Generating traffic to your website is tough. Making the most of that traffic and transforming those visitors into paying customers is an even more challenging pursuit.
Your website could generate thousands of visitors per day, but if these people don’t buy your product, subscribe to your email list, or take your desired action while they are on your site, that’s a total waste of time and money – after all, you put a lot of money and hard work into getting that traffic in the first place.
A study by Econsultancy shows that only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their website’s conversion rate as they seek to turn visitors into actionable customers and clients.
If you do the calculation, you know the remaining 78 percent of businesses need to work on improving their conversion efforts.
A major challenge that B2B marketers face is a lack of strategy when it comes to both acquiring leads and nurturing them toward the ultimate goal: the sale.
You need a sound strategy to attract prospects, gain their trust, and persuade them to make a purchase.
That said, here are 4 proven methods to increase your conversions and benefit your entire business:
1. Make your buying process smooth
The truth be told: if you make it difficult for your customers to buy your product, they won’t, as there are many of your competitors who are doing far better than that.
With the recent improvements in technology and increased focus on customer satisfaction and ease of use, customers don’t want to jump through hoops before they can spend their money and buy from you.
Today’s customers want to be able to come to your website and find what they’re looking for without stress or hassle. But many companies fail at this.
How do you make it easier for your customers to buy from you?
i). Easy navigation: One of the steps you need to take is to design a website that customers can navigate easily.
From any page on your website, they must be able to access the most important pages areas of your site. Make sure you have a clear menu on your web page and link to your important pages from within your posts.
Here’s a good example:
Your website must also be mobile responsive for readers accessing your site on mobile. According to comScore, “online users spend on average 69% of their media time on smartphones.”
Likewise, you must be clear about what you’re selling.
What product or service does your company offer?
You must state this clearly on your website. This gives your customers a clear concept of what they’re paying for. Clarity in messaging and communicating your product will go a long way in inspiring your visitors to become leads by subscribing to your email list.
Remember that if people don’t understand what your offer is and how it can help them, even if they end up becoming a ‘lead’, they still will not buy your product in the long run.
ii). Payment platforms: Another way to make your buying process more smooth is to have all the payment platforms your customers might need available.
If your customers can’t pay for your product, then you’re going to lose many sales because of that. No one wants to go out of their way to grab another credit card, let alone go out of their way to open a Paypal account.
iii). Promotions: When customers have made the decision to finally buy a product, they will be looking for the best deal they can find.
For your website, offering promotions will encourage even more people to buy. Hello Bar is a great tool you can use to offer amazing promotions that your target audience will respond to.
Note that your promotional offer can be a piece of content that will resonate with your audience. For example, Garlic Shaker recorded success in their list building efforts by offering a garlic cookbook to site users.
As a result, the company was able to build a community around their main product, even before they started selling Garlic Shakers. In fact, their content promotional strategies boosted Garlic Shaker’s list from 220 subscribers to over 20,000 qualified subscribers!
2. Invest in your lead generation system
Every customer you get for your business starts out as a lead. From there, you nurture them until they become a paying customer. Of course, not every lead will end up being your customer.
But without leads, you can forget about gaining new customers. This is why you must invest in capturing more leads for your business.
There are several tools you can use to make this process easier and result-oriented, such as installing Hello Bar on your website to capture targeted leads that you can then follow up with using compelling content via email marketing.
To ensure you acquire qualified leads, you can set up customized triggers (for example, when someone signs up for a free trial, or downloads an ebook) on your website using tools like Acquire.io or similar tools.
According to the State of Inbound report from HubSpot, marketers see generating traffic and leads as their biggest marketing challenge. For many industries, there are many sources to gain leads.
Acquiring leads requires investment of your time and money. Ideally, a part of your marketing budget will be used for lead acquisition, nurturing, and retention.
As an organization, you have to determine which leads are worth fighting for and take action accordingly.
Most often, qualified leads are those that have shown an interest in your lead magnet (e.g., an eBook) or signed up to your free trial. On the other hand, someone who follows you on Twitter may not be a good lead to fight for, since they’re likely on social media to learn more about brands and not to buy a product.
Some of the ways that you can gain leads for your business are:
i). Use of live chat: Live chat is one of the best options to increase your lead generation process, as it’s quick and easy to set up. You can use it to reach and capture targeted leads and customers and start a direct conversations that will lead to sales in real-time.
In a survey by Vtldesign, “38% of online users said that they made their purchase because of that live chat session.”
One of the challenges you’ll likely face is choosing the right live chat software, as there are several of them out in the marketplace.
One proven way of choosing the right live chat software is to stick to software that’s AI-powered because it’ll boost customer engagement and deliver exceptional customer service.
Note: AI-powered live chat software gets insights about website users especially those who visit frequently. Based on their previous behavior, this software can help the live chat agent ask better questions and provide better answers.
ii). Blog: Your business blog helps to attract traffic from search engines to your website. If you offer value by solving your visitors’ problems when they visit, they might decide to find out more about your products.
This is one of the best channels to gain leads because after reading a blog post, your visitors will already have a level of trust in your business.
According to research by HubSpot, companies that published more than 16 blog posts per month got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that only published between 0 and 4 posts in a month.
Apart from this, a blog also helps your website to gain more organic traffic which is targeted traffic from keywords that are important to your business.
ii). Landing Pages: The main aim of your landing page is to capture leads. Your landing page should go straight to the point.
What does your potential lead gain when they give you their personal information? A discount offer? A free trial? The best available solution to their problem?
Another opportunity you should exploit is to have as many landing pages as possible on your website. Remember that landing pages are used primarily for providing compelling information that will motivate users to opt-in to an email list or buy a product.
Therefore, with multiple landing pages, there’s a chance of capturing more leads and increasing sales, since your offer will be seen by more targeted people.
For example, companies see a 55% increase in leads when they increase the number of their landing pages from 10 to 15. Likewise, your form fields should be structured depending on your goals.
Do you want to capture more leads? Having fewer form fields could help you achieve that. However, if you want to capture fewer but more sales qualified leads, then you can have a long form field.
iii). Social Media: With over 3 billion social media users, you should know that most of your leads are on social media. How do you attract them? On your social media accounts, visitors should know what products your business offer.
Furthermore, you should update your social media pages regularly and offer important information about your products and industry trends. In a survey, 60% of B2C marketers and 54% of B2B marketers claim they have generated leads from social media.
iv). PPC Ads: In some cases, you may have to advertise your business for some keywords that are important.
For Google Ads, you’ll have to bid depending on the competition for these keywords. Today, there are also PPC ads on social media channels.
These PPC ads usually lead to a landing page that you have optimized for conversion by testing the elements on the page.
WordStream reports that for search queries with commercial intent, ads get 65% of the clicks while the remaining goes to organic listings. If you’re selling a product, running an ad might prove to be worthwhile.
v). Industry Forums: When you participate in industry forums and solve people’s problems there, they may check out your business.
These are major sources you can generate leads for your business. However, you need a strategy to get the best out of these channels. Creating valuable and timely content are the ingredients that will make a discussion board engaging and desirable to your target audience.
3. Integrate chatbots into your website to engage users
For all our efforts as human beings to become perfect, we’re still far from achieving that aim.
For instance, human beings sleep, go on breaks, and lose concentration. During these periods, you’re unable to attend to your website visitors who might have important questions about your product or service.
You tried. You installed live chat. But your website visitors still wait for 5 or even 10 minutes before they get replies to their messages. Well, a chatbot performs these functions better – and more promptly.
In a survey about the potential benefits of chatbots, respondents claimed 24-hour service and getting an instant service as some of the biggest potential benefits. 37% also said they’ll use chatbots in an emergency and 35% will use it in resolving a complaint or problem.
Chatbots can be trained to answer some common questions that your visitors may have in a short period of time.
You can also add more answers later. And when your chatbot can’t answer your visitor’s question, it can alert your customer care reps to take over.
When you set up a chatbot, it allows your employees to focus on more important matters like talking to sales qualified leads and your current customers.
Amtrak, a railroad service, implemented the “Ask Julie” chatbot. The chatbot answered 5 million questions annually, increased bookings by 25% and the company generated 30% more revenue with bookings through the chatbot.
4. Develop a follow-up system using CRM
Capturing leads in today’s competitive business terrain is tough. Well, turning those leads to customers is even a tougher task. When you capture leads, you can’t just hope that they’ll become customers.
You have to follow up with your leads. You have to send important information to explain why they need your product. This is also an avenue to send promotional offers that will encourage your leads.
With your customer relationship management software, it is easy to track your interactions with your leads.
This system allows you to send messages automatically to your leads and watch how they interact with your content.
Through this, you can tag them based on their interests and segment them into various lists. This allows you to send personalized messages to each lead that they’re more likely to respond to.
According to Cloudswave, a sales CRM software can increase sales conversion rate by 300% and increase revenue by 41%.
GovMint.com, an asset marketing service, was able to close more deals with the personalization features of a CRM.
By following up on their hot leads, Envelopes.com got 40% more conversions.
Conclusion
With several content distribution and marketing channels, it’s easy to get distracted and flow with the noise. Social media, for one, can be a huge distraction to increasing your conversion rate.
That’s why you need to pay attention to channels (e.g, blogging, search engines, guest blogging) that will help you reach a more targeted audience that will be interested about your offer/message.
To improve your conversion rate, you have to draw more visitors to your website and turn them to leads. After this, you have to show them the benefits they gain when they buy your product.
Added to these, you have to make it easy for your customers and prospects to buy from you.
Converting customers into your sales funnel is a process. You have to make sure customers are not lost through holes in your sales funnel.
Author Bio: Sawaram Suthar is head of marketing at Acquire, and also a founder of Jagat Media and TheNextScoop. A digital marketing consultant, he has experience in things including branding, promotions and page optimization, along with research and strategy. He has an MBA from the University of Pune.