Posted on November 16, 2022 in Marketing Thoughts

There are many businesses struggling to increase the leads and conversions their website generates. Once they reach a satisfactory number of daily visitors to their website but don’t see any conversions, they are at a loss. Bringing traffic to a website with proper search engine optimization can be difficult but the path to success is well-documented.

Increasing conversions is less well-documented. Quick Google searches can end up with finding advice that sounds more like guesses than facts.

Let’s walk through 10 of the best ways to increase your website’s conversion rate.

Live Chat

Possibly the single best action you can take is to implement Live Chat on your website.

Get a great Live Chat tool and convert a confused visitor into a loyal customer. The appeal of Live Chat is obvious: it allows you to fully answer customer questions, guide the customer toward conversion, build human and emotional connections with the customer that last, increase customer satisfaction, and more.

Chatbots, on the other hand, can be frustrating. The main appeal of chatbots is that, in theory, they save money by not paying human beings to be your customer service representative. That can be true but it’s hardly the whole picture.

Money lost from frustrated customers is never counted because it was never received. In that sense, it’s easy to claim the savings benefits of using chatbots. But what was the cost for all the customers who didn’t get the customer service they wanted, and left?

If your business has so many customer requests that you are trying to save money by avoiding them, that’s most likely a very successful business already. It’s unlikely you got where you are by ignoring your customers.

Stay the course with a solid, friendly, engaging customer service philosophy. Then kick it up a notch with live chat to satisfy and convert even more visitors.

Don’t avoid your customers. Connect with them today through BirdSeed’s Live Chat!

Remarketing

Remarketing is designed to recapture your potential customer’s attention after they leave your website.

Many customers start to shop for items only to abandon their carts. The percentage of buyers who abandon their carts is much higher than the number of shoppers who checkout. In 2018, the percentage of abandoned carts was just over 75%.

During their visit, make capturing their email address a priority. Having their email address allows you to send reminders to them about the items they looked at, greatly increasing your odds of converting them into a customer.

The customer was interested and engaged when they added the product to their cart. They could have left your website for any number of reasons:

• By accident
• They weren’t engaged
• Something came up
• Decided they didn’t want the product after all
• Weren’t ready to buy

People browse the web very frequently, and the data supports the idea that the large majority of visitors to websites aren’t ready to buy. This is where remarketing is most powerful. When interested but hesitant customers continue to see ads for the product(s) they wanted, they are more likely to remember and visit your website when they are ready to buy.

Remarketing is a very in-depth subject with many different applications. We’ll just briefly touch on some of the strategies here to get you started in your research of the topic.

Different remarketing strategies

• Email Remarketing:

Email capture is the most frequently sought-after piece of information from users visiting a website. See our section on Emails below for more details.

• Video Remarketing:

This can be done on YouTube by displaying your video ad prior to, during, or on the side of the video, the user is watching.

• Standard Remarketing:

Use Google Display Ads to retarget visitors that landed on your website but left by displaying ads on other Google Display Network sites and apps.

• Dynamic Remarketing:

Dynamic retargeting is more specific than Standard Remarketing: It involves displaying ads that are dependent on the precise actions the visitor took while on your website.

• Remarketing Lists for Search Ads:

This is a Google Adwords offering that allows for very customized campaigns in Google Search Ads.

Emails

Every successful website you go to will try one way or another to capture your email, and they have a good reason: Email lists are one of the most powerful of all marketing & conversion tools.

The reason email lists are such powerful conversion tools is that the subscriber has given you permission to contact them whenever you want, rather than passively hoping they will someday return to your website.

You can:

• Give users of tips and tricks to optimize their use of your product or service
• Inform them of new services or additions to your product line
• Entertain & engage with snippets, and drive users to your website to see the full content

There are many benefits to those types of newsletter emails:

• They give value to your customers
• Show unconverted subscribers that you have more to offer
• They increase brand awareness
• Can build customer loyalty and return customers

Acquisition Emails

These emails are designed to convert users from being interested in your products into actual customers. As we mentioned above in the Remarketing section, a heavy focus on capturing visitor emails before allows you to follow up later.

All websites are almost guaranteed that a majority of users are going to be abandoning their carts. But there are other options than just passively accepting the percentage of conversions you get. Acquisition emails allow you to regain some of that unrealized revenue by using acquisition emails targeted to users that only visited your website and never checked out.

A perfect example of an acquisition email would be an “Abandoned Cart” email, a reminder that they left products in their cart. Another set of acquisition emails could be targeted to visitors whose emails were captured but didn’t add anything to the cart. You can send them attractive images of your products, sprinkled with customer reviews and descriptions of the quality, shipping speed, etc.

All types of acquisition emails pair well with an exclusive promo code that will expire in several days. This method of offering opportunities with urgency helps users convert to customers.

Retention Emails

Retention emails can be the gentle nudge an inactive subscriber needs to notice your products and come back to your website again. You can ask for reviews of the products they have purchased in the past, ask them to fill out a survey, join a contest for some of their products, and more. Having some customer churn is inevitable, but the rate at which it happens can be slowed or dramatically reduced by careful retention emails and strategies.

Promotional Emails

Promotional emails advertising sales are most effective with returning customers who were pleased with their original purchase(s). If someone hasn’t converted yet, certainly lower prices will help them make the leap into being a paying customer.

But if they haven’t converted yet, you may need to convince them that buying from your website is a good idea, regardless of price. Don’t send the same single email and think it will convert everyone on your mailing list.

Even within your target audience, you have customers either in different demographics or at least in different parts of their customer journey. If a user needs to be convinced of the quality of your product or doesn’t fully understand a service, you’ll have a hard time converting that user with just a promotional email.

A good strategy to convert those types of hesitant potential customers is through acquisition emails or newsletters.

Newsletter Emails

Newsletters are one of the best ways to provide off-site value to your users and customers while increasing conversions.

Though it’s certainly possible to alienate subscribers with irrelevant emails, overly pushy ads, or a bad value-to-ad ratio in your overall email mix, when used wisely newsletter emails remain one of the best marketing tools available to maintain and increase conversions.

Create Compelling Calls To Action (CTAs)

Determining what CTA is actually compelling to your users requires experimentation. This is an excellent subject for an A/B test as described below. Increased or decreased conversions will show whether a new call to action is performed or not.

Use strong action verbs like:

• Subscribe
• Buy
• Order
• Download
• Get

In addition, anything you can offer for free is a great way to provide value and incentivize potential customers to engage with your website. Offering free materials will also raise your chances of capturing user emails for continued remarketing after they leave your website.

Build Trust & Create Connections

Trust is not easy to obtain. Many customers are rightly suspicious and have been burned before by unscrupulous companies. Taking a positive, proactive approach to building trust is the most reliable way to engender it in your visitors.

Use Customer Testimonials

The reason so many websites have so many reviews and encourage customers to leave reviews is that having reviews increases conversions.

Take the time to reach out to your customers and gather reviews of your product or service. It would be productive to set up email follow-ups prompting customers for reviews. Many websites also offer incentives to incentivize users to leave reviews, making it a win-win scenario for you and the customer.

BirdSeed’s Customer Testimonials tool allows you to seamlessly present your good reviews and encourage users to finalize their purchases.

Optimize Your Website For Mobile

Mobile web searches account for almost 60% of all web searches. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile viewing, you are missing out on a large number of potential customers.

Focus on creating a great customer experience regardless of the platform.

Responsive websites have already made great strides in dominating search results, and that will only increase. Google favors responsive websites, and so will your users. Increasing the mobile-friendliness of your website can help your customers understand better and convert easier.

Provide Valuable Content

You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is King”. While it’s not the be-all and end-all of creating conversions, creating valuable content helps your website on many levels. Well-targeted and written content aimed at providing value to your audience is always important, but other forms of content are becoming ever more popular. Having a library of valuable content on your website can help not only educate customers but push them closer to the purchase point.

Videos

About Us pages are necessary, but most customers won’t end up navigating to that page. Introduce yourself and your team with a quick video message, explain your quality standards or create an unboxing video of your product(s). This reassures the customer your website is trustworthy. People prefer to spend their money on personable people who speak their language, rather than on a faceless overseas corporation.

Pictures & infographics

Use pictures that are relevant to the intent of your landing page or your target audience. Infographics that provide value add another level of comprehensibility to your page to help your users understand your content more easily and fully.

Use Proactive Messaging and Popups

Proactive Messaging is an appeal or greeting to the user without the experiential interruption of a popup. Popups certainly have their place and provide excellent value to users with exclusive codes and offers, but they can also be annoying and drive users away with requests for information or action that users are not yet ready to take.

Get your message noticed with Proactive Messaging

BirdSeed’s Proactive Messaging gets your message noticed without being in the way. Think of it as a greeter welcoming people as they enter a store.

With options for video greetings and instant Live Chat, that’s a great way to describe the digital customer service atmosphere that BirdSeed creates. It’s a great option to greet your customers and tell them a little about yourself and your website. Provide some quick links below the video to give them quick access to your most valuable pages. These pages should ideally be the most valuable to your users and to your conversion strategy.

Popup Strategies

Popups range from effective to annoying, so it’s important to get them right.

Offer something of value to your user. Offering them a promo code sent to their email is a classic and effective strategy, although it’s focused less on immediate conversion and more on remarketing if they leave your website without converting.

Or you could inform them of a current sale ending soon. Countdown timers convey a sense of urgency that can spur the visitor to make a decision on the spot instead of waiting for another day.

Use Data & Testing to Drive Conversions

A/B testing

Using A/B or split testing is a very easy and effective way to increase conversions: Create two different versions of a landing page and see from the results which one is more likely to convert users into customers.

The changes can be small or large, but if you already have a successful site, small changes are less risky. You could change the main image on the page, the call to action, the header text, etc.

It’s a relatively simple process to set up an A/B testing plugin or extension, and it’s a very powerful tool to make incremental improvements. A good headline or the right image can sometimes be the deciding factor that keeps visitors to your site engaged.

Engagement data

Knowing how people are engaging with your website is crucial: Anybody can guess what the best solution and tools for your company would be. But only the data on how your customers actually interact with your website will lead to true optimization of your engagement & conversions.

BirdSeed provides extreme levels of detail in exactly how your users are engaging with your website. The detailed reports show you exactly what customers are using and what they avoid. BirdSeed excels in testing how different options for engagement actually perform, which gives you the ability to improve or remove the tools you’ve selected.

Revenue is the goal

The ultimate deciding factor to determine the success of any and all of your strategies is how they affected your revenue.

Be sure to allow enough time for your changes to have an effect; almost nothing brings success overnight. But once enough time has passed to see the effects of your changes, cut what hurts your revenue and double down on the tools and strategies that grow revenue.

Streamline & Remove Distractions

Take away unnecessary animations

Animations are flashy and fun to use when designing a website, but slow page loading speeds will drive many customers away before they even get a chance to see your design.

Minimize the effect your animations have on your landing page loading speeds. If that means removing the animations entirely from your landing page, don’t worry. Successful landing pages drive customers in one direction: toward conversion. Simpler is usually better than a complicated page that pulls the user’s attention in different directions.