discreetly. Your response may include immediate communication with the customer to clear up misunderstandings and resolve problems.

Through PulseM, you get an early warning that customers are unhappy. It means that you have a window of time to intervene before they write a negative review on a public platform. Meanwhile, the enhanced visibility of positive reviews strengthens your reputation.

Worker Trainings and Rewards

PulseM enables you to use quick customer feedback to improve your services and earn a greater number of positive reviews. Workers receive praise and critiques for how they’ve handled different jobs. You can set up a system that rewards the best workers and corrects problematic behaviors.

Privy

The purpose of Privy is to convert website visits into actual sales. Along with displaying special features on your site, it gives you email and text marketing capabilities. Although Privy is especially useful for e-commerce sites, contractors may also derive benefits from a number of its features.

Not Just for Shopify or Wix

When you first land on Privy’s site, you may assume that their services work only for businesses that use Shopify or Wix as online storefronts. However, Privy actually integrates with a wider variety of platforms.

These include Squarespace, WordPress, Joomla, and other content management systems. As for email providers, Mailchimp and SendinBlue are among the many that can be linked to Privy. You can also connect Privy to certain Facebook marketing platforms and other sales and marketing tools.

Email and Text Marketing Campaigns

When planned carefully, email marketing remains an important strategy for increasing sales. Privy can help you collect emails more effectively from website visitors and set up email marketing campaigns. The content of your campaigns can include special promotions and informative newsletters that draw on a selection of customizable templates.

Privy also offers a service for text message marketing. You can set up automated messages that reach customers at various points in the sales cycle, including after they initially contact you.

By using email, text, or a combination of the two, you’re maximizing the value of the information customers give you. Every piece of information is a potential way to maintain a connection with them, cultivate a relationship, and make sales.

Website Conversion Features

Privy allows you to design a variety of online displays that pop out at various points during a website visit. You need to be careful not to clutter your site or produce displays that interfere with site interaction. However, with thoughtful planning and appropriate timing, these displays can increase the chances of website visitors providing information and contacting you for services.

Zapier

Zapier is a well-rated and widely used automation tool that allows you to streamline a large variety of tasks. These include activities that promote your website, expand your reach on social media, and secure a greater number of sales.

Customizable Workflows

Zapier’s flexible workflows can be tailored to any aspect of your sales or marketing activities. Consider the multiple steps it takes to follow up with customers or to set up and track the results of an email marketing campaign. You can work more effectively and save a significant amount of time by automating chains of repetitive tasks.

Works With Numerous Applications

Zapier can incorporate over 3,000 apps into its workflows. These include Google and Microsoft apps, major social media platforms, and various messaging apps, such as Slack. Privy and PulseM are also on the list.

One point to keep in mind is that not all apps work equally well with Zapier. However, Zapier keeps refining its services, and your experience with different apps may improve over time.

Reliability and Security

Zapier operates with virtually uninterrupted uptime. Furthermore, they’ve implemented a variety of effective measures for data protection. These include powerful levels of encryption and regular checks for security weaknesses. As a contractor collecting sensitive information from customers, it’s critical to use software that helps shield you from data breaches.

Which Website & Marketing Tools Should You Use?

Although a well-designed website is crucial for success, it isn’t sufficient. To compete in a crowded field and enjoy the opportunities of the coming years, you need additional tools that keep you ahead of competitors.

Whether a specific sales or marketing tool is beneficial for you depends on a number of factors, including the size of your business, your target customers, your budget, and the design of your site.

All of the tools mentioned here are fairly adaptable and work well with software that you may already be using. Whenever you adopt a particular solution, we’ll help you implement it, tailoring it to your specific needs. With our assistance, you’ll be able to successfully use the tools that best strengthen your online presence and convert website visitors to loyal customers.

Aaron R. - CEO

Confident, creative and highly qualified interactive marketing and web design professional with 17+ years of distinguished performance in construction internet marketing, social media, SEM/SEO, branding, web design, lead generation and e-commerce.