Did you know your FAQ page can help you convert customers? Here’s how.

Are you making use of your FAQ page?

One of the first things you learn in sales is how to deal with objections. And when I was trained in selling, I was taught an analogy that has stuck with me to this day (despite the training being a rather long time ago). It is quite an ironic piece of advice – given the lack of international air travel for everyone these days. But, I still feel it is an interesting way to teach others about why it is so important to remove barriers to help make it easier for people to buy from you.   

So imagine you have gone on an extra long overseas holiday (sob) and you had to bring back a few extra suitcases for all your souvenirs. You’re now standing at baggage claim, waiting for 10 suitcases to come around the conveyor belt, but once you grab the first three you see – you head off home. 

Wait. What? No! Of course you don’t. You wait for all of the bags, use three trolleys to get back to the car, and think about how happy your cat will be (or won’t be) when you walk in the front door.   

Now, if you think about that traveller as your future customer – and those bags are the objections (or barriers) to sale that need to be eliminated before they buy from you – you can see how important it is that they collect all the information required before buying. 

By only helping them with one or two ‘bags’, someone else (a competitor) might help them with the rest, and then get the sale! And perhaps what’s worse is that you actually made the job easier for that competitor by warming the customer up! Imagine! How frustrating.  

If you are cold calling, or have a particularly large item(s) to sell, it may require a couple of ‘face-to-face’ meetings in order to get all of those objection ‘bags’ onto the trolley, before they are ready to go. And if you’re wanting to sell more, to more people, you’ll end up finding that one-to-one selling is a very expensive method, both in terms of time and energy. That’s where marketing comes in. 

Using marketing to remove objections

By using marketing to remove objections, it helps to make the process from ‘I’m aware of you’ to ‘I need you and what you sell’ much simpler. 

Sometimes it can feel like a new customer appears from nowhere and if you are in a service-based business, you may find a sales call ends up just being a formality. That’s because the better the marketing, the smoother the transition is. 

And, one of the easiest ways to help your customer remove those ‘bags’ from the carousel, is to add an FAQ page to your website. 

The role of the FAQ page on your website

FAQ is an acronym for frequently asked questions and is an incredibly powerful conversion tool. 

What is rather contradictory is that after telling hundreds of my own clients to have one, I’ve only just got around to one for our Identify Marketing website. Oops. It is something that I call ‘a stroke of the pen’ task – in that it takes a bit of time and effort to do, but now that it is sorted, it is evergreen content for the website.     

What’s key is that every FAQ page will be different between businesses – because it’s only your customers (and potential customers) who can dictate what it is they want to know about you and what you do. Essentially you should be helping people to gain clarity of what is involved when working with you and your business.   

Also, don’t forget to frame each question in the way someone may write it into Google (as it will be good for SEO too).

What kind of things should FAQs cover? 

When putting together my own list, I read through my sales meeting notes to see what people asked for over and over again. I also thought about the things we get asked through our website and social media. Lastly, I posted on our Facebook group to ask if anyone had questions they’d like to know.

Still stuck? Here’s a few things you could include in your website FAQs:

• Pricing or budget indicators for service based businesses
• What you cover
• What you don’t do (especially if you get asked a lot)
• Steps to working with you
• Delivery or returns process
• How people can pay for your services/ products

While FAQs are pretty much a ‘set and forget’, you can always add to them when another question continues to pop up, or you discover common objections and barriers from potential customers.  

And the great thing about having this information all in one place is that these answered questions often help the team and I to respond to common queries, filter out potential customers who aren’t the best fit, and also help to display the core values of our business. 

Take your FAQs to the world!

The power of a FAQ page doesn’t stop there. Because, I can now take these snippets, add a little intro, a simple call to action and an image – and I’ve got fourteen posts I can use on all my social media platforms! Boom.  

Because FAQs aren’t time sensitive, I can schedule one a week and continue to cycle through them as and when required. If I use them twice a year, that’s 28 weeks where I know I have at least one post per week sorted! And while I’m here – that answers two of the frequently asked questions our clients ask us, ‘what should I be posting on social media?’ and ‘can I repeat social media posts?’ 

So if you think you could be doing a better job of warming people up to buy from you (by removing common objections) perhaps an FAQ page should be at the top of your to-do list. 

I know I’m glad I’ve ticked it off mine!