5 Valuable Tips to Convert Your Website Visitors into Buyers

Some websites have a lot of visitors – and I mean a lot! And they pride themselves with that. Well, that’s ok if you’re an inspirational website, a design news portal – in short, it’s great as long as you don’t want your visitors to buy something from you – a service or a product.

Image source: Vectorious.net

Some of you may already know the fact that online success can’t be achieved over night, just by keeping your fingers crossed, hoping that your website’s traffic will do the job. You, as a website and online business owner, have to play the role of the active agent in this trade. You have to convince your visitors by combining the sales process with the buying process, applying the AIDAS formula (attention, interest, desire, action, satisfaction) while answering the question “What’s in it for me?”.

So here are a couple of valuable tips on how you can convert your visitors into subscribers or buyers:

1. Give your visitors answers

There is a reason why the “FAQ” (Frequently Asked Questions) was invented. A great percent of your visitors wants to know or to find out some information while they are on your website. So here is what to do:

• Don’t make them use the “Contact us” button because it’s frustrating for them and expensive for you.
• It would be great if your visitors didn’t get to the FAQ button, so try to avoid that. I usually find it very annoying to scroll down a long page of possible question and answers to find the information I need, I’d rather look elsewhere.
• Try to find out what your visitors want to find out and write that in your website in the header, below it or in banners.
• If you notice that there are a lot of visitors who ask you various questions, you should structure your FAQ into more sections.
• Consider using an expert in customer relations which uses a tool that permits him to take on questions, to answer them and to include them in a data base which can be used both by experts and customers.

Image source: Flickr

2. Maximize your conversion rate to sell content online

Make sure that your visitors can easily and quickly find what they are looking for on your website. You should also give your visitors the chance to see a great part of the content that they are going to pay. You can do this by offering free samples, testimonials, images and so on. Make the paying process as easy as possible.

Vector Famous Cities Free Sample

Image source: Designious.com

3. Focus on driving relevant traffic to your website

You may have read on all sorts of websites and forums that website owners are wondering how they can increase the number of visitors to their website, while others are giving tips on how to get more traffic. Long story short, it all comes down to this question: What do you prefer, heavy traffic or relevant visitors?

Because if you say you prefer heavy traffic, I understand that you just love to see your Analytic report and you giggle of joy when you see thousands of visitors and page views. What I’m wondering is: will you also be happy with your websites conversion rate?

It’s a very high probability that your conversion rate will register a noticeable decrease. The reason: it doesn’t matter if you have thousands of visitors if they were not actually interested in the content of your website.

Image source: Vectorious.net

I’m not saying here that heavy traffic is bad, it can be good if it’s relevant traffic. Either way, here are a couple of things you can do to drive some relevant traffic to your website:

Make search engines your friends – you need to rank high in search results on your keywords to bring relevant traffic to your website. So, you need to focus on optimizing your website for search engines to attract targeted traffic.

Take advantage of Social Networking – these days, social networking is on the roll! It can help you meet people very easily and you can also use it to promote your artwork, your products or whatever you’d like. The key here is to be genuine, to make friends, to communicate with people, to get their feedback, to answer their questions and so on. Remember: avoid actions that will make people consider you are spamming.

4. Don’t neglect the infrastructure of your website

If you are the marketing responsible, you may think that the speed of the website is not your responsibility and it doesn’t concern you. You should know that a slow website has a series of repercussions:

• Less page views during a visit, which leads to a loss of incomes, especially if you sell publicity spaces.
• Less links to your websites by search engines – this happens when the search engine  spiders try to index your content and give up.
• Lower conversion rates.

This is the graph of Pixel77.

Here are a couple of tips to solve the speed problem:

• Monitor the speed of your website at high points. For example, when you send an email with one of your promotions and you get a lot of answers.
• Use one or several easy to use and not expensive tools to monitor your website’s performance.

5. Understand the steps of online shopping

In order to boost your conversion rate, you first of all need to understand where is the problem. You are aware that you have a great deal of visitors, but your website is still not converting the way it should. You need to find out what the problem is and fix it!

Image source: Bluegreen Resorts via Flickr

So where are you losing your customers? There can only be 6 points:

Finding – Possible scenario: you visitors and potential buyers can’t find that area in your website with the description of the product they are interested in buying.

Choosing – You don’t offer your buyers enough information so that they can choose the right product for them. They can’t tell the difference between the products you are offering.

Deciding – The buyers don’t know if the selected products will actually fulfill their needs and desires.

Guidance – Your buyers don’t know how to tell you that they are interested in purchasing a product.

Paying – The customer can’t complete the paying process and can’t send the order.

Satisfying – Your buyers didn’t get the products they ordered or decided that they want to return them.

Each of these 6 areas represents a target for preventive planning or for fixing. Of course, the important thing is to find out where are you losing the buyers along the process. A commonly mistake is that everybody focuses on the paying area although that area is responsible for a much lower percent of loss than the first areas  – which are responsible for over 50% of the loss sales.

So, how do you figure out where do you lose the buyers? Well, the easiest way is to watch people while they are buying. Follow someone’s steps while they are buying and take a close look at the purchasing process. I pretty sure that, if you do this a couple of times, you will draw up a long list of the changes you would want to make.

Your turn.

Do you have other tips on how to convert website visitors into buyers, from your experiences? Please share them with us.