Lets say you put up a booth at an exhibition where a large number of people have come to see a product or service that you offer. This booth has all the brochures, pictures, demos etc. of your products/service. The customer is now interested and wants to talk to someone to find out more about your product/service or to clarify a few queries.

But on this booth you have not displayed your phone nos. anywhere or any other contact details prominently. The customer is expected to look around for your contact details all across the booth. How long do you think this customer will look around? Do you think he or she would take a lot of effort finding out how to contact you?

Well this is what I have seen on a number of web sites across the Internet. All sites are designed well, all product details are mentioned, and ways to purchase the products are defined. But the details on how to contact the company are either not mentioned or put in a link "Contact Us" in the footer of the site in small fonts.

"Contact us" should be the highlight of the website. Your telephone numbers, email address etc. all should be displayed prominently on the top of the site on every page so that people can easily call you up and get their questions answered. If you have a toll free number that much better. Display this on the top of the page.

If you do not have a 24-hour service then display the time between which people should call you and specially mention the time zone. The Internet has people coming to your website from all over the world and the time zones are different as you know. So you put up on your website 9.00 am - 5.00 pm and no time zone it would look to the visitor that he or she can call you during their time zone.

People feel more comfortable making a purchase from a website to whom they can reach by a phone to clarify any queries that they may have. Every sales man in his first contact with his customer first hands out his visiting card to ensure that the customer can call him after his sales call for any clarifications.

Advertise your phone numbers and contact details on the website more prominently and ensure that it is mentioned on every page of your website as any visitor to your site would not necessarily enter your website from your home page.

About the author:

Manoj Mansukhani is the founder and CEO of Scarlet Technologies (http://www.scarlettech.com). They provide services to help your business succeed online. Their services include increasing website conversion rates (i.e. online sales/leads), online marketing, search engine optimization and web development.