10 Ways to Convert Site Visitors into Paying Customers

Phil

If you are anything like me you work extremely hard to get visitors to your site. You may spend money promoting your site through things like pay-per-click search, banner advertising or other form of online advertising, or you may spend endless hours utilizing social media to drive traffic. But what happens when visitors finally arrive at your site?

Are your visitors buying your product or service? Are they opting to receive your newsletter? Are they subscribing to your members-only content?

Finding ways to get qualified prospects to arrive at your site is one thing, but making them do exactly what you want them to do is another kettle of fish altogether. Achieving massive traffic is totally meaningless and pointless if you are not able to keep your visitors and turn them into buyers.

An effective web based business is all about converting browsers into paying customers. This is measured by what is known as a “conversion rate”, which is a measure of how many visitors it takes to make just one sale or capture just one lead – to work out your conversion rate as a % you simple take the number of orders/the number of visitors.

So why is conversion rate important? Well, conversion is the key to running a successful business online. Improving your conversion rate is a very cost effective way of growing your business dramatically without actually attracting more visitors. In most cases, it will be cheaper to make some changes to your website to improve the conversion rates than it would be to pump more money into advertising and promotions to attract more visitors.

Regardless of whether you are operating an e-commerce website or an info-based site, below are 10 simple ways to improve your conversion rate and turn your visitors into paying customers:

1. Provide quality products or content: Its all about quality. You have to give your visitors a real reason for been there! Show what great value your product or service is, and tell your visitors HOW your product or service will make their lives better.

2. Grab their attention immediately: Put your most important statement at the top… the first thing they see! Never put anything important below the scroll of the web page (the bit that you don’t see until you scroll down). Make all your top-selling and important products or services accessible from your homepage directly. And, ensure your website has a fast load-time as visitors get bored waiting for pages to load and will simply move on to the next site.

3. Its all about the customer… all of the time: People really don’t care how good you are. Visitors will respond to your offer ONLY if you can successfully make the case that your website exists purely for them, to provide them what they need and offer a solution to their problem.

4. Design your site specifically for your target audience: There is no real solid rule that every visitor should come into your site directly through your homepage. They could go straight to your sites main product or service pages. Or, they could go to a specially created landing page that is designed with that specific type of visitor in mind. Visitors from Google’s Adwords program may land at a different welcome page to that of visitors clicking through from a recent press release, etc. Provide the right visitors with the right content to make them WANT to spend their money with you.

5. Make it easy: Everything has to be quick and easy. Make the site design simple and easy to navigate. Make the purchase process easy and problem free, and make the delivery of their purchase seamless.

6. Improve site copy: Take a look at the wording of your site currently, and think about how you could re-word and explain what you have to say in a better, simpler and more shinning light. Remember, talk about the benefits and why your products and services will solve their problems, rather than what your competition has to offer.

7. Think active: Try using active voice to keep your customers motivated and fully engaged in the sales process. Active voice is more dynamic, making the visitor feel that you are speaking directly to them. They become more engaged, and you are closer to a sale or a loyal customer.

8. Increase trust: Trust is a massive and key element of success on the web. Visitors will only return to websites they trust. They purchase from websites they know will safeguard their information, provide them with quality service and offer products that are of real value for money. Assure your customers that you will maintain their privacy through a privacy policy, add it to your site and make it easily accessible to all at any time and in every location of your site.

9. Build loyalty: Loyalty marketing is a proven technique to increase conversion rates and improve bottom line. One possible way is to institute a rewards program in order to entice customers to invest more time on your site and give you more data about themselves.

10. Study your metrics carefully: Set yourself a series of KPI’s – Key Performance Indicators – that you can look at every day to understand the pulse of your business. I.e. An e-commerce website should have info on the source of orders, list of most popular products, daily unique visitors, cards started/updated, checkouts started, order, revenue, cart creation rate, checkout rate, average order size, revenue per customer, etc.

Those who can analyse their site traffic in such great depth, and then draw conclusions based on the numbers, will not only allow their site to survive as a viable online business, but will also reap huge profits along the way, creating a more sustainable web venture.

photo credit: SierraTierra

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Phil has had many other businesses including Coaching, Marketing and PR, Graphic and Website Design, and Online Learning. His current venture is Phil Johnson Business Services, providing low-cost essential services to the newly self-employed and small and medium enterprises. Aside from this Phil runs Major-Business.net, a free source of quality help, advice, tips and tricks on many business and personal development subjects, catch Phil on Twitter

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