How to Convert Website Visitors into Paying Customers
Imagine… You have the right creative website to attract the right kind of people. Your coding has been corrected to ensure your website loads correctly and search engines understand it. Your site has clear and concise content that communicates your intended message. Your call to action was made in a way that generates response. Your credibility has been built and enhanced with powerful testimonials. You have strong connections so your target market feels you are the only logical choice when it comes to your product or service.
Make Your Website Pay for Itself
Once you already have all these, it is time for Conversion. At the end of the day, this is what really matters. When all is said and done, the final action has got to be converting as many ideal prospects into customers, customers into long-term clients and clients into raving fans. This is when you consider the lifetime value of a customer. You need to run the numbers to see how many customers you should generate through your website for it to not only pay for itself, but be a powerful investment.
To convert more website visitors into paying customers, you need to consider who your website visitors are by asking yourself these questions:
- Where did they come from to find your website?
- What were they searching for?
- Did they get what they want?
Gather Data and Do Something About It
This is about taking data and making it into something useful and meaningful for you. Analyse the ratios between visitors/leads and conversions. Look at what pages are most popular. Look at the time spent online. Look at what pages they enter your website on. All of these data may give you clues as to what could be tweaked to create better performance and will ultimately lead to more conversions and more profit. Google analytics is a great starting point to do all these and it is free. There are also tools like Crazy Egg that can track the mouse movement and where people click on your webpages.
You may also notice many people clicking on an image that isn’t actually a link. That’s a good clue to suggest you make that image a link to something relevant. For example, maybe you have a “100% guarantee” badge graphic on your website that gets many clicks. This suggests that people are interested in the guarantee you are offering and want to know more about it.
Best Value for Your Money
In many cases, very few conversions need to be made for a website to pay for itself and generate profit. When you consider the fact that you will probably keep your website for at least a few years, it’s one of the most cost effective marketing strategies for small businesses. Best yet, unlike cold calling or networking it is scalable and not limited by how much you can fit into your work week. A good website is like having a fantastic sales person who works 24/7, never complains and never asks for a pay raise.
