Every day, your site gets hits and attracts visitors. But how many of those turn into leads and sales? If you’re not sure — of if you know that your conversion rate could stand improvement — take advantage of these best practices to start building relationships and maximizing revenue through your site.
Attract the right customers
You’re likely using the latest search-engine marketing techniques, pay-per-click advertising and other promotional strategies to attract visitors to your site. (If you’re not, you should be.) But what happens once your promotions pay off and the traffic starts pouring in? Even with a huge influx of visitors, you need conversions to leads and then sales to be successful.
Did you know that 98 percent of visitors to B2B sites won’t ever convert — or even join your mailing list? You need visitors who really are looking for your specific product or service; make sure your off-site messaging in ads and SEO campaigns is targeted correctly.
Connect immediately with clear messaging
Don’t make visitors wonder what your site is all about. As Inc. magazine notes, fully 85 percent of prospective customers abandon sites within the first five seconds. That means they’re either at the wrong place, or they’re not finding what they’re looking for immediately. You only have a few seconds to keep your prospects’ attention, so make your words and images count.
Make sure your site is functioning properly
You don’t want your visitors encountering broken links or pages that just don’t work as intended. Make sure your web team is testing on a variety of platforms, browsers and monitors to ensure that everything looks good and works well. Make sure to build in methods for capturing leads — and make sure it’s easy for visitors to contact you without hunting around.
Track, track, track
You should have Google Analytics or another reliable tracking program installed, and your team should review the data frequently. Review information on your visitors like geographic location, browsers and operating systems used, whether they’re visiting on a mobile device, what pages they visit, how long they stay on the site, referring pages and exit pages from your site. Use the information to continually improve the browsing experience on your site.
Optimize conversions
Getting visitors to your site, engaging them and keeping them there all move you toward the ultimate goal: conversions. The number of visitors who perform a desired action on your site versus your total visitors is your conversion rate. Desired actions can include completing and submitting a contact form, requesting a proposal, signing up for a free trial, making a purchase and others.
About Money offers advice on calculating your rate. For an online store, the formula might look like:
Number of orders / Number of visitors x 100 = Conversion Rate Percentage
Improving the conversion rate is critical for boosting sales without the need to also increase site traffic.
Follow up effectively
Even more important than what happens before a conversion is what happens afterward. To turn one-time customers into loyalists for your brand, implement favorable return policies, make it easy to contact customer service, make your security and data-use policies transparent, and ask for feedback. Use email marketing automation software to keep customers engaged with compelling content and special offers.
Turning visits into leads and sales
Getting visitors to your site is just the first step. To convert them to leads and sales, you’ll need pinpoint targeting, an attractive and highly functional site, clear messaging, effective tracking and favorable conversion rates.
