You have a booming website, great traffic, and… no customers. What gives? The reality is the vast majority of your website visitors won’t become paying customers.
At least, not without your help. But how do you convert visitors into customers in the first place? Well, I’m glad you asked.
Increasing your customer conversion rate is one of the best ways to boost your online sales. It’s also one of the easiest, too. Here are some simple, surefire ways to turn that traffic into cold, hard cash.
Start With the Landing Page
In the olden internet days, the landing page was nothing more than the central hub of a domain. Visitors would drop in on the landing page, get a glimpse of the website’s content, and navigate if they wanted more. While landing pages can still fulfill this purpose, it’s no longer their chief goal.
What is the main purpose of a landing page?
To convert visitors into customers.
If you’re looking for a higher conversion rate, the landing page is the ideal place to start. But what makes a landing page so successful at converting potential leads? It nurtures leads by creating a line of communication with your target customers.
Here’s an example. You run a search engine optimization (SEO) company. Thanks to your fantastic SEO efforts, people interested in SEO have found themselves on your landing page.
These visitors might not pursue your services at this time; maybe they’re on the fence or it’s a bit too early to make a decision. But that’s okay. On the landing page, your website offers “Six Killer SEO Strategies!” if you sign up for the blog’s newsletter.
That’s a low barrier of entry, and your target audience is interested in ways to beef up their SEO. Some of these visitors will become part of the newsletter and receive the exclusive articles for their trouble.
You’ve just created new leads for very little effort. Every week when you publish your email newsletter, you have a chance to convert these old visitors into customers.
Want more advice to make a high-conversion landing page? This article dives into the details.
Grow and Convert With a Responsive Website
Your website’s performance matters not only for SEO purposes but also for user experience. If it takes too long for visitors to access your landing page, then guess what? They won’t bother to stay.
This can affect your overall search ranking and cause you to miss out on potential conversions. How slow is too slow? Well, half of your visitors won’t wait longer than three seconds.
That’s less time than it takes to blink. Nordstrom’s online sales fell more than 10% when their load times increased by half a second. So yes, response time is everything.
If you’re having trouble with loading speeds, try using a content delivery network to make things faster. You can also look at your hosting plan. If you’re under a shared hosting plan, it might be worth the price to upgrade to a dedicated alternative.
Oh, and don’t neglect your mobile website, either. In both scenarios, your visitors are running off before you even have a chance to convert them.
Analyze the Analytics
Sometimes your website actively works against you. In fact, there could be a longstanding issue in the code that prevents visitors from making a purchase. This is especially troubling for e-commerce sites.
Always look at the bounce rate of your various pages. If you find anything suspicious, such as a massive bounce rate at checkout, you’ve found a potential conversion issue. Either the website has a glitch that’s pushing customers away, or they are changing their minds at the last stage of conversion.
Whatever the case may be, it’s in your best interest to examine the website analytics on a regular basis. This can tell you where your conversion funnel needs some outside assistance.
Use Calls-To-Action That Convert
If calls-to-action didn’t work, people wouldn’t keep using them. But they do. They work really, really well if you insert the right message in just the right place.
Not every call-to-action is the same. For example, you can use a CTA on the landing page to nurture leads, as we spoke about earlier. But maybe you would rather try to land an immediate sale with visitors on your blog.
You could include a CTA at the bottom of your blog article, directing users to a 10% off coupon at checkout. Not only are you encouraging a sale, but you’re sweetening the deal, too.
Create a Remarketing Campaign
You can’t turn every visitor into a lead. What about the visitors that ignore the newsletter and leave the site? Are they gone for good?
Hardly. A remarketing campaign allows you to send targeted ads to previous website visitors. These advertisements can vary depending on what the visitors did while on your site.
Let’s say they looked at your service or purchase page, but decided against a sale. You could use targeted advertisements to offer a small discount. These ads will appear as the previous visitor spends time on unrelated webpages that are part of the remarketing ad network.
How Do You Convert?
Every company has its own target customer and thus its own methods of conversion. But the fundamentals don’t change. So how do you convert visitors into customers?
A combination of remarketing, CTAs, and a great landing page will contribute to an improved conversion rate. Figure out your target audience and the solutions you provide them. With that done, you just need to get the message out there.
Need to draw more website traffic to convert in the first place? Check out our SEO articles for expert advice.