7 Tips to Better Convert Your Traffic Into Sales
Making sales entails so much more than driving visitors to your website. Your marketing actions will be in vain if you don’t have a good plan to keep visitors on your site long enough for them to take action. According to the Search Engine Journal, when a user visits a certain page on your site and leaves the page before they take any action, this is called a bounce. A high bounce rate is usually an indication that most of your traffic is not converting. Other users may take a few steps from the initial page they visited, but leave before completing a purchase. Users will leave your website without making a purchase for a couple of reasons. This article highlights some of the steps you can take to better convert your traffic into sales.
Focus on Potential Traffic Only
One of the reasons people bounce back from a website is because they land on a page that doesn’t address their needs and interests. This is usually as a result of poor marketing strategies that focus on internet users in general instead of the potential customers. Therefore, the first step you should take is to ensure that your marketing strategies are driving the right kind of traffic to your website. Some key tips that can be useful in driving potential traffic to your site include focusing on content that is relevant to your products, using the right keywords and avoiding misleading topics.
Learn to Segment Leads
Lead segmentation can boost sales by a big percentage. This involves dividing your leads into smaller groups based on their interests, location, needs, sex, age and lifestyle among many others. Segmentation allows you to take an action that is most relevant to each lead. This boosts the chances of retaining and converting them as opposed to when you take a general action for all the leads.
In addition to segmentation, you should consider lead scoring. While the two terms are at times used interchangeably and both involve grouping leads, they do have their differences. Segmentation groups leads based on demographics whereas lead scoring gives the leads scores based on their conversion potential. You can score your leads based on their interactions on your website, email and social media channels. For instance, if you are using email, lead scoring with an email marketing platform will focus on email opens, click through percentages, and downloads among others.
Nurture Your Leads
The journey with your leads doesn’t stop at segmentation and scoring. Once you have identified a prospect, keep on engaging with them until they become your loyal customer. Through lead nurturing, you share content and build a relationship with prospects. This relationship increases their likelihood of buying from you. In addition to boosting sales, lead nurturing is beneficial to businesses because it shortens the buying cycle. Prospects are likely to buy from you more quickly when you are actively engaged with them. The engagement should continue after a sale for the sake of customer retention.
Ensure Your Pages Load Fast
Slow loading pages are a huge turn off. Visitors expect that your website will load in two to three seconds and most will leave if it takes longer than that. Therefore, if you want to keep visitors on your website and convert them into sales, work on your page load speed. Some of the key causes of slow loading pages include large images, JavaScript issues, server location and performance, and too many plugins among others.
Keep Your Pages Simple
Having too many elements on one page not only gives a bad impression about your business, but it could also confuse the visitor. If you are dealing with multiple audiences, consider making a couple of landing pages. Pages with too many elements usually appear untidy. Additionally, it becomes hard to navigate and determine the call to action to follow when a page is busy. This leads to a higher bounce rate and lost sales.
Simplify the Buying Process
A long and complicated buying process is one of the major causes of cart abandonment. Simplify the process by removing the unnecessary steps and refrain from asking for information that the customer already provided during the sign up process. In addition to simplifying the process, you can reduce sales lost through cart abandonment by assuring customers of the safety of their credit cards, providing multiple payment methods, avoiding hidden fees and making the return policy clear.
Consider Remarketing
When a prospect abandons a cart, or visits your blog, reads a page and leaves without taking any other action, you can drive them back to your site through remarketing. Remarketing involves showing ads to customers who have previously interacted with your website. Remarketing ads are effective since they are based on something the customer has already shown an interest in.
Driving traffic to your website does not guarantee you will get sales. You have to take more steps for a great percentage of your potential customers to convert. Some prospects will convert right away, but others need some encouragement before they take any action.