10 Little Known,Yet Proven Website Conversion Tactics,To Create More Buyers

Everyone has an opinion on what is good and bad about a website.

Mostly its from experiences of their own website, which creates one huge problem as every website is different.

On what basis are decisions made to make changes, upgrade, create a new website?

Most of the time its based on what a designer / developer thinks looks ‘pretty’ and modern and what the decision maker in the business ‘decides’ is best for their website visitors.

Why is this a problem?

Firstly the web developers are not normally experienced Internet Marketers, who understand:

• Advanced Eye tracking behaviour
• Advanced Search engine optimisation
• How to measure success on a website
• Marketing copy
• The factors that influence a successful split test to improve leads & sales.

If You Don't Answer These Questions You Will Hate Yourself Later

I have been in Internet Marketing for 9 years now and we have discovered through 1000`s of hours of professional development, some of the key factors in website visitors user behavior, that generates more qualified enquiries.

• Do your visitors really look at all your content on your pages or do they skim read?
• How far down the page do they scroll before abandoning the page?
• What kind of images are going to keep your viewers engaged with your content?
• What creates curiosity to keep reading your content?
• Should you have a multiple images slider at the top of your website?

What to add in terms of content, what to change and why can cost $1000`s in lost leads & sales.Having a clear picture of what your visitors like and dislike makes getting those valued qualified leads & sales much easier.

What sale and lead improvement ideas can you use to get your phone ringing with qualified leads? We will discuss some very powerful opportunities below.

You will get a chance to ‘look over my shoulder’ now as I reveal the secret thought process that we went through to create our new home page.

Is it perfect? No.

Is it based on years of proven advanced conversion optimisation techniques ? Yes

If you like this post ….. You will love this new leads tool …… Check it out below.

Do You Recognise The 5 Early Warning Signs Of A Poor Lead Generation Website and How To Grow Your Leads & Sales?

Just before we start, there are 5 critical questions to answer as you think about your own lead generation website design.

Creating more leads, sales and reducing costs is not having about a ‘pretty looking’ website.

To get more leads & sales, a professional, functional and results driven design is needed that has been carefully thought out, using eye tracking, psychology and advanced conversion strategies, that can be tracked and tested.

Which of the following apply to your website?

• Distractions: Do you have distractions that take away from the number objective of the page / website? E.g too many banner images on a page?
• Confusion: Is there confusion, e.g The ‘language’ of the site is not simple to understand and has too much ‘jargon’ leading to lost sales and leads?
• Relevant: Is each page of the website`s content relevant to the ‘conversation’ that a person on Google is having in their head when they click the search listing to visit your site?(Known as a click promise)

If when the visitor lands on the page they see a completely different message and headline to what they were expecting, you know they are very likely to leave the page very quickly.

• Benefits: Is it really clear what the website is about in the top fold of the page (They don't have to scroll) and what the top 3 benefits are?
• Scarcity: All the above is extremely important, only if there is no reason to ‘act now’ with a ‘scarcity’ reason, then the chances are you will never get the real results you can, as when it comes to the internet ‘out of sight is out of mind’ in many cases.

Yes, you should offer a powerful free electronic offer to capture your visitors details with at least an email address, if not their first name and phone number.

Yes, you can and should do remarketing (Where you ‘follow’ your website visitor around the Internet) that will allow you to keep your key benefit messages in front of them, encouraging them to come back to your website to phone, email or buy a product.

The main challenge is, assuming that you have everything they are looking for, why should they not delay the decision and ultimately very possibly as a result buy from somewhere else?

Examples of using scarcity to increase sales and leads, are linked to limited numbers and time:

• While stocks last
• Only 7 copies left
• Competition. Closing deadline of the offer is ……
• One off special events
• Discounts
• Our own example: First 10 to apply for a free Integrated Digital Marketing review in each month (Its genuine as we simply don’t have time to do more than this and we can’t do everything for free of course)

So What Are The Top 10 Little Known Website Conversion Tactics That Can Grow Your buyers?

1) Are Your Priority Call To Actions In The Top 3rd Fold Of The Page?

a) While this may seem obvious,I wonder how many websites really have the key calls to action in the top 3rd fold of the page? (Meaning visitors don’t have to scroll)

Let me be clear this is not intended to be a ‘self promotion’ article at all, only to demonstrate where our website is mentioned, that we ‘walk the walk’ in our own business and not just ‘talk the talk’ like many others.

In our own website andrewredwards.com we have one main objective to watch the video. We don`t give the visitor multiple choices like many websites to. There is a well known phrase in marketing “A confused mind takes no action”.

The alternative and very different objective is the free integrated marketing review orange call to action button. This is designed to create leads yes and also add people ethically to our email database.

Note, that unlike many websites, it is not showing the fields for the first name and email, as this does not work as well as having someone click on the call to action button and then see the offer and opt in box to put in their first name and email.

This is because they ‘commit’ to following through when they click the call to action button and assuming their is compelling marketing copy for the offer, it reduces ‘friction’ in the decision making process.

Can you also have an electronic offer to grow your email database, that is specifically designed to solve the pains, frustrations, challenges of your target market, while giving valuable solutions that they would literally pay for? Absolutely, yes.

This is also a powerful way to capture your visitors details (Email, name, phone, etc)

b) You will see we don't have drop down navigation menus on our website. Why? Because it distracts from the key headline message and main objective – To watch the video.

c) Should you use the multiple image slider`s that are on many websites now as its the ‘trend’?

Everything has to be tested, although in my experience the sliding images actual hurt conversions as it takes the eye away from the focus of the page – The headline.

How many multiple image sliders have no calls to action in them or only one, in one of the images? Many that we have looked at when assessing ways to grow the website business.

d) Does your website show ‘authority’ in your marketplace?

We have used the logos of well known partners, including Google, Commonwealth Bank, Chamber of Commerce and the Queensland government. In addition while not everyone can do this, the ‘founded 2006’ is on their to demonstrate our experience.

Do you have a primary social media platform that you can demonstrate social proof with? In our website we have a Google Plus follow button that shows we have 3300 followers

e) What can you do to attract the eyes of your visitor to take the main action you require? One example in our website is to have’ as a client described it, a ‘throbbing button’ to focus on the eyes on the video play button.

I am not sure if I agree that would be the best marketing terminology :)

f) Does your top third fold of the page show your target market what your product or services are? As Integrated digital marketing specialists we have 31 different services, so its difficult to show everything that we do for clients to get more leads.

The next best solution was to show the names of the brands everyone recognises,while demonstrating the cross platform solutions, such as mobile website, tablets,laptops and desktop

g) We will talk about this later in the post however how do your images help the visitors eyes focus on your main call to action?

In our example the desktop Google Adwords image is facing the ‘throbbing button’ for playing the video. What could you use? It could be ‘people’ image with them gazing towards the call to action or pointing or both, showing emotion ideally.

h) How and Where Can You Use Your Social Media Sharing & Follow Buttons?

Could you use social media sharing buttons on the left hand side of your page?

Assuming you have a social media presence while these are used more
often in blog pages, why not give people the choice to share great content for free?

Also pick follow buttons that are placed on the site only they don’t take people off the site, away from your main marketing message.

We have spoken to clients to insists they want to send them to their social media page when they are already on their website.

Unless there is an exceptional reason this does not make sense as assuming you have created your landing page strategy to create leads & sales, why would you want them to leave reading that message?

2) Is The Bottom Of A Website Page Important?

In online studies it has been noticed that viewing time increased significantly at the very bottom of the webpage, which means that you need to have some important strategic information placed there.

In our website home page we have:

• The contact phone numbers,
• The call to action buttons that are in orange to stand out
• Our credentials of 30 years in business
• $164M of sales
• 9 years full time in Internet Marketing.

Therefore its important to consider what you use as people are known to skim websites and not read all the information.

As a result you need to have also have marketing sub headlines through the page that ‘tells the story’ of the page, even if the small print is not read.

3) Where Do Your Website Visitors Eyes Go The Most On Your Website?

A Google study a long time ago showed that website visitors read content in a F shape pattern. What does this mean in English?

It means there you need to carefully consider what you place on the top right hand side of your header in the top 3rd fold of the page, as well as what you put on the immediate left to keep the readers viewing.

In our website, like in many websites, the phone number is prominent. In addition we have a main call to action to click on the link to get a free Integrated Marketing review.

The images below are heatmaps where the red areas are where the visitors eyes are focusing, so you can quickly see the F shape described.

4) The Smart Way To Grow Your Potential Client Database

When visitors come your pages, you have no idea who they are. You have no doubt worked hard to get them to view your website. Obviously it would not be wise to ‘let them leave’ with no opportunity to follow up with them after they have left.

80% of all searches are information seeking and 20% have some kind of ‘commercial intent’, so the reality is that most people won’t be ready to contact / buy from you.

What can you do to minimise this problem?

The answer lies in what are the pains, frustrations, challenges in your target market and what can you create in terms of an electronic solution (Think report, video / s, emails, etc)

The free report shows how you can help solve their problems, while giving them so much value they would literally pay for the information, only you are giving it away in return for their first name, email and maybe their phone number.

This is worth spending the time and money on. On our Blog we have the 7 top, free, lead generation tools and its in the format of a downloadable PDF.

5) What Type Of Images Should You Use?

Which types of images you use on a website and blog is a very important question to answer as it will directly influence your profits.

We know we buy on emotion and support the decision with logic. The result? We click, like share and comment more .

It won’t come as a great surprise that people images will always attract the eye more than anything else.

This has been proven in many eye tracking studies. While you can’t use people images everywhere, the question is what types of people images should you use? If you get this wrong it could lose a lot of sales.

• Use people who are smiling when relevant to the context of the content.
• If you are for example, giving a free offer on your website, look carefully for an image that has the face looking at the key call to action, this is ‘guiding the eyes’ to look subconsciously. You can also have someone pointing at the main call to action.
• To take the concept to another level when the image shows positive emotion and is still guiding the eyes to the main call to action, it has been suggested this improves conversions even more.
• Like everything in Internet Marketing you need to split test it on your website (A subject we will also cover briefly in this blog post)
• Think about the outcome you want the visitor to visualise, known as ‘results in advance’. The pay per click images on our homepage has the relaxed guy with his hands behind his head, knowing that everything is being managed for him.

• When should you use stock photos? The expectations of website visitors have changed over the years and while stock photos are exceptionally useful they should be chosen very carefully.

People can tell when a picture of a team is ‘false’ and its no longer acceptable (If it was ever acceptable). The images should be obviously professional and not ‘tacky’ (The ‘thumbs up’ and ‘money notes’ images spring to mind)

Consider using flat style vector graphics as in the example on our Free Digital Integrated Marketing review page. These are stylish and modern, still portraying the relevance of the marketing message

6) The First Words Of Your Headline Are Important

What do you use for the first word of your headline? Its a critical decision as you have less than 2.8 seconds to keep people on the page and wanting to read more.

In our website example the word “Transform’ is very powerful and captures the
attention of those who are not happy with their current situation and want to improve their results.

Does your headline show the outcome of what your clients will get from working with you? Are you using specialist marketing copy phrases?

In our marketplace one of the biggest challenges and frustrations for businesses is getting lots of traffic, often paid (You pay for it one way or another even if it comes from the ‘free’ left hand side of a Google search) and they don’t see the leads or the phone ring.

‘Transforming your clicks into customers meets therefore the criteria of a headline, while using marketing ‘power words’ like ‘proven’ to emphasise the point as well as the unique selling point ‘Integrated’ Digital Marketing.

Its not about one or 2 solutions online, its about how multiple Internet Marketing tactics work together to create a powerful marketing funnel, to ultimate boost your business growth, leads and sales, while reducing costs. That is the ‘secret’ solution to your success online.

7) No More Arguments – The Ultimate Tactic To Growing Your Website Buyers – Split Testing

What is split testing, you may be asking?

The answer is that is it when you you change at least one item on a web page (For example the headline) and you keep the original as it is. You then drive an equal amount of traffic to those pages to see which actually converts the best.

It is one of the most underutilised opportunities for businesses to increase their buyers and profits, with only a small increase in a conversion rate.

There are more complex versions of A/B split testing (Multivariate testing, whereas the the name suggests its where you test multiple items on a page against the original to see what performs better) only we will focus on the most straightforward opportunity here.

We have mentioned above that you can give too many choices to your website visitors and one of the first ways to test how to improve conversions, is to identify your most visited pages.

If you are not aware how to do that, you will have that information in your hosting analytics package or preferably your Google Analytics account.

Then take your most popular product pages (Assuming you are an ecommerce store. Yes we will have a services example as well shortly :)) and reduce the number of products to show only the top selling products.

Split test those pages against the original and see which converts the best!

If you are service based business the same principle applies in finding your most popular pages.

This time, if you are not using professional marketing copy (Emotional based language as opposed to ‘informational content’) then add the new copy and compare the results.If you need a marketing copywriter we can help you.

Split testing is an absolute vital part of your Integrated digital marketing and yet is so rarely used by most of the businesses we talk to.

Ultimately you have to test which works on your website with all the principles we are discussing here, to generate more buyers. Every site is different and there is no ‘one size fits all’.

If you are not sure what design to use, split test it. What to test? That is the question. If you need help with that you can contact us here.

Only your targeted audience can tell you what they like and dislike and consider adding survey feedback widgets to your website, to get additional information about what to test further.

8) How Far Down The Page Do Your Visitors Scroll?

You will have different goals for certain pages on your website and depending on where the area is on the page, there will different points where they leave and don’t take the actions you want them to.

What if you could identify those areas and make the changes needed to increase your sales and leads?

• Do your blog readers read all of your post or only some of it?
• Do they only read the headline?
• Are your website visitors abandoning your long forms? If so at what point?

Most of the time if they are not scrolling that far down the page it is not a good sign.

There a number of solutions that include:

a. Making sure your main call to actions and the benefits of what your website is about are all in the top third of the fold of the page. Beyond that ensure you spread your key messages throughout the page.

b. Use a professional marketing copywriter to create sub headlines on your page that keep readers scrolling down the page as website visitors are known to skim read.

Tell the readers to scroll down the page with a ‘reason why’ e.g Learn ….. scroll down to see.

c. Don`t have a large white space or line that looks like there is no extra content to read on the page under the top 3rd fold content or they won’t think there is more to see.

While it is often frowned upon to having content overlap the fold, assuming there is more content to read this is a good thing to do as visitors will know to look for more content below the fold.

d. Add a scroll sign image on the page that also could, when clicked on, scrolls the visitor down the page to a specified point.

e. Add a scroll text description just above the fold so visitors know there is more content below

f. Avoid having users scroll horizontally by designing for smaller screens

9) Which Links On Your Page Do Your Visitors Click On?

Why is this so important?

When visitors come to your website you should have a strategy of where you want them to click.

As I mentioned in the first point of this blog post, having multiple drop down menus like so many websites have is not a good idea from a conversion point of view.

After 9 years of directly managing and building websites, I have seen a typical web developer will create multiple drop down navigation menus, giving the visitor, together with the other choices of where else to click on the page, an average of 30 choices!

You should have only have one main goal on a website page meaning you give the visitor one main type of choice. The home page is the hardest page to do this on as you want to show the visitor all the choices of services or products you have.

With internal website landing pages you should strongly consider taking off the top navigation totally so the eyes focus on the main headline and content, not getting distracted with the other navigation choices.

If you must give them more than 1 option, give them no more than 2-3 choices of where to click in the main body of the page with a clear strategy of when they do click, of how they are going to get to ‘know, like and trust you’ as part of your marketing funnel.

Over the years I have seen many clicks on the logo when they are already on the homepage and this just takes the visitor back to where they are already, so what else could you link that logo to that is part of your strategy and far more useful?

Are your main call to actions being clicked on? How do you know? With the combination of Google Analytics and heatmap tracking, you will learn those critical answers to creating more profits and leads from your website.

10) How Fast Does Your Website Load? Could You Increase Your Sales?

Finally (Phew :)) you have created the most amazing content on your website, you have professional marketing copy, restricted the choices to direct the visitors through your website funnel and it looks professional with clear to call to action buttons.

You then wonder why you are not getting enquiries or sales. What could the reason be? Well it could be one of many reasons, however one very common problem we see is, how slow or fast the website loads.

You maybe are thinking your web developer will ‘look after this, as he knows what he is doing’.

In my experience of 9 years in full time Internet Marketing, this is one of the biggest challenges to a successful website because the typical web developer won’t take the time or trouble to make sure the website loads preferably, in under 3 seconds.

Why is this?

Because they often don't know all the areas that need to be reviewed as they are not conversion experts and in addition its a lot of work to fix, depending on the problems.

They would have to charge more money for the website creation and you would be saying, I suspect, ‘Is that not included in every website built as a standard service?’.

My experience says most definitely not.

A recent survey online confirmed that for every extra second your website loads after the first second, you will lose 7% of leads & sales.

What are some of the causes for websites loading slowly?

Here are a few examples below and there are many more reasons that are very technical that I won't go into here as its challenging for even web developers.

a. Image that have not been reduced in size prior to uploading

b. There is shared server hosting (The most popular, low cost and common) meaning you are sharing the resources of many other website owners, which is why its slow loading

c. There are too many wordpress plug in`s in your website. How many many is too many? If you have more than 15 then it will start to be a problem.

Every website has a score out of 100 that Google gives for loading times and this not only affects the user experience it also is a ‘public’ announced Google ranking factor.

What is your website score? If you would like to know contact us here for a free assessment.

Next Steps To Growing Your Buyers & Profits

I hope you have enjoyed this article, I have certainly had fun writing it (Yes, its been a lot of work :)).

Myself and my team, would love the opportunity to help increase your website conversions, so if that interests you, we can genuinely only work with a limited amount of clients, as its about quality not quantity.

Please apply by contacting us here and we look forward to talking to you soon.

Andrew R Edwards - Integrated Digital Marketing Specialist

Director

www.andrewredwards.com

https://andrewredwards.com/contact/

Andrew`s credentials & Portfolio