“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.” – Jeff Eisenberg
The last time we talked about the importance of converting websites visitors to leads and leads to customers. However, what if we said despite having the best website – great content, smashing graphics – all leading to huge amount of ‘traffic’ – you are failing to convert visitors to customers. Does that happen to you? Have you thought about it – what could be the reasons that your website is failing to convert visitors to customers? It would be imprudent to let all the time, money and effort spent on creating your wonderful website go waste – given that ‘crunch’ is all around.
People are becoming more aware – they are being introduced to new technology. Whatever information they need is available at the click of a button and in the palm of their hand too. Whatever we seem to know on one day, seems to get replaced or ‘upgraded’ the next! There is in-depth research being carried out on how to enhance customer experiences and how to optimize ‘conversions’ from website. Failing to convert visitors to customers is not an option – since that would mean that the ‘conversions’ are happening elsewhere and your company is losing out on valuable revenue and customer base. It is indicated that even a 1% conversion rate of approximately 4000 visitors to the company’s website would be 40 customers and so if you were to focus on increasing the conversion rate, you would have a sizeable customer base just from website visitors. Let’s just say it is a three step process – put together a great website, get more traffic to it and ensure that you avoid the pitfalls that would lead you to fail in converting visitors to customers.
While focusing on building a creating a great website one of the crucial things to keep in mind is ensuring that you are aware of what can make your website ‘off-putting’. Once you have developed it, look at it from the customer’s perspective in order to ascertain what could be the possible causes that the website fails to convert visitors to customers. The website must excel in both quality and quantity and attract the kind of visitors who would benefit from the contents on it and therefore decide to give your company business. You could enlist the help of a professional company to help you raise conversion rates. The benefit of using an ‘outside view’ is to get an impartial and focused opinion on the quality of your website – content, graphics, navigation, usefulness and being user-friendly.
Getting opinions and feedback on your website will reveal any disastrous imperfections too, that can then be done away to prevent the failure of conversion of visitors to customers. To start with ensure that the landing page does not ‘force’ the visitors to do something they may not want – like filling in a form with personal details to access information. Gated content obviously must not be on this page. Seems like common sense! Ensure that your ‘visitors’ know what they can do – any scepticism or reluctance should be done away with when the ‘land’ on the first page of the website. If not, you can be sure that the preconceptions that people have of companies and websites, will get the better of them and they will never even return, much less want to be customers.
Does your website scream ‘sales’? This is a bad idea especially if your company’s products are technical, costly, not as easy to comprehend and would need planning and risk management. This is a great way to prevent the conversion of visitors to customers and also probably drop the number of ‘visitors’ too.
We mentioned in a previous exposition, the importance of an impactful landing page on the website. Failure to convert visitors to customers could be because the landing page is cluttered, confused, hard to comprehend and completely overloaded with information. Would you want to navigate or even spend a few minutes on something that looks and feels so clumsy? For example – some of my friends get very easily irritated when they land on a page that has an auto video or audio. It really should be the choice of visitors whether they want to listen to or watch something – don’t shove it at them. You can be sure, that a lot of your visitors won’t return and would do their friends and associates a ‘favour’ by warning them about your company’s website.
Ensure that your website is relevant – by that we mean that the content therein must connect with the visitors. If a person is searching for something in particular and is redirected to your website, ensure that the person reaches that portion of your website that deals with the particular subject rather than on the ‘landing page’. Not doing so, just wastes time and effort for the visitor in trying to get to the portion that is of relevance to them. Your website should save time, effort and be easy to use for even first time visitors.
A great way to distress visitors and also prevent conversion from visitors to customers is to ‘throw’ jargon at them on the first page that pops up on your website. Enough to have them scurrying off your site! Unless the visitor is specifically looking for your products and the complex jargon, don’t shove it at them. Make your website friendly and attractive for all – you never know who may ‘visit’ – you don’t want to close any window of opportunity.
Another great way to block visitors out is by sounding fake or should we say by presenting your company in a manner that sounds made up or over the top. Why would you do that – all you are conveying is that your company too has no faith in its products and you are ‘over trying’. The content must not appear incredulous – rather should reflect honesty, candidness and high values. I remember a website of a chain of resorts – while the resorts, no doubt are in naturally picturesque surroundings, the description of nature is as though the resort in the particular region has something to do with it! I left the page laughing and never returned! Your website should be about who your company is and reflect the character and culture of your company.
If you don’t care about converting visitors to customers, then it would be fine to create a website that ‘talks at’ the visitors. By this we mean that your company’s website has no space for the visitor’s views – no portion to provide feedback, or post comments, or ask questions or even add a line or two complimenting you and giving you value added suggestions. Not allowing any of these activities tells the visitors that your company does not have place or value for their views – would anyone want to convert from visitor to customer for such a company? Ensure that your website is interactive – in fact this is one of the critical areas for the success of any website and for a company. Visitors need to be assured that when they become customers, the service provided will be high level and of great quality.
Don’t allow visitors to share, email and print content and pictures from your website and you can be sure not to have a high conversion rate. With social media occupying ubiquitous status it would be highly detrimental to the ‘health’ of your company to ignore it from your website. The fact is that when your website does not allow such ‘sharing’ your company is limiting its opportunities and reducing the amount of time each visitor spends on the website. Allowing sharing increases your company’s reach, increases visibility, builds relationships and also allows encourages conversions from visitors to customers, who then have the ‘power’ to encourage more such conversions.
These are just some of the things that could be keeping visitors away or restricting the number of conversions your company has from its website. Keep your website true to your company – just because something works for someone else does not mean that it would work for your company. This is even more crucial to remember since your company’s products and services are different, target customers are different and even your company’s culture and values are not the same as the next company. Don’t copy / replicate anything blindly – analyse what could work, run a pilot and then tweak it till you can see the conversions from visitors to customers increasing.
