e-commerce

If you are operating a business online, you’ll be aware that you need to work hard at increasing website traffic using online marketing tactics such as SEO or social media marketing. However, you might begin to find that generating more leads for your business won’t increase sales if there is a kink in your conversion process – allowing sales to slip through the cracks.

You might have a cutting-edge design or a breakthrough product, but if consumers are not connecting with your business, for whatever reason, then they’ll simply choose to shop elsewhere.

Luckily, there are a number of strategies that you can use to better connect with your customers and try to stop this from happening to your business. Here are my 6 top tips for converting your website leads into sales.

#1 Make Sure Your Landing Page is Goal Orientated

The single most important aspect of converting leads into sales is to optimise your website landing page so that it contains one clear call-to-action (CTA). No matter how excited consumers might appear to be about your product, without something compelling to further draw them in, leads will drift away.

If possible, reduce the on-page clutter of your landing page. Remove navigation to other areas of the website and funnel your users through to fulfill your goal.

#2 Map & Measure Your Sales

It’s vitally important to map your sales process step-by-step. By doing so, you can track the actions that you have taken for each converted sale. Allowing you better insights into understanding your buyer’s goals, building trust and overcoming any concerns they might have. By mapping your sales process, you’ll be able to study it from every angle, controlling each step and converting more effectively by creating a certainty that your product meets the consumer’s needs.

Similarly you need to accurately measure your sales, otherwise you’ll only ever be able to guess your conversion rate. It’s only once you know what your conversion rate is, that you can truly start work on improving it.

#3 Improve the Quality of Your Leads

It might surprise you to learn that not everyone who visits your website will be a prime candidate for your product. Wasting time on unqualified leads is one of the biggest factors guaranteed to be negatively affecting your conversion rates. If your users appear to be uninterested in your product then more often than not, you’ll discover that you’ve been busy trying to convert the wrong people.

You can improve the quality of your website leads by using what you’ve learnt from mapping your sales process to create highly targeted propositions fulfilling the needs of the right people. By doing this, you will go some way towards ensuring that those who do respond to your marketing efforts are those best qualified to convert.

#4 Create Irresistible Special Offers

Most businesses rarely go much further than throwing together some kind of special offer to display on their website in a bid to hook sales. But unless you are offering something absolutely irresistible, something that they just know they’ll regret if they didn’t purchase, then consumers today are finely-tuned to ignore your offer. This problem will usually arise because businesses have not supplied enough information related to the offer for the customer to make an informed enough decision.

It’s a common misconception in business that online consumers aren’t interested in reading large chunks of text. Of course, this isn’t always the case! The truth is that your customers are thirsty for information so that they can make the best informed decision. When looking at a special offer, a qualified lead will want to know everything because they’re already half-way towards purchasing. This is the real hook. If you supply the right information at the right time, educating the most qualified leads, you will dramatically increase the chances of those leads converting.

#5 Use A/B Testing

Sadly, there is no one-size-fits-all technique for determining the best call-to-action to use or which colour certain buttons should be. Red or green? Do your customers prefer email when you reach out to them? Or telephone calls?

Your customer-base is as unique as your business, so to get things absolutely spot-on you’ll have to do a whole heap of A/B testing. Even the tiniest changes can have a massive impact on your conversion rates.

#6 Understand Online Consumer Psychology

Before the internet, consumers were far more susceptible to sales chatter, options were limited. Today they have a far broader choice and will tune out any pushy sales talk, remember that they can always shop elsewhere with a few clicks of a button.

Online consumers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be helped, informed and reassured. The very least that a business should be doing is understanding at which point in the purchasing funnel each of their leads is currently in.

1 Comment

  1. Definitely good tips. Personally, I believe in the value of good content promotion to bring quality traffic to the blog. Additionaly, I can suggest using specific tools on the website to find out the conversion barriers. Heat map providers like UsabilityTools helps a lot to find out the clicks and mouse movements.