So, you’re investing in digital marketing strategies and driving lots of visitors to your website. Great work! If the agency you’ve hired is doing their job well, these leads will be highly targeted prospects who are looking for the products or services you offer. But unless you have a quality sales process in place, this marketing investment will become an expense.
Converting website leads into paying customers is a crucial aspect of online business success. To achieve this, you need to have a well-planned strategy that is clear and consistent. Here are some steps to help you convert more website leads:
Understand Your Audience
Analysing your website traffic and leads helps you gain insight into your target audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviours. This can be done within Google Analytics.
No matter what size business you are, Google Analytics provides crucial information about your website activity. However, as there is so much data available in GA4, it’s no surprise many people feel overwhelmed.
Knowing the best places to go within the platform that provide the most meaningful data will ensure you get the most out of your analytics.
For the purpose of understanding your audience, you want to navigate to:
Reports > User Attributes > Overview
From within there, you can view detailed information on your current website audience, including gender, age and interests, as well as the language your users speak. Drilling down into each section allows you to see specific engagement of each group, in terms of time spent on website and conversions.
Understanding this data allows you to undertake 2 strategies to help with conversions:
- Create detailed buyer personas to understand your ideal customers better.
- Create High-Quality Content:
Developing valuable and relevant content that addresses your audience’s pain points, questions, and needs will resonate with the users. Utilising a range of content types, such as blog posts, videos, eBooks, and infographics, will engage your leads at different stages of the buying journey and help maximise conversions.
If someone isn’t ready to book your services or purchase your product, they may be happy to download a free eBook with helpful information about the topic.
Knowing your audience means you can tailor the content to meet their needs.
Social Proof and Reviews
Prospects want to know if you’re good at what you do. And unless they’ve been referred by someone else, they don’t know your business from a bar of soap (or at the very least from the next business offering the same thing as you).
Showcase customer testimonials, case studies, and reviews to build trust and credibility with potential customers. Highlight successful use case studies relating to your products or services.
Optimise Your Website
Making sure your website is optimised to allow the best possible user experience will go a long way in converting leads. Optimising your websites for search engines – via SEO – is also crucial, but that’s an article for another day.
Ensure your website is user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and loads quickly. If people don’t know what they are supposed to do once they arrive on your site or are forced to wait ages for your page to appear, they will click the back button faster than you can say “there goes my ROI”. As a web design agency we know what works best.
Use clear and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) that guide visitors toward the next step, such as purchasing a product, making a booking, signing up for a newsletter or requesting a quote.
A/B Testing and Monitoring
Continuously test different elements on your website, such as headlines, CTAs, and images, to determine what converts better. Use data-driven insights to make improvements and track website analytics to assess the performance of your lead generation efforts.
Google Analytics allows you to measure conversion rates, bounce rates, and user behaviour, so you can test, see what’s working, and then refine.
Leverage Lead Generation Forms
Implement lead capture forms strategically on your website to collect contact information from visitors. Keep forms simple and ask for minimal information initially to reduce friction.
Downloadable resources such as eBooks allow you to offer a free initial product in exchange for contact information.
Providing multiple contact options make it easy for leads to get in touch with you through multiple channels, including phone, email, forms and social media.
Follow Up Promptly
Always respond quickly to enquiries and leads. A prospect may have emailed 3 different businesses (thanks a lot due diligence!) and in many cases, the person who gets back to them first will win their hard-earned dollars!
Automated email responses allow prospects to get an email from you immediately. Then personalise follow-up communications based on the lead’s actions and interests. Depending on your line of work, sometimes picking up the phone can be the best solution, as a lot of people just want to talk to someone in order to find out more about an offering.
Implement Email Marketing
Use email marketing campaigns to nurture leads over time. Segment your list based on their interests, behaviour, and demographics, and send personalised, relevant content and offers to keep leads engaged and moving through the sales funnel.
Position your products or services as solutions to your leads’ problems, and offer incentives such as discounts, which have a limited life span. Provide help but also create urgency.
Engage in Live Chat and Support
Offering live chat support on your website allows visitors to get their questions answered in real time. Monitoring live chat all day every day may not be feasible for a lot of businesses, but luckily there is another option. You can leverage the power of AI.
Firstly, setup a knowledgebase which answers important questions that users might ask and train a chat bot to answer these questions that are in the knowledgebase. Userdesk.io allows you to create such an AI Assistant.
Continually add to the knowledgebase with new information (including filling gaps of new questions asked) and over time you will have a Live Support that can automatically answer most user questions without the need for a real human online.
Offer Remarketing and Retargeting
On average, it can take 6 to 8 touch points before you get a sale. Consumers are not always ready to sign on the dotted line – they may be getting other quotes, taking time to fully understand your offering, or just may be super busy and are doing some initial research.
Use remarketing and retargeting ads to re-engage leads who have visited your website but didn’t convert. Show them relevant content or offers as they continue to navigate around the web, to encourage them to return.
Types of remarketing can include:
- Display Remarketing
- Search Remarketing
- Dynamic Remarketing
- Video Remarketing
- Email Remarketing
- Social Media Remarketing
As a business owner (or marketing manager), you should regularly review and refine your lead conversion strategies based on data and feedback. Adapt to changing market conditions and customer preferences, so your brand doesn’t get left in the past.
Remember that converting website leads is an ongoing process. It requires a combination of effective marketing, customer engagement, and a user-friendly website to turn potential leads into loyal customers. Be patient and persistent, and continually refine your approach based on what works best for your specific audience and industry.
