Convert More Visitors into Customers

On Friday I listed the 4 Pillars of digital marketing success (Traffic, Conversion, Value, and Tracking), and I addressed the first pillar, Website Traffic. Nearly all the buzz in the digital marketing world is about how to drive more traffic to your website, but you need to be careful because not every tactic is appropriate for your business.

In fact, focusing on getting more website traffic may not even be your best opportunity to generate more leads and sales. How can that be? Doesn’t more traffic equal more leads and sales?

Not if your website is weak in the second critical digital marketing pillar, Website Conversion.

You can drive all the traffic in the world to your website, but if it’s not set up properly to convert those visitors into leads and sales, then all that traffic will be a waste. Sure, it’s nice to run reports and see your daily website visitors graph trending upward, but what good is that if it’s not increasing your revenue?

Always remember that the goal of your digital marketing is to generate sales, not traffic. And the #1 job of your website is to sell.

So how do increase the selling power of your website?

The answer is to make your website mimic a face-to-face sales presentation…

Mimic Face-to-Face Selling

If you’ve ever tried to sell something, then you know how important it is to first identify your prospect’s need. For example, your product or service probably helps your customers in many different ways. It may save money, increase efficiency, improve health, increase resale value, etc.

When you’re selling face-to-face, then I bet early on in your conversation you try to figure out what your prospect is really looking for. If saving money is the #1 goal, then you’ll elaborate more on that benefit versus talking about increasing efficiency. This is sales 101. Match your sales presentation to your audience.

Now take a look at your website. Is it best to just list ALL of the benefits of your products or services and hope some of them resonate with your prospect? Or, should you try to mimic the face-to-face sales tactic and segment your website visitors, so you know exactly what they’re looking for?

Clearly, segmenting your website traffic is the better option. The more you know about your website visitor, the more likely you’ll be able to sell because you’ll be able to speak directly to his or her needs and desires.

How to Segment Your Website Traffic

For every page on your website, ask yourself the following 2 questions:

What do I already know about my visitor/prospect?
What else do I need to know about your prospect in order to close the sale?

Let’s walk through an example to see this in action. First, go to your website homepage.

On your homepage, what do you know about the visitor? This is a bit of a trick question because you really don’t know anything yet. Think of your homepage like your receptionist answering a call from a new prospect. At that point, you’re starting from square one.

So what would you like to know to help you close the deal? Answering this question obviously depends on your type of business and what you’re selling. For a chiropractor, you may want to know which area of the body is painful. If you knew that then you could speak more directly about relieving pain for that body part.

Or if you’re a fitness trainer, then it would be very helpful to know if the visitor is a man or a woman. Generally men and women have very different fitness goals and that information will certainly help in the sales process.

Once you know the information you’re trying to collect, then simply make it as easy as possible for your visitor to self-select by clicking a big button or a link. In our chiropractor example, you could show a diagram of a human body and ask the visitor to click on the area that is painful. On the fitness website, you could have two big buttons that say, “Men Click Here” and “Women Click Here.”

Can you see where we’re going with this?

Match Your Offer To Each Segment

Let’s take a look at the next pages on our example websites. For the chiropractor website, one of the next pages might be for neck pain. Remember, your prospect just self-selected neck pain so we now have an answer to question #1 above. We know the prospect is experiencing neck pain and is looking for a solution.

We can ditch the sales material about relieving low back pain, headaches, or any other ailment and laser focus our message on techniques to relieve neck pain. We can even take this one step further and match the offer to this particular segment of website prospects. For example, a chiropractor may offer a specific 10 week neck pain relief program. I bet that would convert better than a generic “free consultation” offer, don’t you?

For the fitness example, you may need to segment one step further in order to craft a more compelling offer. Just knowing gender might not be enough. That’s why question #2 above is important. If you’re a fitness trainer and you know the visitor is a woman, then you could segment again by different fitness goals like losing stubborn belly fat, toning buttocks, or prenatal yoga. Again, it isn’t hard to see that an offer tailored to the exact needs of your prospect is going to convert more visitors into customers than a more generic “contact us” message.

Your Homework

Now that you know how to increase your website conversions, it’s time to take action. Review your website, starting with your homepage, and answer the two questions listed above. Then edit your webpages so that your visitors can self-select to find the exact offer they need.

If you would like more help with your digital marketing, then click here to tell me about your business.