Your website is up and if you don’t mind saying so yourself, it looks fantastic. But there is a nagging thought at the back of your head that’s telling you, “as good as it looks, is it actually going to convert visitors into paying customers?” This is the pandora’s box of online marketing. Here, we will provide you with some tips that will make the conversion from visitor to customer, a sure thing, rather than just a possibility.
Help your website visitors through the decision making process. Providing your clients with a great variety of options to choose from is certainly a good thing as it shows that your company has great versatility, but it can also have the effect of overwhelming them in the decision making process. To mitigate the impact of this, try to list many relevant details about each product, including what benefits it offers and what pressure points it addresses. Another good way to manage this issue, is by putting a product filter widget on your website, this narrows down the options to exactly what the client is looking for.
Get your response out fast. A company’s ability to respond to a client’s comments or questions is a primary indicator of the quality of their customer service. With so many ways available to contact a company, be it via the website, social media channels, email or by making a call, a company needs to monitor each of these communication channels and ensure that all messages are responded to within good time. Clients expect a response and they expect to get it fast. A live chat feature on your website is a good solution. It will help to keep clients longer on your webpage, engage them with your offerings and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Make the purchasing process easy. This may sound totally obvious, but it never ceases to amaze me just how many company websites don’t do this, with more hurdles to jump than an equestrian race track. It goes without saying that making the online purchasing process easy, will have a direct impact of enhancing the conversion rate of visitors.
There are a number of ways to do this; make sure your website guides visitors through the conversion process with logical automating conversion funnels. In a few short steps clients want to be able to select the product and autonomously complete the purchase. Have clearly highlighted ‘Calls To Action’ or CTAs that tell the client exactly what they need to do next, such as ‘Explore Now’, ‘Start Your Search’, ‘Make a booking’ etc. The CTA button should be situated ‘above the fold’, meaning that the visitor shouldn’t have to scroll down the page in order to see it. Once clients are in the conversion funnel, the next CTA should change to be relevant to the stage that they are up to. So that the ‘Explore now’ CTA becomes ‘Select Product’.
Build Trust. No matter what you are selling through your website, be it financial services, children’s books, solar panels or sink faucets, at the end of the day you are asking people to let go of their hard earned money. Therefore an important element of being able to do this well, is making potential clients feel they can trust you. Listing the physical location of your company, along with a phone number, is a simple but effective tool that indicates that you are a real and legitimate enterprise. On that score, add any regulatory license numbers or information that you have that is pertinent to your industry, have a terms and conditions section, a customer feedback section and why not put a service guarantee on your homepage?
Put up a Video. A promotional video will explain to your visitors, in the most engaging way possible, what your service or product is, and the main benefits that it offers. Studies have proven what colourful moving pictures can do, where 64% to 85% of website visitors are more inclined to make a purchase from you, after watching a video. Videos have great versatility and can be scripted and designed to address your marketing campaign. Do you need to create educational materials or how-to-guides? Do you want to demonstrate your customer satisfaction with people giving their testimonials? Perhaps you want to showcase the authenticity of your business by giving a behind-the-scenes look into how your products are manufactured or show the human faces behind your service.
Optimize your website to perform. In today’s world, your website is the shop front of your business, you don’t only want it to be seen, but you want the experience of “stepping inside” to be welcoming and pleasant. To do this, you need to invest in the SEO value of your website by ensuring that the content addresses visitors’ questions, use keywords, attach meta titles and descriptions to each page, tag images, constantly renew content, quality assess you code to ensure that your site is found and avoid using intensive applications that take too long to load.
Don’t disappear when things go wrong. No matter what service you offer, all businesses experience hurdles in their operation. Whether it be a wholesaler who has run out of stock, a shipment that has been delayed, a merchant account that is not processing transfers or a backlog of overdue work that still needs to be completed. What is in your control and what you can do about the situation, is keep the client informed. While behind the scenes you will be working to address the problem, with the client you can inform them as to how the situation is being resolved. If you don’t inform the client about the problem, they will assume that you just don’t care about their business. Clients are not only likely to accept that obstacles happen, but the transparency and dedication of your support is likely to win their loyalty.