Why Do Visitors To Your Training Website Bounce?

We know what you’re thinking.  Your training company is doing all these things to get traffic to your website,  Now you want to show the effects on your sales results from your efforts.  But then you got that bounce rate statistic from your analytics report and you said “but they didn’t even wait to see why we’re good.”

We’ve done the same thing (when we were running other companies).  But thanks to years of studying visitor behaviour on websites we don’t do that anymore.  If you’re worried about your bounce rate, we have to tell you something:  your problem may not be what you think it is.

You’re Not Starting Where Your Prospects Are
The first thing a visitor is asking when they hit a training website isn’t “is this company good or its courses good?” They are trying to decide if they should even spend any time looking at your site — is it even relevant to them — “Is there anything here for me to look at?” is the actual question on their mind.

Its like the person walking by a shop peeking quickly in the window to see if they should bother to walk in.  Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer:

• Training is a competitive industry and they have several (if not many) options

• Their first challenge is figuring out what belongs on their “shortlist”

So how do you make sure you get on the short list for your key prospects?
The question itself has a lot of the answer in it: key prospects should be your focus.  The first step is to focus on the needs of your key prospect groups:

1. When they’re making a choice of which training options to shortlist, they’re looking for a range of characteristics to choose from.  Think about what those could be?
2. Let them know how your company gives them a unique and valuable option that’s distinct from others they’re seeing.  This is where having a clear competitive positioning strategy for your training organization goes a long way.

Your Website Isn’t That Different From A Sales Call
First you just have to get them to pay attention to your sales material, then you start educating and selling them. That first step, we call it “Connect”, is a very narrowly focused effort.  You’re just trying to get on their list — so they’ll give some real attention to your value proposition and course offerings.  Focus on that and you’ll see the effect on your bounce rate.