How to Turn Your Online Visitors into Customers?
Veronika Krasteva
3 min
The existence of the advertising, in general, has one main goal – increased sales and respectively increased revenues for the company. Even if you attract a lot of traffic to your site/online store, this should not make you happy, if you don’t make sales as a result of this sizable traffic. In this case, it turns out that a company with many visitors, but no customers, is (pretty much) wasting its advertising money.
How then to turn these visitors, who are already on your site, into buyers? How to make them buy from you? How do you attract their attention and earn their trust?
The most logical thing which you can do, in case your products or the services you offer are perfect, is to optimize and improve your site. This is a long and almost constant process, which requires plenty of ideas, inspiration, research, and tests.
We will give you hints about some of them in the first part of this article.
Let’s start with the design. The design is the first thing that the visitors see on your site. Thus, it is recommended for it to be nice looking, even though this is subjective. To make sure you won’t get it (totally) wrong, stick to a simplified, clear design with fewer colors, blinking elements, and different fonts. Make it stylish, not overly elaborate. Giving a lot of choices to the visitors is a double-edged sword – while they are enjoying the variety and wondering what to choose, they may give up on their intention to buy. Seek information about the symbolism in the use of colors and their meaning – what they mean, how they influence people, etc. Spend time on the visual part of the site and develop it properly – the investment will pay off!
The structuring of the site’s content is also very important. The visitors should be able to easily find what they are looking for. It’s recommended to show them information which will make them trust you – a portfolio, a list of partners, a list of customers, comments (references) from satisfied customers, useful advice, with which to demonstrate your professionalism.
Copywriting is the other important thing you need to use to have a profitable website. Copywriting is the writing of texts for your site, which lead to the customers doing something (making a purchase/order, liking of the Facebook page, subscription to a newsletter, subscription to receive information about promotions of the company). These texts are usually written by copywriters. They write not only the texts on the pages, but more and more often they are responsible for the names of the buttons, the titles, the names of the products, the offers, the company emails. A visitor of your site could become a customer thanks to the well-selected and arranged words.
Use personalization of online shopping as well as the “abandoned shopping car” technique. What does this mean? If a customer shops at your online store, but they don’t finalize their order within a given time period, you could remind them of it (by phone or by email). This could be done an hour later or on the next day. It is very important not to remind too early, because it is possible that the customer isn’t pressing the button “Buy”. After all, they are comparing prices, reading opinions on message boards, etc. If you remind them earlier than necessary that they have an order which is not yet finalized, this could annoy, offend or anger them.
Analyze! All you do would be simply pointless if you don’t track the results, don’t analyze them, and don’t draw conclusions from them. Pay attention to which the most visited pages on your site are, as well as the opposite case – which are the most common pages that the visitors were looking at when they decided to leave your site. Where do the visits come from (city, country, continent)? Which are the bestselling products? Do you fulfill the requirements of the company’s marketing strategy?