We all know, the website visitors conversion is a vital process of taking a newly landed visitor on the website page to pushing him to enter the engagement funnel preset by the brand or an entrepreneur. The website conversion topic has a massive scope to be discussed, analyzed, and understood by the businesses, bloggers, and the internet marketers.
Many marketers are still in the basic stage and trying to understand the psychology of creating a long term relationship with a visitor to turn him into a recurring customers.
For service industry, most of the companies are now shifting towards recurring revenue.
How to Effectively Convert Website Visitors Into Customers
Once in a while, every website owner, whether a brand’s CEO or a blog’s founder, thinks that how his website can do better. Then he digs in to find that what it takes to make a website better when it comes to conversion rate. For me, there is always a room for improvement and there is no satisfaction point. The success lie’s in keep on testing and improving, this strategy not only results in a success but you also tend to stay ahead of your competitors.
- What does it take to make a site better?
- What does make a website click?
- Why does a visitor leave without clicking?
- How does a visitor get engaged on the site?
This article is designed to help understand every aspect of a website conversion. The business owners, bloggers, entrepreneurs, and internet marketers who have anything to do with the website ownership might find this helpful because this article is going to answer a few questions that every one of them wanted to know. If you’re ready to know all these secrets, then hop in.
Because it’s going to be a long-haul. It would be better off to save this article and read at another day, if you’re not ready to read it now or not having that vibe of learning about website conversion.
That being said – if you’re still there!
Are you there?
Okay. It means you want to GRAB THIS right now. Cool I mean!
The purpose of writing this article was to have a full time tutorial because every month, I often critique, review and analyze the monthly performance of my blog with a blog report. There i discuss several key points including user experience of the website, traffic statistics, social media subscribers and other matrices to see how it is performing. Each month, I try to do various experiments to take the maximum out of this blog, so you can say this post is an outcome of my experience in digital marketing field and how effectively i’m converting website visitors through this blog.
Things That Matters In Visitors Conversions :
Okay let’s go back to the topic, There are certain things that matter in visitors’ conversion, such as:
Website layout and design
It shows how attractive a website looks when it comes to layout appearance and design. Not only does it involve design, but the colors also play a role.
Optimization of written content
The written content must be useful, helpful, and clear in order to make readers understand. The grammar mistakes or ambiguous sentences wouldn’t do any good.
CTAs and Engagement
There is no doubt on the importance of CTAs. A call-to-action button becomes so essential when we deal with the visitors engagement and clickability. If you are interested in CTA, do check the 7 examples of CTA button article.
Steps in Website Visitor Conversion:
Take a look at the procedure of how to convert a website visitor into a regular subscriber or paying customer:
Creating the Funnel
The funnel creation is the basic step of getting things started for converting a website visitor. I don’t imagine a visitor being converted either into a subscriber or a paying customer without a proper funnel and this is for a single reason and that is TRUST! you need to build trust for a user to convert him or her into a customer and thats what a funnel do! It slowly educates and establish a communication channel between you and your buyer but having a simple funnel is a no big science rather it needs to be an attractive and effective funnel, that’s why this whole article was planned to help the readers understand the big process in a short span of time. The funnel creation is a complete setup of email marketing, landing pages, opt-in boxes, sign up forms, an opt-in bribe to make sure that the visitor gets engaged, recognize some value behind the wall and hence make his mind to join you.
Articulating the Message
Once the funnel creation is done, the next part is the making of a great copy. A great copy means a well-written message on the page or pages. It’s extremely necessary to deliver the right message in your copy. A message in your copy must help a visitor understand the solution available either in the product or underneath the content. If you are starting out, it will be a great idea to signup to your competitor’s list and see what they are doing, how they are convincing and what terms they are using to win your heart. Study and research that and then come up with something unique and even better then them.
Optimizing the Pages
Without an optimized web page, there is no way of getting any organic traffic. Make sure that your website pages or blog posts comply with basic SEO techniques. Don’t go aggressive with your keywords adding, but you must add a proper and basic keyword to the meta title, description, and meta keywords of every page or post.
User Experience
Never ever ignore the user experience, rather prfioritize it as your biggest agenda. You can never win without UI. Focus on that, don’t make things too complex rather every thing should be easy. User’s can get information without scrolling much, the page needs to be compatible with most of the devices. (Preferably all of the devices in market). Keep on critiquing and improving.
Engaging the Audience
The process of converting a visitor into a paying customer or a regular subscriber is based on different engagement strategies. From creating a funnel to applying the engagement tactics, there are a number of ways to engage the audience. The visitors engagement does help your brand because it begins the communication as well as build the relation between the brand and readers. The content marketing is a vital customer engagement strategy being used by hundreds of thousands of companies around the world. In fact, the audience engagement might not be at its best if there are no call-to-action buttons or opt-in forms in place to finally pushing the prospects to the engagement funnel.
Offering the Product
Once everything goes well with the customer engagement, the next step comes in is the ‘OFFERING’. It’s essential to build a strong relationship with the audience before offering the product. In other cases, your copy must be answering all the queries that prospects might have after landing on your website, and all that stuff, the clearly highlighted call-to-action buttons must be there to offer the product.
Analyzing the Performance
At last step, the performance analysis will be important too. A/B testing is a strategy in which two or more cases are analyzed in terms of output. There are plenty of tools that look after the A/B testing thing for websites. All you need is to hustle a bit about testing a few copies, landing pages, and website designs to find what works and what doesn’t.
There were the steps that are involved in a visitor conversion from a visitor’s landing till the conversion.
After knowing the pathway of converting the visitors into paying customers, now take a look at five ways of converting the visitors:
5 Ways of Converting Website Visitors
These are extremely popular ways of converting website visitors and worth trying for any kind of business website. Although, these methods might seem slow as far as results are concerned, but once the right strategy is in the place, you won’t look back to fix anything:
1. Build Email List
As said before, it’s a 5-day job to build a strong email list, but the bigger it is, the better results come in. Speaking of an email list, the marketing experts, bloggers, and digital marketing geeks believe that email marketing is one of the highest converting methods for any kind of business. Most probably because only interested people sign up to the newsletter —it means they are interested in the content that you might send to them. If not half, at least, a number of people would be interested in buying the products you will offer to them. The fact of the matter is that they (subscriber) sign up for your newsletter knowing the fact that you’ll offer something at some point while sending value, but they still believe in it, because they trust you, it means the relationship with your visitors, readers, and subscribers do matter.
You might need a handful of advice for start building an email list. Here is the guide to building an email list, in case, you’re looking to read insights on email list building.
A few popular email marketing companies to try:
2. Use Opt-ins and Popups
People might feel a little annoyed when it comes to popups but it’s unfair to say that opt-in boxes at the bottom or sidebar disturb the readers. It becomes impossible to engage the visitors and turning the whole on if there would be no opt-in boxes and popups there. You must use professionally designed tools for creating opt-in boxes and popups. Have you seen the popup and opt-in boxes on AliRaza.com?
This article discusses the same point about the popups that some people find it annoying, but many of them are okay with them. In fact, the results popups bring home are far better than not-using-them-strategy.
The popular online store builder Shopify has a bunch of popup extensions for their users to use on their shopify-powered online shops. This article is a proof that Shopify does support the fair use of popups, which is why that article came in with lots of advice on what to do and what to avoid while using those popups.
Tools that might help you:
- OptinMonster
- MailMunch
- SumoMe
- Bloom – (Im using this on my blog currently).
3. Use the Psychology of Colors
The colors should never be ignored in your web design. When a brand wants everything to work on its website, there is no room for such hiccups. We must accept the importance of colors. Choosing the right colors is incredibly important, not to mention if you have to change your theme colors too.
Sticking with your brand’s colors is good, but wrong branding tactics might be disastrous. Speaking of colors, McDonald’s famous ‘M’ and the color ‘Yellow’ are quite their identity.
Did you know that McDonald’s is sticking to their yellow color in the logo for a long time?
The psychology of colors is a serious business these days when brands have challenges like competition, distractions, social media, internet, communication etc. so, it gets harder to build a brand’s identity and maintaining that on a consistent basis.
This article talked about different colors and their psychology. Everyone might not agree with this, as every human being is different, and therefore, everyone has a unique perception of things. Nevertheless, the colors psychology does exist and matter in the online marketing, which is why it’s being discussed.
Gregory Ciotti wrote a detailed article on entrepreneur.com. He discusses the colors psychology of women and men, along with the other branding implications that are caused by the psychology. It’s quite understandable that colors do matter when it comes to improving the website conversion rate.
The reasons behind that are:
Contrast Effect on the Page:
It’s pretty much a basic color sense unless you’re a color blind. For instance, a white background with a red or dark green call-to-action button would clearly be seen on any website, because the white background would make the call-to-action button prominent.
An Appealing Look:
Using the contrast colors for the body of the page and CTAs would not complete the job. The website page must give an appealing look. Sometimes even light and dark colors combination (for ground and CTA) doesn’t look appealing, which is why it’s essential to analyze the combination of the colors.
Message and Color Synergy:
There is a bit connection of message with the color. An alerting page or copy might be perfect with the red color, and a page with an interesting offer might be a good fit with green and yellow colors.
Therefore, try to understand the audience, product type, and the typical message a color gives out before start using it your branding campaign.
One last thing I would like to say is that, both male and females react to colors differently, you also need to keep in mind about your target gender.
4. Set up Engagement Channels
Another effective way of converting visitors into subscribers or paying customers is by creating an engagement channel. The engagement channel mean to have a place where people interact with your brand and it’s not happening on your company’s website. In fact, how can a visitor interact with you on your website page?
In fact, the need for creating a channel is absolute. A channel where visitors (prospects) talk to the brand, ask for the solutions and get to know the solutions that brand’s product can provide to them. Some brands are smarter than the others, they already have set up their engagement channels and doing great with them.
What are those engagement channels?
There aren’t certain engagement channels penned, however, you need to figure out what type of channel you have to choose and where does your audience exist. When it comes conversion rate improvement, the engagement channels that could help the cause are:
- Blog: There is no better way to engaging and converting your website visitors than doing it on your official blog. The reason behind a blog’s engagement is that blog does work separately along with the website — but of course — blog supports the website when it comes to SEO as well as readers engagement. A blog provides a platform for continuous content publishing.
- Guest Posting: The guest posting is an opportunity to take your content, face, and name in front of the others’ audience. It always brings in some quality leads and traffic, however, it depends on the quality of blogs you choose for guest posting.
- Social Media Platforms: The key to social media success isn’t by joining a number of social media platforms, but sticking to a few and becoming the authority. It’s not that simple, you have to spend years and years in building relationships with new friends, peers, and followers. You have to be a GIVER in order to gain success on social media.
- Youtube/Facebook live: Facebook Live is a new engagement channel along with Youtube, is a great way to build a connection with your audience, with anything, the key to success here is you need to have patience and consistency in order to start seeing some good results.
- Surveys: Some companies used the old form of collecting data, via surveys. There are various forms of obtaining data but the two common types of survey is physical survey, like you individually distribute these surveys to everyone and ask about their opinion or you do it using digital media over the internet.
- Chat/Phone/Email Support: This can also be used as an engagement channels, most companies like use email programs where they follow up their user’s time by time and try to have a contact with them and then there is Phone and chat support too
Obviously there are many more methods and list goes on, however i have discussed some of the common and mostly used channels.
4.1 Do Re-marketing :
For some reason, I would like this topic to be a part of Point 4, which is using Engagement channels. Because this is an add-on to it. What you have to do is open the interaction channel with the user and re-marketing can do this job for you.
For those who don’t know, let me introduce it again.
‘Re-marketing is another digital way to connect with a visitor who have previously visited your website, blog, page or something in past. You can display relevant ads to them with different marketing channels such as Google Adwords display network, Facebook Ads and other channels’.
For me, the best example of re-marketing will always be Amazon because once i was searching for a iPhone 6 deal and after that, although i didnt made a purchase but i was seeing iPhone relevant offers everywhere and this made up my mind to think more and get on and today some of the comments on this blog are approved by my iPhone 6. (No show-off) but I’m an apple fan.
Let’s be back on topic, Consider using Re-marketing for establishing a connection with your visitor. Visitors turns into leads but everything happens with the time and Re-marketing plays an important role in it.
5. Offer Occasional Discounts
If you have listened to me previously, I have been saying it, consumer is the most laziest person on the earth. Often customer’s need an urge to buy your product, he knows very well about the product or service u offer and he is interested in that, but he needs some urge to take an action and heres where Promotional offers and contests always work because when it comes to sales and marketing, give them a reason to buy it or else they are gonna miss it strategy do works. Although, they not every time but still does work. If you have discounts on the basis of events; Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year are the biggest sales and promotion times in the Europe and North America, For Pakistan and India consider adding Eid and Diwaali too.
As far as converting the visitors are concerned, we can use the same idea of occasional sales, offers, and discount in our favor to help boost our converting rate.
This is a no brainer. What we need is:
Create an Offer: Of course, it always starts with a great offer that attracts the visitors to avail it. Make sure you create an attractive and unquestionably good offer.
Display it Properly: Without a proper display where they can see it, it could be worthless. So, whether you create banners to put everywhere, use a top-bar, or popup boxes on your blog as well as the website, just like Elegant Themes, you could end up improving your conversion rate.
Engage the Audience: Use your social media accounts, blog posts, through vlogging cameras and website places to let every customer and prospects know that your brand is running a limited time offer and they can grab it.
The Last Part
After adopting a number of strategies, the end result will matter and you will judge that how the strategies worked for you.
Always remember, different circumstances work differently for different brands.
Don’t copy any particular strategy because it worked for someone else.
Use your mind. Understand the process. Hone the strategy. The winning strategy is to be different, be unique, make a twist and keep on testing, even if something working for you, keep on testing new things and stay ahead of your competitor’s.
Whenever you’re stuck in making your website improved for conversion, just make a change, analyze the outcome in terms of organic traffic, keywords of traffic, and the number of leads. Use tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Long Tail Pro to help guide your customer acquisition planning.
Your Turn
So how was the article? What did you like the most? What more you want me to add in it? Do you have anything to share? or you disagree with something? do comment. Let’s have some interactive discussion. Good luck!