Fix 2: The Enquiry Pipeline Audit

00:00 Hello everybody, hi, and welcome to the next episode of the Fixed List with Caro vs. Code. I am Caro and we're fixing something today.
00:10 What are we fixing? Well, we will be looking at your inquiry pipeline, which is what happens in between your website contact form and your actual company processes.
00:20 We're going to be checking it for leaks and we're going, we're going to be plugging what we can in under an hour, right?
00:27 So typically, if someone says to me, I have a website, but it's just sitting there, it's not really doing anything, while they are doing some things about the website, that tells me that, the fastest explanation for it is typically not your copy or your colors or the style or your pricing.
00:45 It's the inquiries they might be following out of the pipeline before you ever see them, and that costs you your business, right?
00:51 So, a lot of businesses, right, they're failing to receive notice of follow-up, and that's not judgment, that's just fact, and in the next 10 minutes, or so, I am going to give you some simple tests you can run today, and a set of fixes you can do in under an hour, so you can stop losing these leads,
01:12 and get some new business, because who doesn't want new business? I want new business, call me. So, here's the situation, what you might think is, people are visiting my site and not contacting me, so there is some sort of a conversion problem, and there is, there is one, but it's a reliability problem
01:29 , possibly, so what often actually happens is, people do try to contact you, it's just that the phone doesn't submit reliably, or, if the sub, if the phone submits, the message doesn't reach you, or if the message reaches you, it lands somewhere you don't see, or if you see it, there is no next step.
01:50 And, you know, just to be kind about it, this isn't a you're disorganized issue, it's just a reliability issue, right, because if you're a little bit like me, you get like 200 emails in your inbox every day, and, that's not, you know, being disorganized, it's just being a business owner, right?
02:09 So, it stands to reason that some of those would fall through the cracks, and the thing is, we need to set up a system who helps us be more reliable in applying as well.
02:23 So, your website can still be great, and it still doesn't need to work because of that contact form, and let's map that pipeline, right?
02:35 I imagine myself a plumber. Right? And the forms, the pipeline starts with the form, right? On the contact page, you probably have a contact form.
02:44 I'm not a huge fan of contact forms, and you'll see why in a minute, but they are useful, and some businesses swear by it, so that's good.
02:52 They're not going away, we have to live with them, right? So let's fix them. And let's see, the form, then delivery, then visibility, then logging, then next action, and then follow-ups.
03:05 And if any of that breaks, you're going to lose the lead. And you don't even going to know that you lost the lead, and that's, that's awful, right?
03:14 Let's do something. The fastest test you can actually do is the most finicky one, right? You just need to submit your own form, right?
03:23 Three times. And it's pretty simple. I just want you to submit your own contact form three times. One normal message on whatever device you're, you're submitting, or you're working, you know, if you're on Desktop, do it on Desktop, eh.
03:39 You, you need to submit one on mobile, ideally on mobile data, not your Wi-Fi. And three, one edge case. I would like to test for, for weirdness.
03:51 So let's make it longer. Let's include, like, some weird characters, apostrophes, emojis, accents, whatever. Whatever that's realistic, that for actual humans, but not, you know, not typical.
04:03 So what we want to see is first, does the page clearly confirm that it's sent? So, note that the page refreshed or, you know, when, we, we're not sure, do you get a clear success message?
04:19 You need to get that. And second, does the sender receive a confirmation email? Because if the sender does get a confirmation, that's proof that some mission actually happened, right?
04:31 The third checkpoint where testing is, do you receive it? And do you notice it? And if any of those fail, the website's leave.
04:40 So let's go through the four most common failure points, and let's discuss how to spot and fix each one, right?
04:48 So the first failure point for us is the form failure. And it's the one that is most often underestimated. In my opinion, because form fail all the time, which is, I'm not a huge fan of them.
05:01 They do fail all the time. And the form failure can look like this. So let's say I'm contacting your business because, you know, I want to do some business with you.
05:11 And I, I write you a message in the contact form, I tap submit, the button spims, the page refreshed, or it does.
05:18 It gives me, you know, it gives me the confirmation and you don't get anything. Or for example, it works for me on desktop, but it doesn't move.
05:27 Or it doesn't work if the connection, the internet connection is slow. So, if we're testing for this specific issue, I would like us to a submit on mobile, b, submit in a incognito window or tab.
05:43 Because that's the closest situation to a first-time visitor. Submit a longer message. Submit a weird character message. Like, for example, I'm originally Polish.
05:54 My language has a lot of, you know, dacratic sounds, signs. let's, little add-ons, unusual letters. So, my surname doesn't have any, but a lot of sound names have them, and forms typically lose those sound names.
06:09 That's important, right? So, you want, to see what's happening when you submit. And if nothing happens when you submit, there are some fixes we can do.
06:20 First of all, we can set up sending and the success message. We should be, we should be, ideally, presenting a clear success message, right?
06:33 Something like, you have successfully sent or like, thank you for sending, you know, like from your business. And then reduce Use the amount of foam fields.
06:42 The more fields, the more friction, and also, you know, the more fields, the more friction for the user as well.
06:48 And then, what we do want also, we do want the fallback. We want an email, or a telephone if you have it, or if you- You know, if you do have an office with a telephone, and you take them from people, receptionist, or somebody like this working for you, you do want that on your website.
07:05 You do want people actually to call and to send you emails. I- I- I- I- I- I typically, I don't even have a contact phone to become- I'm completely honest with you.
07:14 I don't think it's, worth testing and trying, but it is useful for some people. So, if you do like contact phones and you want to have it, you just need to test it and it's going to work fine.
07:25 But it does need to be tested. So, the failure point two is the delivery, which is the phone works, but the message doesn't reach you.
07:37 So, this is where, for example, your email filters aggressively, you have some AI filters. Or the inquiry email gets flagged as suspicious, especially if your website is sending it in a way that looks unauthorized with some strange email address, right?
07:55 And the inbox then treats them as spam, and they land in the spam folder, and you never see them, because, again- 200 emails and that's not counting the spam, right?
08:03 A lot of people want to do business with you. So, after you do those three submissions that I discussed earlier, you check the following, tabs in your inbox.
08:12 The spam, the promotions tab, if you have it, all may- you know, if you have it, any filtered tabs or folders, because you want to test the filters, right?
08:22 And then, if you can, try a second sender address, like one test from Gmail and one from a work email, and see if one arrives and the other does not.
08:31 If it's in- Consistent, ooh, that's probably the deliverability issue. So, there are some fixes you can do without turning it into a techie lecture, believe me.
08:43 I could talk about that. but, a lot of acronyms. And then, none of them are that fun to say and all of them, you know, can be summed up into, like, just turn on automatic confirmation email to the sender.
08:55 And that they get the email that, thank you, I received your message, something like this, because it does two things.
09:01 A, it ratios the- sender, so we do want to make people feel like they're taking care of, right? And then, B, for you, it proves the submission actually happened.
09:12 So, the second thing is temporarily sending queries to two places. For example, your main in bu- box, and a backup inbox, until you are sure it's stable.
09:22 Three, if you control your domain settings, which you should do, make sure domain is configured so your emails are properly authorized.
09:30 So, your emails should be probably legitimate. Be- Thank you. Because otherwise, the providers might quietly bend them. And, to be completely honest, if you rely on email for inquiries, and your email isn't trustworthy.
09:43 Your website can be, you know, ideal, perfect website, and you're still going to lose business, you're still going to lose needs.
09:49 Right? So we do want to fix that. The failure point three for us is the visibility failure, which is, you drive, but you don't see it.
09:58 And it's very common when everything's working, but when it lands in the middle of that 200 emails, how do you- You know, right?
10:06 It's so, so easy because you have newsletters, you have invoices, you have the calendar meetings, you have the client threads, you have the notifications, some of it is important, some of it is not, but some of it is marked as important.
10:17 How do you actually fish out, like a proper inquiry from your side? So, can you find them in under 30 seconds in that inbox?
10:26 If you don't, you know, it might need a little label or a folder depending on the email client that you're using, and I'd call it leads.
10:35 Please. And I'd do anything that matches your enquiry, send their subject line goals and leads, and then you turn on notifications for that label or folder.
10:45 If your email client supports it, it should email that. And it should let somewhere-ish you cannot miss. Thanks for watching, and right?
10:55 And because we don't want to lose leads, we are plunking, right? We're plunking that pipeline. And, what I, often advise people do is, on the- on the website, you give that- contact form.
11:06 If you're that set of having it, you give it prefilled for people. Like, for example, you create the subject line, and it's always the same.
11:15 People can change it, but it's sort of prefilled, and it's, you know, my inquiry. Column something, right? And if that's prefilled, then it's easier for that message to get into that folder and to get into that filter.
11:32 And it also has an additional bonus. It eliminates a look. A lot of friction for people, because people already see the beginning of the message, you've removed the pain point there, right?
11:43 So, let's move to the failure point for the process failure. So, if there's no next step, then it just dies quietly.
11:52 In the corner, right? So, even if the phone submits, the email arrives and you do know to say it, and if there isn't, I know it because I know it, right?
12:03 I have to watch out for it, so it's not judge-friendly. I guess if it- Look at this judgment, it is of me, right?
12:11 So, but if there is no clear next step, it's just going to get forgotten, right? Because it's just an inquiry, it's not an actual new business, it's just a question, you know, or maybe somebody wants something from you, but it's- it's not, you know, immediately obvious what it is, and then it's two weeks
12:28 later, right? And it's- what is bad about that is that it's also reputational, because if somebody writes to you and you just ignore them, they just think, well, you know, you No.
12:40 They can't be bothered to deal with me. And the- in reality, it doesn't- maybe you didn't see it, right? Or you just- you saw it, but your day is so so busy, right?
12:53 So, the simplest test you can do. Is you open your last 10 inquiries, and you just see, are then next actions for those, with the date of the next actions.
13:05 If there isn't, well, you know, go on. And the fixes for it, it is minimal. I don't care. If you're using a CRM, a spreadsheet, a notebook, a piece of paper, whatever.
13:19 I, I like to do this in Notion, but I used to do it in Excel, and it worked fine. So for each inquiry you get, you just, dump it into, you can automate it, you dump it into Excel, and you just give it a status, new, replied, waiting, closed, new, next action date, when you will do the next step, and
13:39 you don't have to do, like, a huge process, just a Bitbucket, I thought. One, two business days later, two, seven days later, that's it, and, you just move the leads through that, and that's going to help.
13:53 And that's the system I'm using, and it works really well, because it's not, you know, cumbersome enough. It doesn't, it doesn't sit on your back like a zombie, I suppose.
14:03 So the minimum reliability standard, so that our baseline, that they would like you to hit, which is reliable, not perfect reliable.
14:12 every inquiry should produce. One, a clear confirmation on the page, right? So the sender can feel affirmed, and you can feel, feel affirmed as well, then took confirmation email to the sender.
14:26 Because again, we are nurturing that contact, but also that's proof. For you as well, three, a copy to you that you cannot miss in the correct folder, leads, right?
14:38 For long next action date. So if we respond to, what I do is I respond to queries. In, within, like, working day.
14:48 So I shoot a quick response. And then we log the next action date before Ops two days. And I can't forget about it.
14:56 And I'm going to take a look in two days. Unless I get, like, a response sooner. And on that, then it will get another process, right?
15:04 And you will stop losing leads for stupid reasons. And now that, that is that. We fixed it. We blocked it, right?
15:14 If you do want help with this, you can't book a diagnosis. It's free, will test it, and to end. Form delivery visibility follow up.
15:23 We're going to fix the weakest link if we manage 8-15-30 minutes. But I am determined to give you as much as I possibly can with it.
15:32 So, having a good day. Good one, take care. Yeah.