How to Boost Your Website Conversion Rate

sales-funnel

Are you getting hundreds of visitors to your website but no calls? Maybe you are receiving lots of email enquires but no purchases? Your marketing is obviously working but it isn’t paying dividends.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could find out where your customers drop off the conveyor belt on the way to deal completion?

A lot of marketing effort and spend goes into driving traffic to your website and enquiries about your product or service but not a lot on nurturing leads. In fact, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Why? Because the leads are not adequately directed through the sales funnel to completion.

In this article, I’ll explain some top tips for getting your leads to take action, and the importance of marketing to your current audience not just new prospects.

Set up a sales funnel

Step one is creating a sales funnel, something that 68% of B2B organisations fail to identify. This is a means of tracking your prospects from the minute they log on to your website, or read your advertisement, up to the checkout. Companies who have a lead nurturing plan in place make 50% more sales than those that don’t. Not only that, but nurtured leads spend on average 47% more than cold leads.

Generally the sales funnel has three stages: Awareness – Interest – Sale. Depending on the product the funnel and its dimensions and labels can be a lot more complex. Think about yourself as a customer, larger scale purchases take longer to commit too, you may need to research the product more, reassure yourself that the purchase is the correct action to take. For example, you are going to buy a new car, you see a poster for the new Ford Zetec (Awareness) typically you will research the make, model, price, performance of a vehicle and compare providers (interest) before you commit (Sale).

It takes on average 7 interactions for someone to make a purchase or commitment. If you can build trust into every interaction the quicker the lead will go through the stages and close. For purchases of a higher value it is often a good idea to provide something of value to the prospect for free. For example; back to the Ford Zetec example, you create awareness with a poster promoting the ‘family’ quality and benefits of the vehicle attracting parents (awareness), create content on the website that shows these benefits, perhaps special offers around back to school time, or reviews from families who drive Fords (interest).

The more expensive and/or complicated the product, the more time people need before they’re ready to commit.

Try Split Testing

Small adjustments to your website, print or digital marketing, can yield huge returns. Experiment with your marketing to find what works best for your business. A safe and measurable way to do this is using ‘split testing’ using an appropriate tool.

Create two versions of a web page on your website, make a small adjustment between them perhaps a change of images or layout and see how both perform. There is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach in marketing. The same tools and tactics do not work on every prospect in the sales funnel but by continually testing you can learn what works for your business and what doesn’t.

 Test one hypothesis at a time so you can track changes and attribute it to that amendment. Start off with small changes which may seem to have a minimal effect like colour change or image replacement. Then move on to more daring split testing such as changing headings, call to action buttons, etc.

For example, if you’re a retailer who operates solely online, your customers might find it difficult to get a feel for your products without physically touching or seeing the item.

After a month of showing different versions of the above webpage to visitors on the retailer’s website, we found that there was a 221% increase in the click-to-cart rate for the variant page with the zoom in function.

Such a simple change yielded significant results. You could try a similar test with the headlines in your articles, because as marketing guru David Ogilvy once said:

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.  It follows that, if you don’t sell the product in your headline, you have wasted 80% of your money.

Track user journey to reengage prospects

You can easily see the number of views a page has had, the number of opens an email has received, or the most popular product on your website, but do you know the customers’ journey from ‘awareness’ to ‘interest’? Being able to track the consumer journey and follow their path, especially those that drop out at the last minute, can be incredibly telling about where your site is failing to push leads to close.

Technology that tracks inbound phone calls, for example, will help you to close the loop on your marketing by tracking the entire user journey. The technology works by generating a unique telephone number for every web visitor. So, should they call you, the software instantly logs the caller’s user journey on site right up until the phone call – and it tracks any webpages they’ve viewed once they hung up.

This type of practice is known as website visitor level call tracking, or simply, call tracking software. And isn’t just limited to tracking online marketing – you can also track enquiries from your offline advertising too!

Call tracking software goes beyond targeting your perfect customers and straight to those ready to make a purchase and engage. For example, a web visitor who has logged on to your site, looked at a number of pages, called you on your unique number but then didn’t go on to close the deal is a missed opportunity. But because your call tracking software will have logged their details and interests you can then re target them with a relevant offer, email them price comparisons, contact them to demonstrate your product/service or call and make signing up easier and effortless. You can see those close to purchasing and nudge them along to closing the deal.

Remove barriers in the conversion path

When you use call tracking, and start analyzing visitor paths, you may find some of your prospects fall out of the sales funnel before purchase. Be critical about your purchase process. It may be that you have barriers preventing users from buying, such as long registration forms, limited payment methods or not enough information about shipping, etc. Make doing business with you as easy as possible and hand the prospect as much information as possible on a plate.

Here are some simple checks you can do on your website:

  1. Does each page have a call to action? Does it have something that guides the viewer to the next step, e.g.: Register with us for more information on this model/Sign up for a free guide
  2. Reduce the noise on each page. By this I mean clutter. Make each action as simple as possible and in the least number of clicks.
  3. Reduce the number of fields in your registration or purchasing forms: people get tird of complex or long form filing
  4. Sometimes the visitor will want to buy without being a member, let them. Forcing users to register to purchase is not always beneficial.
  5. Do your web pages have contact details? Many consumers have actually left a site because they haven’t had the option of calling to discuss a purchase with a sales agent before they commit to buy.

Once the barriers to purchase are down you can look at building the prospects’ trust in your site and product. Include case studies, testimonials and guides that viewers can read and build a picture of your company.

Companies who apply lead nurturing tactics, some of which are mentioned here, on average see a 10% increase in revenue in the first 6-9 months and those companies that stay the same see a 7% decrease. It pays to nurture your leads.

 

Gina Hutchings
 

Marketing professional with over 12 years experience specializing in digital marketing for the IT sector.