Turn Your Website into a Conversion Machine

Part 1: Turning Your Visitors Into Customers

Before you turn your visitors into loyal members of your brand community, you need to convince them to become a customer first.

Here are the 4 best ways to help you do that.

1. Target the Right Audience

This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s something many business neglect most of the time. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, if the demographic you’re targeting isn’t buying it, your perfect product or service will remain with you. Instead, making them feel like you know who they are, they’re more likely to want to do business with you.

A great way to target the right audience is by creating buyer personas for your ideal customers. These personas will help you make strategic choices about how you target customers. You’ll be able to critically evaluate who they are, what motivates them, and how they’ll interact with your brand.

Taking the time to define who your audience is and how they want to interact with your brand will go a long way towards making customers feel like more than just another added number to yiur customer list.

2. Build a Personal Connection with Live Chat

Live chat is a revolutionary e-commerce tool being used more and more effectively. In the past, customers’ understanding of a brand would be limited to whatever the product or service descriptions are and Frequently Ask Question (FAQ) section could offer them. This would lead to frustration and confusion, ultimately leading to lost sales.

But now, you can address customer concerns about your products in real-time, saving you from losing the sale due to a lack of information.

With live chat, visitors can now converse with an actual representative from your company and receive personalized answers to their concerns.

Having live chat also helps to build a personal connection with your customers. That’s because it gives them the chance to talk with someone who actually works at your company who can provide recommendations and answers tailored to that specific customer.

It humanizes your brand, making your business feel more accessible, desirable, and personable. These emotions will inspire customers to browse a little bit longer and ultimately make their first purchase.

If you’re interested in trying out live chat on your website, I recommend checking out Zendesk, Intercom or Tawk.

3. Encourage Purchases with Introductory Offers

An awesome way for you to woo new visitors into paying action is to give them an introductory offer. If they’re new to your site, make the best first impression, and a limited time offer to receive a discount on their first patronage. With more value upfront, they’re more likely to make more patronagee and consider you in the future.

You can also build introductory offers into longer-term business strategies like rewards programs. Instead of simply offering a discount off their first patroage, give them welcome points for signing up for your product or service

You can see this strategy at work with Klova’s Sleep Squad program. Klova offers its customers 50 Klova Coins simply for signing. This acts as a great incentive for visitors to sign up for their rewards program in order to take advantage of discounts and earn more coins!

This type of incentive is another great way to build relationships, which plays into your long-term loyalty strategy. By the time the customer decides to complete their first purchase, they already feel a connection to your brand because it feels like you’ve been generous with them.

If you’re interested in building rewards and introductory offers into your longer-term strategy, I’d highly recommend looking at Smile.io as a way to strengthen your customer experience.

4. Give Visitors Peace of Mind with Social Proof

People don’t just want to be sold to, buyers are becoming more self directed. You can tell visitors how great your product is, but the fact is they won’t believe you unless you can prove it. A great way to counteract this is by including user-generated content on your website. I mean social proofs. This type of content allows visitors to quickly verify from other buyers that what you say is true.

According to Nielsen, 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know, making customer reviews the perfect way to set your customers’ minds at ease.

For example, Intelligent Blends’ reviews allow you to quickly determine if a specific blend of coffee is right for you. If you like a strong cup of coffee, these reviews would convince you that this blend is an excellent choice for you because of all the enthusiastic reviews about its strong, amazing taste.

There are a tons out that but two of my favorites are Yotpo and Stamped, both of whom offer innovative ways to approach social proof.

5. Track Your Visitors

This might sound weird for the first time but yes, this works! Tracking your visitors’ mouse and cursor movements can help you figure out what they find interesting on your website.

With this data, you can estimate which parts of your website are interesting and which lack exciting elements. Heatmaps show you click activity. Optimizing websites based on click data can help you move your visitors towards a conversion.

Another interesting thing that can be done to push users’ to stick around is to build custom exit popups. This can easily be done using Hello Bar.

Offer them an incentive and they’ll have a reason to stay!

6. Optimize Your Landing Pages

Landing Pages are designed to convince visitors to make a purchase. Good and Healthy landing pages have some common elements. These are:

• Intuitive design
• Catchy headlines
• Clear Call-to-Action

There are several tools available out there that help you to optimize your landing pages. Optimizely is one such tool that can help you design Landing Pages that actually lead to conversions.

7. Leverage the Power of A/B Testing

A/B testing is an exercise that can turn your website visitors into customers. While conducting an A/B test, most of the marketers make a mistake of changing multiple variables. This is wrong!

You just have to change a single variable and push that variation with the same landing page. Keep it running until you have enough data to support which one is working. This becomes crucial to know what your audience prefers.

Part 2: Taking Your Customers, and Turning Them Loyal

Once you’ve converted your visitors into customers, your next task is to make sure they’re satisfied with their purchase and have a reason to keep coming back for more. While there’s a number of ways to retain your customers, I’m going to focus on 5 of the best ways.

8. Use Rewards Program to Encourage Loyalty

This might seem obvious but if you’re looking to build customer loyalty, rewards programs are the best way to do so. That’s because they ensure your customers are satisfied that your brand provided real value with every purchase.

Rewards programs also allow you to introduce an element of gamification to your business strategy. Giving your customers increased status that reflects how valuable they are to your store motivates loyal customers to keep making purchases to protect their high status. It also prompts new customers to seek that same status, encouraging them to make their first purchase to unlock the same benefits.

For example, Camera Ready Cosmetics’ theCrew does an awesome job of creating a tiered VIP experience built on this gamification principle. Members can see the increased benefits as they move through the tiers on a dedicated program page, and are motivated to reach higher levels in order to reap the more attractive rewards. These rewards ultimately act as powerful switching costs that keep their customers from shopping with a competitor in the future.

9. Create Awesome Content to Keep People Coming Back

Your brand is more than just the products you sell, and content is a huge part of that. Sharing original content provides additional value to your customer experience that turns your brand into more than just a product. By building something like a blog or a gallery page, you’re able to transition from simply being a marketplace to being a community.

A company who has done this extremely well is Evy’s Tree. Through their blog and social accounts they’ve done an amazing job of captivating their audience on multiple fronts, building a loyal and engaged fanbase.

By sharing this type of exciting content, you create more opportunities to engage with your customers and, as a result, earn their loyalty. As they start to trust you as a source of information they will engage with your brand on a more regular basis, making you influence as opposed to simply another brand.

10. Build a Social Media Presence

Social media can be an awesome place to interact with your customers and create original content to support your brand.

Increasing your social media presence will allow you to showcase new products, inform them of limited time offers, and engage with customers who love your product. When you build your social media presence you humanize your brand, and customers are able to stay more informed about everything that your brand has to offer them.

Inkbox does an excellent job of this with their Instagram profile. With a mixture of branded content and user generated content, they’re able to showcase customers who love their product. And when a company reposts your photo, especially with a large following like Inkbox, it’s an incredibly positive experience for you as a customer.

When customers are able to contribute to your online presence, it increases their personal connection to your brand. This in turn, grows their attachment to your company which makes them a more loyal customer.

Make a note of aforementioned tips and skyrocket your conversions like a pro.

Happy Marketing!

Key Takeaway

1. Attracting Visitors

When beginning your content marketing strategy set your long term goal and be very clear about who you want to attract. Think about who your target audience is, what they will be searching for and the type of content they will be interested in.

Attracting strangers and turning them into visitors is all about creating more opportunities to be found. A perfect way to do this is through your blog. Think about the things your target audience will be searching for and write blog articles that answer questions related to those topics. This will help you rank your articles for these key phrases and in turn help, people find your website. This is the main premise around the attract stage. Once someone is reading your blog you can then start the convert stage to turn them from a visitor into a lead.

Another way to attract people to your website is by using infographics. Infographics are great because they condense numerous facts, statistics and information on a topic into a fun, flowing image that is useful, informative and sharable. Let’s look at an example from AmeriCommerce who provides an eCommerce platform to help people sell online.

They used an infographic titled the history of web design on their blog; someone searching the internet for web design, web design trends or the history of web design is likely to come across this and find themselves on the AmeriCommerce website, therefore attracting the right people through search.

Another way the Infographic can be used to attract more of the right people to their site is through outreach to other bloggers who write about similar content. Outreach is the process of speaking with these relevant bloggers and publishers with the aim of getting the infographic featured on their website. If the infographic is placed on their site with a link back to AmeriCommerce the result will be they have broadened their reach to more relevant visitors.

Lastly, in the attraction stage, use social media to share your other appealing content that will link back to your website. The more shares the more likely you are to attract the correct audience. Building a fan base through social will give you a wider reach and a resource to tap every time you create new content.

2. Converting them to customers

Once you’ve attracted potential customers to your website there needs to be a method to capture their details in some way. This turns people from anonymous visitors to contacts in your database.

First of all, make sure however they may have clicked through or found you, that this is reflected in the landing page. If they clicked through from a blog about a special feature you have to offer, make sure it takes them to a page that reflects this with a Call to Action for them to get it. The use of an ebook to download is a great way to convert your visitors. Offer a link to download the ebook in the blog they’ve just been reading or in easy view advertise it in the sidebar. For example, AmeriCommerce’s blog on ‘The 7 Biggest Ecommerce Design Mistakes to Avoid’ had a well-placed link to their ebook on ’10 Ways to Drive Traffic That Converts Shoppers into Buyers.’

Finally, to capture that information ensure you make it as easy as possible, no long-winded sign-up forms. Use a quick type in your name and email here to download our latest ebook and voila you’ll have the information you need to turn those leads into customers.

3. Close the sales

Now that you have captured their details it’s time to start the nurturing process to turn them into customers. The ways to do this: email marketing, blog management, and social media.

Email Marketing is the key to keeping in touch with the person once they have to input their details. The idea is that if you market yourself in the right way to them, through a relevant sequence of emails, you’ll be in the forefront of their mind when they decide to make a purchase in your industry area.

In the email, you can also use clear recommendations, by making something stand out amongst the content rather than showing equal choices. Psychology studies have shown that if there is a more equal choice we are less likely to make a decision but emphasizing can make it seem like a good idea and the right choice.

The key here is to send contacts relevant information about your product or service, highlighting why you are better than your competitors and reasons why they should buy. Make your service irresistible and when they are ready to buy you will be the company they consider.

Further blogs and social media at this stage are also recommended. However, at this stage it’s important to have content relevant to people further down the sales cycle. People at this stage need more specific content that’s relevant to their purchase decision. Make the blogs more specific to what they’re interested in and on social media share content that will prompt those people closer to making a sale.

4. Returning Customers

By now you have the sale but what you really want is a customer that is happy to return time and time again, and more so, someone who will tell their colleagues and friends about your product or service. Inbound marketing is key to getting and keeping these customers and used effectively will delight your customers into a returned sale and into becoming promoters of your business. Using advanced strategies that help customers use what you have sold to them is ideal. You also want to create up-sell and cross-sell opportunities to help increase customer lifetime value.

An example of this is presented by AmeriCommerce who provided their customers with a piece of content that advised them on the importance of product photography in eCommerce and a cheat sheet on DIY product photography. In providing this content they are adding value to what the customers have already invested in.

Do this in your own industry area by coming up with advice or tips on how to get the best out of the product or service they have purchased/received from you; the key to creating loyal customers.

Turning website visitors into customers should be fairly easy if you plan your content marketing in the right way. In today’s market, it is important as most customers use the internet to search for what they need; all you need to do is cast out the correct bait to attract, convert, close and delight the right customers.