Why & How You Need To Record All Enquiries From Your Website

Why & How You Need To Record All Enquiries From Your Website

Every enquiry (whether contact form, email, phone, or other) should be kept in your CRM. Without that you won’t know which forms of marketing are working best for you.

You receive a new enquiry into your business, but what happens next?

Most businesses respond promptly, keen to turn the enquiry into new business.

Fewer businesses record details of the enquiry within their CRM.

Even less businesses attempt to link the enquiry back to what brought that person to your website.

Businesses that do all the following are businesses that build strength in ways I’m going to focus on within this article:

  1. Respond promptly to the enquiry.
  2. Record the enquiry in a CRM (or similar).
  3. Analyse what brought the potential customer into the website.

Different mediums of enquiry

Most businesses have these three main methods that people can use to make an enquiry:

  1. Contact form(s).
  2. Email address.
  3. Phone number.

While there are other methods (e.g. live chat), the focus here is on those three above because they will be most-used to make an enquiry.

Three reasons why it’s important to record the details of each enquiry

Some businesses don’t have a CRM, but all businesses have access to spreadsheets and other ways to record incoming enquiries.

Here’s why it’s so important to record every enquiry (even the junk ones) that you receive:

  1. You can compare numbers of enquiries about specific products or services to the numbers of people who got to those parts of your website. This gives you a percentage success rate plus the other percentage of how many people didn’t lead to enquiries after looking at those parts of your website.
  2. You can identify junk enquiries so that you can link them back to sources of that website traffic (and so work to reduce visibility to those people who submit irrelevant or spam enquiries).
  3. You will get an independent view of which forms of marketing led to those enquiries. Instead of accepting information provided by those who do your marketing (e.g. they tell you that you had 100 clicks from Google Ads within the month), you’ll have a view of how much of the marketing led to enquiries for you.

What you should be recording about each enquiry

  1. Date the enquiry was received.
  2. Precise time that the enquiry was received.  This is very important.
  3. What product or service the enquiry related to.
  4. Ask how the enquirer found out about you and make a note of their response.  If they say they found you via your website then ask them if they are on your website now (this is important for linking back to the marketing source of the website visitor).

Linking enquiry form completions back to their sources

This is the easiest way to see:

  1. What brought someone to your website (e.g. Google Ads, organic traffic).
  2. What they looked at page by page.
  3. The exact date and time they made contact with you.

When you receive an enquiry from your website contact form it will likely have information including:

  1. Name of the enquirer.
  2. Contact details of the enquirer.
  3. What they were interested in.

You will have an email showing the exact date and time that the enquirer made contact with you.

However, what you probably won’t have is any indication of what brought that person to your website.

My customers use the software I provide (free to trial for 30 days) to get insights about people who complete those contact forms.

Below you can see an example, which shows that the person had searched Google for ‘conservatory roof replacement’, clicked through from the Google Ad at 14:38 on 2nd August, and then navigated through the website before completing the quote form and getting to the ‘thanks’ page at 14:56:

That level of information isn’t included in most contact forms that are submitted from websites but when you know the date and time of the form completion you are then able to use software (such as that I can supply) to show where the enquiry originated from.

In this case, the customer would enter this within their CRM:

Name of the prospect

Contact details of the prospect

Date of enquiry: 2nd August 2023

Time of enquiry: 14:56

Enquiry format: Contact form

Marketing medium: Google Ads

Marketing specific: conservatory roof replacement

Why is it important to record all that information in a CRM?

Because the business can run some analysis each month that lets them dig deeper into this type of information (focusing here on Google Ads as an example):

  1. How many enquiries did we get from our website contact form within the month?
  2. How many of those came from Google Ads?
  3. How many of those Google Ads sourced leads became paid business?
  4. What was the value and profitability of that paid business compared to what we spent on Google Ads overall?
  5. Were there any Google Ads keywords that brought higher levels of enquiries?
  6. Were there any Google Ads keywords that brought no, or weak levels of enquiries?

 

Compare that approach to:

  1. We had 25 people complete enquiry forms during the month.
  2. We converted 10 of those to customers, worth £20,000 to our business.
  3. That means that all our marketing works (Google Ads, organic traffic, email marketing etc.).

That approach is flawed because it only looks at the overall outcome (£20,000 of business gained).

In reality it could have been that £500 of Google Ads spend resulted in 500 website clicks and only two of those became a customer, which would mean that £498 of Google Ads spend achieved nothing.

Unfortunately, many businesses only roughly compare overall enquiries gained to what they are spending overall on a range of visibility exercises including:

  1. Paid advertising (e.g. Google Ads).
  2. Organic visibility (e.g. SEO).
  3. Social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram).
  4. Email campaigns.
  5. Posted letters.
  6. Outbound phone calls.

By recording all incoming enquiries within a CRM, your business will be able to get a much clearer view of what’s working and what isn’t.

Recording enquiries gained from contact forms is the easiest of all because those enquiries get to a specific website page after landing (e.g. /thanks) and so can be easily tracked by software.

Linking email enquiries back to their sources

If you receive an email enquiry (other than people who completed contact forms), there are a few possibilities:

  1. They were on your website and clicked on an email link to make contact.
  2. They had been to your website before and had kept the email to contact you with.
  3. They had found your email somewhere else, or someone had passed it onto them.

For 2 and 3 above, that’s practically impossible to link back to their website visit and so you could only populate your CRM with this level of information:

Name of the prospect

Contact details of the prospect

Date of enquiry: [date]

Time of enquiry: [time the email was sent to you, which will be visible]

Enquiry format: Email

Marketing medium: Unknown

Marketing specific: Unknown

For the first option, you have more to work with if you are using website visitors analytics (which I provide on free trial), because you will know the date and time of the email you received, which could mean that they were on your website at that time.

Below you can see an example from someone who emailed, which shows that the person was on the contact page at 15:11 and so, if that was the only page of the website that had the email address, then it could be safely assumed that the incoming email enquiry was related to that Google Ads click:

In this case the enquiry would be recorded in the CRM as:

Name of the prospect

Contact details of the prospect

Date of enquiry: 26th July 2023

Time of enquiry: 15:11

Enquiry format: Email

Marketing medium: Google Ads

Marketing specific: green space uk

 

It’s not always easy to link email enquiries (other than the contact form) back to their sources but it’s still worth recording those because there may be some useful data that comes out as part of analysis.

Linking phone enquiries back to their sources

When anyone in your business takes a phone call they should immediately write down:

  1. Time of the incoming call.
  2. Date of the call.
  3. Summary of what the call was about.

The time is the most important part to get right because you can then use software to later refer back to the date and time the enquirer was on your website.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen people who record the enquiry time as the time that they entered it to the CRM, which means it can’t be linked back to the website visitors data.

Here’s what would ideally happen when you receive an enquiry by phone:

  1. Take the details of their enquiry, including their contact details.
  2. Ask them how they found out about your business.
  3. If they refer to ‘Google’ or ‘your website’ then say: “Oh, are you on our website at the moment?”.
  4. If they were on your website then you should be able to track them via website visitors data, which would also show you how they found your website.
  5. If they weren’t on your website at the time (e.g. they may have been on it in previous days and taken the phone number to contact), then you won’t be able to identify the marketing source.

Here’s an example of a telephone enquirer who rang at 10:45 on 27th July 2023.  Because the call-taker asked if they were on the website at the time, and had also found out that they had clicked through from Facebook, they could (after the call) pinpoint it to this specific visit from a paid Facebook ad:

 

This enables them to record the enquiry in the CRM as:

Name of the prospect

Contact details of the prospect

Date of enquiry: 27th July 2023

Time of enquiry: 10:45

Enquiry format: Phone

Marketing medium: Facebook Ads

Marketing specific: Super campaign

 

Pulling all the relevant enquiries back out of the CRM (and learning from it)

If enquiries aren’t being recorded into a CRM (or similar) then there is no definitive way to know which forms of marketing are getting the better results (and which aren’t).

However, when they ARE recorded consistently then you can pull out information at a basic level and then a more detailed level.

 

 

Basic level data from the CRM

 

Total enquiries received during the month

Total sales made from enquiries received

Value of sales made from enquiries received

 

Number of Google Ads clicks

Cost of Google Ads clicks

Number of enquiries from Google Ads clicks

Value of sales made from Google Ads clicks

Number of Facebook Ads clicks

Cost of Facebook Ads clicks

Number of enquiries from Facebook Ads clicks

Value of sales made from Facebook Ads clicks

 

Those are just a few examples – you will have other forms of marketing to add to the analysis.

 

 

Detail level data from the CRM

 

Google Ads keywords that resulted in enquiries

Google Ads keywords that became sales

Facebook Ads that resulted in enquiries

Facebook Ads that became sales

Email campaigns that resulted in enquiries

Email campaigns that became sales

 

The value of the detailed level data is to identify what achieved most enquiries and also led to most sales.

This enables you to cross-reference to marketing sources that didn’t get results.

For example, you may find that these keywords gave you most of your enquiries and sales:

  • Conservatory roof panels
  • Replace conservatory roof
  • Conservatory roof replacement

… but your data shows you that no-one made contact after typing and clicking through from these types of keywords from within your Google Ads campaign:

  • Price of conservatory roof
  • Conservatory insulation panels

If that data was consistent over time then you would remove Google Ads visibility for keywords that aren’t getting you enquiries, and reallocating it to keywords that are proven to.

Got any questions about all this?

This is quite a detailed topic, especially if there is not already a process of consistently recording incoming enquiries and then analysing that data.

Please do contact me if you’d like some free advice about enquiries tracking within your own business (and how that can lead to a much stronger return on investment from your website and methods used to drive traffic to it).

Please feel free to comment on this page