How to Convert Website Visitors to Customers in 2023

You must be aware of how online business owners strive to get more traffic to their website to increase sales. Many of them have been extremely successful in meeting that challenge. In fact half of the battle is won only by driving more visitors to your site which could be either through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Paid Advertising or Social Media Marketing. But today we will focus on the other half battle of converting visitors to buyers and the most efficient ways to win that half battle too!

When you have your online business up and running with your analytics showing a good amount of traffic coming to your site but shows very low sales, the only question in your mind will be ‘What is it that is going wrong?’

Having millions of visitors to your site is overwhelming but money is made only when these visitors actually make a purchase and convert into customers. Otherwise all the efforts spent in bringing them to the website goes in vain. Therefore the most important aspect of any online business is to focus on Conversion and how to achieve this.

Conversion is just a word but it plays the most vital part in boosting online revenue. You should understand that the profits made after deducting all the expenses including the paid advertisements and marketing approaches have to keep on increasing gradually and not remain stagnant. This can only be achieved if your website has a good conversion rate.

What is a Conversion Rate?

This is the rate at which visitors convert into customers after completing a transaction on the website. This helps in understanding your Return On Investment (ROI) after spending on paid advertisements and marketing.

When there is heavy traffic coming to your website but its making less sales, it means people are finding your website easily accessible but not good enough for sticking around for long to purchase anything. This may be because your external advertising and your SEO is good. Perhaps what is lacking is conversion marketing.

In order to achieve a higher conversion rate, every online business whether its selling goods or services should implement conversion marketing in its overall inbound marketing strategy.

Let us now understand what conversion marketing is…

What is Conversion Marketing?

Conversion marketing is an e-commerce strategy used for converting site visitors into paying customers. This includes encouraging the visitors to take a specific action that results into converting window shoppers to actual purchasers of your products or services.

Importance of Conversion Marketing

1. Customers who have expressed some degree of interest on your website by visiting it are called potential customers and if you focus on converting these customers, you don’t need to reach out to new prospects in order to generate the same volume of sales.
2. As conversion marketing leads to higher conversion rates, there would be more sales, fewer lost customers and greater return on advertising investment.
3. Conversion Marketing for customers who have already shown interest on your website includes making the process of decision-making easy for prospects.
4. An average amount of time taken by online customers to decide whether to stay on the web page or leave is around 10 seconds. The main role of conversion marketing here is to get people to stick around for long and ultimately lead them towards making the purchase.

Conversion Marketing is effectively used by:

• Companies selling physical products that have to be shipped
• Companies selling digital products that can be downloaded directly
• Companies that do not sell, but promote company brand for B2B deals

5 Ways You can Convert Website Visitors to Customers

The techniques of conversion marketing used by different online businesses are as follows:

1. Optimising Your Headline

Always remember the objective of optimising your headline is not to sell, but to connect with your visitors. This plays a key role in keeping your visitors engaged and make them read further on.

Headlines make the visitors make the first move and lead them towards the key goal; this is because:

1. A catchy headline will draw your reader into the next line called the subhead.
2. The subhead then connects them to read the first paragraph called the copy or web content.
3. The copy then engages the visitors with your offers and leads them to transaction page.

2. Make Your Unique Value Proposition(s) Clear

It is very important to showcase the benefits of transacting with your business on the homepage or landing page. Making your Unique Value Propositions clear helps to effectively communicate to your potential customers why you are better, different and worth buying from you.

This enthralls the visitors and seek their confidence which then paves them to make purchases on your site that can help business increase more sales.

In order to make a good value proposition, you should highlight what you offer differently than your competitors. A/B testing is an effective way for doing this. Optimizing the value propositions of your site is a continual process and involves identifying, expressing and testing/measuring.

3. Refine Your Search Feature

Make your search more User-Centered, Customizable & Interactive!

When a customer is in a problem-solving mode, all you need to do is provide support with relevant results for their query. This is possible through an appropriate and refined search feature on your website.

You can achieve this by following the below practices:

1. Make your Search Bar more noticeable
2. The product search result page should return with a filterable option
3. Improve search results by introducing a semantic-friendly site search
4. Introducing an autocomplete page suggestion for site searches
5. Having clickable breadcrumbs (navigation technique that links back to the previous pages)

Example – Forums page of Tyche Softwares website shows how a search box on the forums page made a big difference to them. Earlier there was no provision of search on their forums page. Customers would open the page and look for solutions if available, for their problems. But due to the Search being unavailable, it wasn’t possible to do so.

Therefore a prominent Search Box was introduced that would search on all forums and provide results that would help customers to resolve their problems. This in turn reduced customer enquiries that came in bundle to the site, thereby reducing the burden of resolving them.

4. Implement An Exit Overlay

Exit overlays are modal light-boxes that are used to monitor your visitor’s activities as they browse through your site. Exit-intent technology is used to implement an exit overlay and are triggered as soon as the visitors demonstrate the urge to leave. This is done by prompting an offer that would provide them with better, different and simply some more incentives.

It’s a marketing tool designed to convert abandoning web visitors into leads, sales & signups like the different abandonment solutions available in the market.

The below image is an example of an exit overlay:

An exit overlay on Quicksprout.com using Rooster

In Rooster, an exit-intent technology uses a tracking algorithm to detect mouse gestures, user movements and predict the exact moment a user is about to exit a website. Thus when an abandoning visitor is detected, an exit overlay is triggered to enable you one last chance to get engaged with the visitor.

5. Do not use Jargons

There are businesses that try to woo customers with fancy words and complicated business language. But this does not work to convert them into buyers as they only lend up confused and unclear of the purpose.

Therefore always concentrate on writing the content on the site for people (customers) not for companies and keep it simple and up to the point as Clarity Trumps Persuasion!

Conclusion

This post highlights the concept of conversion marketing and how its important to increase your sales by converting more visitors to buyers. It demonstrates marketing as not just about reaching large numbers of customers but communicating with them meaningfully and effectively so that they are more likely to make a purchase.

It is imperative to test and experiment different conversion techniques and see what has worked for you in meeting the business goal.