Turning website visitors into customers

Omitoyin Victor

I get emails from time to time from my readers and most of my articles are actually an indirect response to the questions and enquiries people have about their businesses, blogging social media and other aspects of digital media.

Without trying to be smart or scientific, what people should be talking about are conversions. Beyond the niceties of how many people visit your website, conversions actually go beyond the numbers of people to follow. There are questions as to how people should direct traffic to their websites. In fact, for some requests it is the metrics that matter.

Okay, pretend to ask me: What is a conversion? Conversion is one of the critical factors that help you to gauge the performance of your website. It is getting them to do the most important activity you want them to do when they visit your website through adverts and various online channels.
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A conversion can simply mean the desired action visitors take when they visit website. It can make them to buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, register for a webinar, download a whitepaper or fill out the contact-us form. For example, for the eCommerce website, conversions are the number of people who add items to a cart out of the number of visitors to the website.

Conversion Rate Optimisation is an established method of using online analytics and user feedback to improve the performance of your website.

So you realise that there is a wide gap between a normal website and another that provides opportunities to turn website visitors to customers. Truth be told, what you really need is customers, not traffic or website visitors. Therefore, when it comes to engaging your customers online, you need to be able to understand how you want to be found and engaged online.

How can you ensure you are increasing the number of people who actually do something when they come to your website?

Identify your customers’ needs and wants

Finding out what your customers want is the starting point of all online engagements, knowing what to use to connect with them is the starting point of leading them further the conversion funnel. Once you are able to identify where your product or service meets your customer’s pain points, you need to address that directly.

Most times, websites of companies talk about themselves but nothing to the consumers. This is the first gulf that separates websites that convert and the ones just put up online to serve the business and not the consumer.

Make it your website’s one overriding goal

When a new visitor lands on your website, what is their first impression? What message do you convey immediately they land on your website? Does it look professional or amateurish? Up-to-date or neglected? Popular or obscure? No prizes for guessing which qualities are more attractive to buyers.

While it is simple to give salesmen targets when going to the field, most businesses forget to define the primary objective of their website. If you are in the direct online shopping business, getting them to add items to the cart is enough to jumpstart a marketing process. To those into the promotion of services, getting your customers to contact you or release their contact details is great for initiating a sales relationship.

Get a great copy, not articles

Most people, when developing websites, look for articles about the company, staff, history and resources – all talking about how great they are and not what they can do in the lives of their customers.

Do you want website visitors to call or order your products? Be clear and tell them that. Sentences like ‘Welcome to our website, the largest producers of imported bags in Abuja’ looks nice but how about ‘We deliver the best quality bags in Nigeria to your doorstep, simply order yours and you can pay on delivery’?

Own a landing page

Apart from turning your website into a sales machine, you need to own a sales landing page. Most people spend money on online adverts but they end up losing the hard advert money by directing people to the website home page, which does not directly speak to their offers.

Use the Internet tools to map consumer behaviour

Thanks to the world of web and social analytics, you can now track user behaviour online. You can check which pages are the most visited on your website, the pages people visited before coming to yours, where they live, when they leave your website and the kinds of actions people take when they land on your website.

There are many Internet tools to use in implementing this, both on your website and on other people’s websites, in order to get your customers engaged online.

Ultimately, the Internet battle is not just to get your website online, you also need to get it noticed. Once noticed, you need to create systems that ensure you continually engage your customers in a meaningful and profitable way.