What Your Website Should Include if You Want to Convert Visitors into Customers

There are many reasons why someone might visit your website, but there is little point in accumulating a lot of traffic if you don’t have a way to turn those visitors into longtime readers, subscribers or potential customers.

A website conversion occurs when a visitor to your website completes a desired action, which could include signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form or making a purchase. The percentage of total visitors that convert is called your conversion rate.

To ensure that you convert the highest percentage of visitors into customers, you should consider employing a few simple steps.

Keep Your Homepage Simple

A homepage is where people get the first look at your brand (depending on how they land on the website), and therefore it can make or break your conversion rate. If it's not set up to guide your target audience through the sales process, you will not be able to convert them. It will also discourage the visitors from checking out other pages on your website.

Your unique selling point (USP) should let the visitors know why they should stick around and do business with you, instead of going back to the search results. Through quality images, concise descriptions, or a combination of both, visitors to your website should be able to figure out what your company does and what sets you apart from the competition.

Define Your Value Proposition Clearly

Landing pages essentially help users decide whether your product or service is worth their time and energy. And the best way to do so is to confront visitors with the very problem your offering solves, in a clear and straightforward manner.

The latest research from HubSpot's“Lead Generation Lessons From 4,000 Businesses” shows that the more landing pages a business has on its website, the more leads it generates. It shows that businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages generate seven times more leads than businesses with only one to five landing pages.

By providing a variety of offers that appeal to different points in the sales process or different customers, you can maximize your lead generation efforts by capturing a larger number of site visitors. In addition, with multiple dedicated landing pages, you give search engines such as Google more website pages to index, offering your website an SEO boost.

Hence, an effective landing page should have a headline that explains to your users all the various benefits of your product or service.

Ensure That Your Call to Action is Clear

If you want to use landing pages — and you should — it is important for you to focus on well-placed text, clean design and strong calls-to-action (CTAs) to ensure maximum conversions. In marketing parlance, a CTA is an instruction for the audience designed to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as “call now,” “find out more” or “download.” You could adopt a sitewide CTA (most critical to your business) and a strategic page-by-page CTA (for example, “for more information…”, etc.).

Enforce Ways to Capture Email Addresses

Once someone is on your website, you don't want to lose them, so collecting their information is essential to maintaining contact with them. Forbes suggests that one of the top ways to capture email addresses is to offer visitors something of value, such as a digital report on your industry. But once you have the email addresses, do not bombard the visitors with newsletters or coerce them into buying things. Protect their information and only communicate with them when you have information that you believe would be of great value to them.

Build Customer Trust with Testimonials

The best way to tell people your company’s advantages is by using the words of others. If you want to turn website visitors into sales leads, featuring customer testimonials on your site is a great idea. Such testimonials instill confidence and motivate your visitors to invest in your product or service.

Create Valuable Content

Creating quality content is a solid way to boost both traffic and conversions to your website. Content related to different market segments helps bring in varied customers. An ongoing content series in the form of blogs, videos or webinars specifically aimed at educating new audiences can motivate visitors to come back to your site.  

In addition, focused content helps educate your existing customers on product updates, company initiatives and industry trends.

Install Live Chat

Live chat offers a fantastic opportunity to engage website visitors while they are on your site, allowing you to increase conversions. It does so by offering instant customer service. Live chat is also a great tool way to address any questions that may not be answered through the content already available.

Perform A/B Testing

Each business is unique and so are the customers. Using A/B testing (also called split testing), you can find out what works best for your website. A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a web page, email or other marketing asset, and assessing the difference in performance. Simple tests that you can perform across your website include:

• Testing different headlines for your traffic-heavy landing pages
• Changing the text in your CTA buttons
• Replacing stock images with shots of your employees

Serious gains in conversions come from analyzing what your customers really need.

Use Tools to Convert Visitors into Customers

If you receive a lot of traffic but only a small number of conversions, there are tools that can help you convert more visitors into customers. Some such options include:

• Google Analytics tells you how many people visited your website. However, it does not tell you who those people are. Products like Leadfeeder can solve this problem by using reverse IP lookup to identify people visiting your website.
• MailChimp is an email automation tool that allows you to schedule emails and preset conditions as to when and how they should be dispatched. This tool helps you keep in touch with your audience.
• Exit intent pop-ups, if deployed correctly, can be used as an effective lead generation tool. They trigger a pop-up just as users are moving their cursor toward the close button on their screens.
• Mention, a real-time social media monitoring tool, lets you know what people are saying about your brand, product or service. You can use this data to strengthen your marketing efforts.
• Visual Website Optimizer is a platform that lets you test the landing page(s) or homepage of your website to determine which one converts more leads into actual sales.

Maintain Fast Loading Times

The time it takes for a website to load is an important part of any website’s user experience. It takes five seconds or less for a user to decide whether or not they like your website. For every one second delay in page response, there is a seven percent decrease in conversion rate, Neil Patel writes. So, for example, an e-commerce website making $100,000 per day would find that a one-second page delay could potentially cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year, he notes.