25 Hacks to Convert Your Website Traffic Into Leads and Sales
25 Hacks to Convert
Your Website Traffic Into Leads and Sales
Have you been looking for a
detailed guide that explains how to convert
your website traffic
into leads and sales? You are in luck
because you just found one.
Truth be told: attracting meaningful traffic
to your website is hard work. Making sales
and conversion from that traffic
is a lot harder.
And if you aren’t making
sales – or at least getting visitors
to sign up to your mailing
list – on your website, what’s the point of having it?
Why invest your time and energy into attracting visitors
that won’t convert?
This is synonymous with having lots of people
window-shopping at a physical store, with few, or worse none, actually
making a purchase.
You definitely do not want that. It’s bad business!
Are you having difficulties converting traffic to your site into leads and sales?
Well, you can turn the tide today and start winning by doing a few
things.
In today’s post, we will be sharing
with you 25 hacks you can use, irrespective of how good or bad you
are at marketing, to boost conversions and drive more revenue.
Here they are:
Here are 25 things you can do to see the conversion and sales you have for long wanted.
1.
Attract the Right Traffic
Earlier on, we told you that one of the
reasons why you are not getting sales is that you are attracting the wrong
audience. It then follows that attracting the right solution
will help fix the problem.
There are a couple of ways to go about
that.
One is auditing
your SEO strategy.
This will particularly be effective if most of your traffic comes through search.
During the auditing
process, check to see if you have been
targeting the wrong keywords.
But what exactly
are “wrong” keywords?
How best can they be described?
They are:
•
Keywords
that don’t relate to your website. For example, let’s say you run a food blog. But keywords like “best denim” appear across your pages and URL. That’s a wrong keyword.
•
Another
are keywords that are too generic. For example “shoes”. Someone who makes that
query might be looking for the sneaker
shoes, the best hack for fixing a broken shoe, the definition of a shoe, etc. Steer clear
from such keywords.
•
Keywords that lack buying
content. Consider two imaginary
visitors A and B. A finds a sneakers website
by searching for “Nike sneakers”. B does the same, but
uses“red Nike sneakers free shipping”. Which will most likely make a purchase?
You know the answer.
So, check to see if your website
is ranking for these keywords
and fix things up.
Another way to attract the right traffic
is by promoting your
website to the right social media platform.
For example, if you sell a Saas product,
your potential audience will likely not be on Facebook
nor Instagram, but on LinkedIn.
It’s the reverse
if you sell fashion items.
2. Keep Your Website Design Simple
One of the hardest things
in life is keeping things
simple. That’s why you see
lots of “colorful” websites that are, as a matter of fact, difficult to use.
Keeping your website
simple in design helps to improve
your user’s experience.
And the better
your website’s user experience, the more
conversions you will get. That’s a no-brainer.
Of course, you don’t have to be boring all for the sake of keeping
things simple. The key is blending simplicity with elegance.
As an illustration, which of these two websites
is more visually appealing?
The one on the right, apparently. It’s simple, yet elegant.
Bonus point: If you don’t have a good web design skill and your website runs on WordPress, just head
over to the themes repository and pick any of the available website templates. Most are free, simple, and elegant.
3. What Makes
You Better Than Competitors?
How many tabs do you typically open when searching
the web? Probably 4 to 5, if
you are like most average web users.
But there
are times things get messy like so:
Where am I heading with this?
A visitor coming
to your website
will probably have visited 4 or
more other websites before arriving at yours.
That means they must have checked out your competitors, and are probably
looking for a better offer.
As such, your unique selling proposition needs to shine brightly.
In other words, visitors need to see what makes you different
from others – and as quickly as possible.
If it’s better pricing, let them see it without
having to scroll
far down.
Or, if your free trial
is longer than others, make it clear from the get-go.
By so doing, you won’t lose visitors
to your competitors.
4.
Make Your Site Trustworthy
Did you know that 86% of your potential customers will first have to trust your website before making a
purchase?
Thus, if your website doesn’t
look authentic and trustworthy, don’t even think about conversions and
sales.
How do you make your site trustworthy?
I figured out that knowing
what makes it untrustworthy in the first place will help you find answers to
that question.
So, here are 10 things
that make a website look untrustworthy
•
Unsecured connection. By this, I mean hosting
a site on HTTP instead of HTTPs.
•
Old-looking design.
•
Bogus, unverifiable customer testimonials.
•
Grammar errors
spurting all over the place
•
No money-back guarantee
•
You use stock images…especially those with watermarks
•
Dormant social media account
•
Unclear shipping
information
•
No return
policy
•
Your website
lacks reviews and customer testimonials
Hence, if any of these are present
on your site, it’s about time you did something about it.
5.
Take Reviews Seriously
Remember the last time you bought stuff on Amazon.
You most likely checked to see what other customers said about the product
before making a purchase, right?
The same is applicable to your website.
Make your site look trustworthy by displaying verifiable reviews left by your customers in a conspicuous way.
One of the ways you can go about this is by importing reviews from your Google My Business page
to your website.
Scared you will have to write complex
lines of code to accomplish this?
Not to worry;
you can use any of these WordPress plugins
to pull that off.
6. Display Testimonials
Just like reviews,
testimonials, as well, are important for improving conversions.
Here are some interesting facts
that prove that testimonials are the
real deal:
•
92% of people will likely
purchase a product
if it is recommended by someone they know
•
If the recommendation is coming from someone totally strange to them, 72% will buy
still
•
88% of web users trust online testimonials as much as they
trust personal recommendations
•
Testimonials make your visitors
58% likely to convert
These are enough
reasons to take testimonials seriously.
Like reviews, you can add testimonials to your
website via a plugin. Testimonial
widget, Strong testimonial, etc. are some good plugins – for WordPress, though.
7.
Optimize Your Sales
Funnel
Earlier on, I mentioned having
leaky holes in your sales
funnel as one of the top
leading reasons for your poor website conversion.
It then follows
that optimizing your sales funnel
for better conversion can
improve your lot greatly.
In the time being, here are some hacks for optimizing your sales
funnel and fixing up leaky holes.
•
First
set up a conversion goal funnel via Google Analytics.
This will help you keep track of your website’s
conversion.
•
If you haven’t created
a custom landing
page for your offers,
go do so now.
•
Continually A/B test your website
elements.
•
Polish up your CTA buttons. Make them more catchy,
inviting to click, and noticeable.
8.
Write Better Sales
Copies
Are you one of those marketers who suck at
writing sales copies? You had better
started to improve
at it because it is through a solid
sales copy that you can convince visitors to act.
Thankfully,
writing a convincing sales copy isn’t
as hard as it
might appear.
Here are a few things that if you do them will make your copies
shine:
•
Personalize your writing. Write as though
you are writing
to an age-long friend
•
Weave in power words into your copies. These
are words that compel readers to act.
•
Stress hard on the benefits of your offer,
not features
•
Less is always more
A little
word of encouragement: will attempting to improve your writing skills,
you won’t be a pro copywriter right out of the gate. It will take a while to hone your
copywriting skill. So, keep at it.
9.
Make Your CTA Buttons to Shine
What action, exactly,
do you want visitors to take on your
website?
Do you want them to check out your product
offering? Or, would you prefer that they sign up for
your mailing list?
It’s only through
a CTA that you get to tell them.
And by the way, CTA is the acronym for Call-To-Action.
Getting the idea?
One more thing: creating
an attention-grabbing CTA is important but more important is placing them right. They have to be visible enough on your website, else their
purpose will be defeated.
Details on this
shortly.
10. Be Strategic with Your CTA Placement
Creating a captivating CTA button that gets clicks
is one thing. Yet another is placing them where they will enjoy maximum visibility.
And if you thought
that placing your it above the fold, as seen below, is all there is to it, think
again.
You know why?
Today’s web users have become scroll-centric.
They will instinctively scroll down your web page upon landing on your
website.
As such, placing
your CTA buttons
at random points
on your page will help make them more visible, and, hence, improve your
conversion rate.
With that said, here are some strategic
placement points you will
want to try out.
•
Above the fold – of course
•
Random spots below the fold. For example, within a blog post
•
Sidebars
•
Sticky navigation bar
You could even add one above your footer just like we did.
11.
Stop Directing Visitors to Your Homepage
One of the reasons you might not be getting
sales despite seeing huge traffic is that you are
directing visitors to your homepage.
Or worse, a dead page. Let me expatiate a little.
Say, for example,
you want to promote your product by running an ad on Facebook. And your goal is to get as many people as possible to buy the
product.
What do you think will happen if you directed
traffic from Facebook to your homepage, rather than the particular product page you want visitors to land?
Loss of sales.
Simple.
So, start optimizing your sales funnel
by directing visitors
to pages that deliver
the most value
– and not generic pages they won’t find
valuable.
12. Be Generous with Freebies
It’s easy to ask people
to subscribe to your mailing
list, sign up for
an account, download your app, or make a purchase on your website.
Where the real work lies is in giving them a reason
to.
Until you answer the “why should
I care” question
bubbling in the minds of your visitors, enjoying
optimal conversion will be a pipe dream.
This is where freebie marketing comes into play.
Enticing people with free stuff
is an age-long marketing strategy that still works today.
So, what freebies
can you give away?
•
Free trial
•
Free shipping
•
Discounts and
coupons
•
Free consultation
•
Free download
As a rule of thumb,
the freebies that you give away should
be valuable. Else, your efforts will go down the drain.
13. Gamify Your Visitors’ Experience
Ooh, how we love games! They are fun, engaging, and are boredom
breakers.
What’s your favorite
game? Pokemon Go, Candy Crush Saga, or Mario?
Okay, we have digressed, but the point here is that you can infuse the elements of gaming – fun, and
engagement – into your users’ experience.
Doing so will not only help to improve
engagement on your website but also bring you closer to your ultimate
goal: win more leads and sales.
But how? Wouldn’t that require you to hire a team of developers? Not at all.
One easy, result-guaranteed method you can adopt is deploying spin-to-win
popups to your website.
As the name suggests, these are popups
that allow users
to play the lucky wheel game
in the hope of winning a coupon.
14. Segment Your Audience
Truth be told: not all visitors are the same.
The simple reason is that people are different. Preferences, hobbies, behavior, location, occupation, language, devices,
etc. are all different.
As such, it would be unwise to treat everyone
that comes to your website in the same way. You can’t offer them the same content or product suggestion.
If you do, not only will your website suffer
poor user engagement, you will likely lose the very
audience you are trying to appease.
For this reason,
the importance of segmenting your audience can’t be overemphasized.
Audience segmentation offers
several benefits, namely:
•
Better engagement
•
Reduced cart abandonment
•
Increased customer
loyalty
•
Higher conversion
But won’t implementing audience segmentation require
some technical skills?
Well, it does require, but with Adoric,
you don’t have to know a
lick about coding to infuse segmentation on your website.
Our smart segmentation engine allows you to group your audience based on:
•
Language
•
Visitor type (returning or first-time)
•
Geolocation
•
Language And lots more.
15. Product Recommendation Is a Must
In addition to segmenting your audience, one
other step you can take to personalize your visitors’ experience in deploying product
recommendations to your website.
As the name implies, product recommendation
involves recommending products – or content
for a publishing website – to
visitors which they will most likely find useful – and valuable.
You’ve probably seen product recommendations at play a couple
of times.
Here’s one on Amazon:
And did you know that 35% of Amazon’s sales
come from product recommendations?
This is clear
proof that product
recommendations actually work.
When you recommend products that best fit your visitors’
preferences and tastes, your sales will soar.
16. Loyalty Programs
Still Work
Sometimes, retaining your old customers
and keeping them happy
is better than hunting for new prospects.
You know why?
It costs 5 times more to acquire
a new customer than to retain an old one.
On top of that, you can increase your profits
by 25% simply by increasing your customer retention
efforts by 5%.
Aren’t those interesting facts already?
One easy way to retain
your old customers, and hence make more
sales, is by rewarding them for their loyalty.
Free product samples, coupons, discounts, free
shipping, redeemable bonus points,
cash backs, and lots more. These are rewards you can weave into your
loyalty program.
To make life easy for you, here is a list of plugins for WordPress
you can use to manage
your loyalty reward
programs effectively.
•
WooReward
•
Gratisfaction
•
myCred
But if your online store runs on Shopify, here are plugins
you can use:
•
Smile: Rewards and Loyalty
•
Loyalty, rewards, and referrals
•
Loyalty
17.
Use Popups to Win Leads
One of the reasons why you are getting clicks
but no conversions is that your visitors are simply not seeing your offers. And not because they are blind; your banner
ads are just not just attention-
grabbing enough to make them take notice.
To combat banner
blindness and increase
your leads, conversions, and sales, use popups
instead.
I know, popups can be annoying. But they don’t
have to be for your visitors. With smart targeting and triggering, they can work
well for you.
This means you can make your popups
to show at the right time
and to the right people.
18. Use Slide-ins to Boost Conversion
Like popups, slide-ins can also be instrumental in helping you beat
banner blindness. They are the little popup box that you see slide in from the
corner of the screen, hence the name.
Unlike regular
popups, slide-ins are less intrusive. And they aren’t infuriating.
And best of all, they enjoy
better visibility than popups. This is
because they can stick fast to
users’ screens even as they scroll
down your page. But without being annoying.
You can promote
just about anything
with slide-in popups: seasonal sales, lead magnets, email opt-ins, and lots
more.
19. Floating Bars Work like Magic
What if you are not a fan of popups
nor slide-ins. Is there any other alternative to those two?
Yes, there is. Floating bars!
They are the horizontal ribbons
that lie across
the top of a website – or the bottom, in some
instances.
You’ve probably seen them a couple of times before.
With floating
bars, you can accomplish just about any marketing
goal you may set your mind on:
•
Capture your users’ email/contact info
•
Drive traffic
to a specific landing page
•
Encourage visitors
to visit your social media
page
•
Generate more leads
•
Pass
an announcement. For example, you just redesigned your website and feel it is needful for your visitors
to know about it.
20.
Capture Exiting Visitors
Our natural human instinct is to take flight
the instant we encounter an unpleasurable situation. This might explain why visitors abandon your website no
sooner than they arrive.
Now, a lot of factors
can be responsible for the abandonment:
maybe they couldn’t find what they are looking for fast. Or, perhaps, your
website’s UX isn’t appealing enough.
The possible reasons
are just too many. But that’s not really our concern.
What you should really concern
yourself with is capturing those abandoning visitors.
This is where
Exit-intent popups come in
handy.
As the name suggests, exit-intent popups are there to help you
capture the attention of abandoning visitors.
Typically, they are automatically displayed
the instant a visitor
motions to leave your website.
With exit-intent popups,
you can:
•
Encourage visitors
to complete their checkout. This will help to reduce cart abandonment
•
Grow your email list, hence win more leads
•
Ask users to take a survey
•
Prompt users
to reach out to you
•
Promote offers,
discounts, and lead magnets
21.
Up Your Game with Two-Step
Popups
Have you tried both regular
and exit-intent popups,
yet nothing meaningful to
show for it? It’s about time you tried a two-step popup.
A two-step popup
– or Multi-step popup as some prefer
to call it –
takes users through 2 or more steps before completing an action.
Typically, it starts
out by asking users a question – usually a Yes/
No question. If they click No, the popup closes – no further questions asked.
But if “Yes” is what they went for, they will be redirected one or
two more times until the action is completed.
But won’t taking
users through multiple
steps anger and make
them abandon your website?
Quite the contrary.
As Zeigarnik – a Soviet psychologist – observed, people
tend to complete whatever
action they willingly chose to start. This is known as the Zeigarnik effect.
This means with the two-step
popup, you can increase your conversion rate quite remarkably.
22.
Live Chat Anybody?
How would you feel if you arrived
at a website only to discover
you had no way of contacting whoever is behind it?
Or maybe the only available way to do so is via a boring contact form.
Frustrating, right?
That’s exactly how your visitors
feel if they have no means of reaching out to you – fast.
And this frustration leaves them with no choice
but to close your website
and go elsewhere.
By adding a live chat feature to your website,
you can actually combat this problem, and, in
turn, improve user engagement.
Other benefits of implementing a live chat are as follows:
•
Increase in customer satisfaction
•
Your cart abandonment problems, if you suffer any, will reduce
•
It helps you build trust with your potential
customers
With that said, here are some hand-picked live chat plugin solutions you can use on your
WordPress website.
•
Tidio live chat
•
JivoChat
•
Crisp live chat
And for Shopify,
here are a couple of solutions you can try out
•
HelpCenter
•
Tawk.to
•
LiveChat
23. Offer Money Back Guarantee
Offering a money-back guarantee can really
help your business grow if done properly.
When you do so, you lay the foundation needed
to build trust with
potential customers.
It also helps
to minimize, if not eliminate, the fear and hesitation
which your visitors will naturally have when looking to make a purchase from
you.
Need some more convincing reasons? A money-back guarantee will help to:
•
Get more people to try out your product,
hence boosting sales
•
Give you a competitive edge
•
Ultimately fetch you more sales
24.
Track Your Conversion
After following all the steps shared so far,
the next step, apparently, is to know what is working for you and what is not.
For that to happen, you need a way of tracking your conversion.
And there is no tool that is better suited
for this job than Google Analytics.
With Google Analytics, you can get first-hand insight
into critical data you need to
effectively track your conversions.
Using this data, you can make intelligent, informed decisions as to
how to improve your conversion.
Google has got an in-depth
tutorial you can reference to set up conversion tracking on your website.
25.
A/B Test Your Ideas
I hate to break it to you, but not every hack shared in this post will
work – no matter how hard you try.
Heck, you could even try an entirely different
tact not covered here, and won’t still see meaningful results.
Or maybe see, but far from what you expect.
Don’t go beating
yourself up when you notice
this – it’s not your fault, but the way things are.
For this reason,
you have to keep A/B testing
your ideas.
When you A/B test, you try different ideas simultaneously until you figure out which works.
For example, if you noticed
that exit-intent popups
aren’t killing it for you, switch things up by using a
gamified popup instead.
Of course, A/B testing takes
time and effort,
but in the end, it will
always pay off.
Conclusion
So there you have it: 25 hacks to better convert traffic
to your website into leads and
sales.
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