How to Take Advantage of Your Web Visitors (aka Conversion)
Online marketing is a multi-faceted process. Not only do you need a professional website, but you need a way for people to find your website. And then once you have visitors to your site, what do you do with them? Unless your website visitors are contacting you or becoming customers/readers/etc., what is the point of your website?
Luckily, there are a lot of ways to take advantage of your site visitors, no matter how many of them there are. The process of turning website visitors into customers or subscribers is called conversion. Here’s a simplified breakdown of what we do at SmallFuel when customers come to us to get more out of their web presence:
First Step: What Do You Want
Without a goal in mind for your site, you’ll have a hard time getting anything accomplished. Do you want to bring in more customers? Do you want to receive more requests for quotes? If you’re a blog, do you want more subscribers/followers?
Make sure that your goal is accomplishable on your website, which means you need to be able to update your site to complete your goal, or adjust your goal to match your site’s current capabilities. If your goal is to get more customers, but you don’t have a product that’s able to sell through ecommerce, then you should consider adjusting your goal to getting more leads or requests for information.
Second Step: How To Convert More
Once you have a goal in mind for your site, there are certain actions you can do to make that goal more realistic. If you’re already considering a site redesign, make sure certain goal achieving elements are included in the design.
Page Flow
When visitors reach your site, they’re not going to automatically ask for more information or buy your product. Most likely, they’ll go through a series of pages before they decide whether or not to contact you. As a website owner, you want to direct them through these steps as quickly and easily as possible.
Write out what you think the ideal page flow would be for a potential customer. It might look something like this:
- Home Page → Services Page → Service Landing Page → Contact/Request a Quote
- Blog → Individual Blog Entry → Subscribe to Blog
- Individual Blog Entry → Most Popular Blog Entries → Subscribe to Blog
You may want to create a few of these page flows, depending on where you think visitors start on your site. Most likely, they’ll start at the home page. If you have a blog, start a page flow from both your blog index and your individual entries as well. Note that the pages included in your page flow are the ideal path that visitors will take, but you’ll need to make it easy for them to leave this path and find other information your site as well. Your main site navigation should accomplish this. A lot of visitors will want to see examples of what you do and your About Us page, and you need to make it easy for those visitors to easily navigate your site so they don’t get frustrated and leave.
Page Content and Design
You can direct traffic in two ways: design and copywriting. There are a lot of techniques with your site design that can guide visitors to the next page in the page flow. For example, if your site has a strong color theme, then you probably have a specific color designated for actionable items such as links, buttons, and certain navigational elements. You can also use page layout and images to direct visitors to a specific button or link that directs them to the next page in the page flow. Designing a page to accomplish a specific action can be a bit tricky, so it might be best to direct your designer to create something for you.
The second way you can direct visitors is through the content on the page. You want to give customers enough information to keep them interested and be informed, but you always want to provide some incentive for them to continue to the next page on your page flow. For example, if you’re on the Services Landing Page, you’ll want to tell your visitors that they’ll be able to get even more information and details on how your product can help them by giving you a call or an email. Don’t forget about keeping with your company’s brand or style throughout the content.
Third Step: Keep Visitors Close
Even with a great design, excellent content, and a clear page flow, some site visitors just won’t be ready to ask for a quote or contact you. However, this doesn’t mean that those visitors are lost. You can catch visitors with a few different subscription methods.
Email Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to keep interested site visitors close to your company. Create a company newsletter using one of the numerous newsletter providers out there (aWeber, ConstantContact, and MailChimp are a few of the most popular ones). Have your website designer or developer include a newsletter signup box on almost every page of your site. We have one prominently displayed on our front page and then include the same box in our sidebar. Setup your newsletter to send out an automated response when they signup. The automated response should thank them for subscribing and give them an idea of what to expect in future newsletters. Most importantly, send out an email to your newsletter list at least every month so they remember you and keep interested. This way, when they’re ready for your services, they’ll remember you and be much more likely to visit your site again and contact you.
By creating a company newsletter, you ensure that people who are interested in your company have a way of being updated on any news and information you want to provide. For small businesses (and larger ones too), an email newsletter will really allow you to keep your valuable website visitors close.
RSS
RSS feeds are another way for users to receive updates from your site. If you have a blog, or a news section, chances are you can create a RSS feed. Users can then subscribe to your feed using a whole bunch of different methods. RSS feeds are a bit trickier to get setup and running than an email newsletter, but the extra work is worth it to continue growing your site’s subscribers.
Twitter/Facebook
If you’re not already using social media, now may be the time to do so. Using twitter or Facebook allows you to connect with your website visitors in a more meaningful and continuous way. There are so many Facebook and twitter users out there now, that you can’t afford to lose out on the large number of website visitors who do use social media to keep up to date on their favorite websites and companies. Plus, it’s easy to get started with twitter, Facebook, or any other social media platform, so dive right in. Don’t forget to display your social media profiles/links on every page of your website (usually the header, footer, or sidebar).
The Total Conversion Picture
Getting more out of your website, or conversion, is a constantly evolving process. You’ll want to check your site statistics regularly to see if there are any tweaks you could make to a specific page or your page flow in general. If you create some goals for your website, make some realistic page flows to accomplish these goals, and then catch some more visitors with some of the subscription methods, you’ll be well on your way to turning your website into one of your most valuable marketing tools. And if you get stuck, SmallFuel’s here to help. Contact us if you’d like us to help with your website.
Have you seen a difference in how your site performs by using these methods? Share in the comments!
Reader Comments
A very good guide to converting visitors.
How many RSS feeds do you think you should send visitors on average a week?
Great article.
As a business coach, I’ve discovered that website owners rarely are concerned with conversion. The only thing they seem to know is that the website isn’t producing any new customers, but they just assume that’s normal, so they have no idea that there are two parts of website marketing, amount of traffic and managing that to get the most of those actually searching, and conversion rate of the web pages of that traffic into a lead, signup, sales, or whatever the action you wanted them to take.
Powerful fuel…
I found myself a self tought learner who developed my own website from very big zero until reached an alexa rank of #520,000. I personally believe that this achievement is possible because of helpful articles that struck me on various websites, including yours.
Thank you for sharing your thought….
I believe you can go beyond email, RSS feeds and social media. Retargeting is a helpful component to any marketing strategy already in the works. So many resources are poured into generating website traffic that keeping visitors close is the best way to realize the full ROI of all website efforts. Retargeting allows you to meet up with your site visitors as they travel the web and present them with custom messaging, driving them to take action.
This is no complete ressource on ways of converting your users, but these are some simple steps which most webmasters can manage to do. I guess, A/B and multivariate-testing should also be on the tasklist of any marketing-specialist.
Thanks for this resource, it is so important to know the exact flow of where your visitors are going compared to where you want them to go so you can change things around to direct them where you want them to go.
Keep up the good work, there are still a lot of people out there needing to learn things like this to progress their business further.
Thanks
Simon
Great article! How you interact with your customers throughout your online presence is very important. Once you are able to attract customers to your page- its then still your job to keep them there. How you direct them is very important to create great customer-business relationships! Over here at Aerofund we are strong supporters of helping small businesses succeed! www.aerofind.com
Very informative blog post, Natalie! I agree that it’s important to come up with specific goals first in order to achieve the conversions you want. I use RSS, e-mail newsletters, blogging, backlinking, and social media and other effective SEO methods. I also make sure that my websites have user-friendly interfaces as well as appealing designs because how your website looks can affect a potential client’s buying decision. I’ve had successful results in using these methods and noticed a significant increase in my monthly sales. But like you’ve said, these techniques do require some monitoring, but with enough patience and effort you should be able to see amazing conversions for your online businesses in no time. :)
Thanks for creating such a creative weblog. Your site is not just knowledgeable but also very artistic too. There normally are very few experts who are capable of write technical stuff that creatively. All of us look for articles regarding this subject. I have gone in detail through many blogs to come across information with respect to this.Keep writing in !!
This reminds me that I don’t have enough opportunities for my readers to sign up for things. I need to start a newsletter…
Thanks everyone for your comments! Glad the article was useful :)
“Don’t forget about keeping with your company’s brand or style throughout the content.”
I enjoyed reading this article and feel the point above is a very important one a lot of small businesses don’t keep in mind.
I work with a lot of small business owners in the UK and am always stressing the importance of having a consistent tone of voice throughout all their marketing materials both online and offline.
Conversion, I am in the very beginning of Web Analytics. I enjoyed reading this article and I hope this will help me make the best of web data that I have on my dashboard. Thanks for the lovely article.
Awesome stuff!
When i first started in SEO a while back I was amazed at how many small business owners didn’t actually sit down and take the time to plan out the whole customer experience. Its a shame really because by knowing exactly what you want, and then laying out an exact step by step plan to get them from point A to point B is the best way to do it.
Thanks for the wright up!
I really enjoy reading your website. The content is great and informative. I have bookmarked your website because I’ll visit it regularly after this. Keep up this great work.
Conversions are key. Tough to find that groove on your website were users are consistently converting to leads.
Make sure to guide your user to what you want them to do. Use calls to action otherwise the visitor will be left cold and not wanting to buy from you.
I knew a company who was ranked for several highly competitive keywords but wasn’t getting many leads. Their conversion system sucked. It needs to be optimized.
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