How to Convert Website Visitors into Customers

Turning website visitors into customers can be a challenge for any online business. After all, no one has a 100% conversion rate, so there’s always room for improvement. In today’s article, we’ll explore some different methods of turning those undecided visitors into customers.

It's important to keep in mind that if you’re looking to improve your conversions, it probably means you’re pretty happy with the amount of traffic you’re receiving. That’s good news. However, it’s also worth considering if you’re bringing the right people to your website to begin with. When is the last time you looked at your buyer persona. Are you sure that your target audience is in fact who you think it is?

Having said that, the tips we’ll look at today will assume the traffic and audience is to your liking. The real issue for you is converting traffic once these users are on your website. We’ll focus on 5 main themes:

Focus on your product pages
Highlight customer support
Build trust
Be transparent
Optimise your marketing efforts

Focus on your product pages

To begin, let’s look at the most influential page when it comes to converting visitors into customers: your product pages.

Detailed product descriptions

When analysing any element of your online business, try to look at things from the shopper’s perspective. When it comes to the product description on your product pages, consider whether there is enough information there. Does the shopper get enough details to feel comfortable completing their order? Are the important specifications there? Try to hit all the important points in your product description:

product name
product brand
dimensions
colour
weight
main features
main benefits

Speak your audience’s language

This is another element of your website that requires you to have a good understanding of your audience. Depending on how you drive traffic to your site and who your customers are, it might be worth having a closer look at your buyer persona. In other words, who is your core audience?

Being clear on this topic can help you influence the style of your texts as well as other marketing efforts.

A shop that sells fishing gear is going to speak a different “language” than a shop that sells urban fashion. In many ways, this can give your shop a bit of credibility. Using the right voice for your audience places you in their community. For niche audiences, this can be really important.

Source: Shutterstock/Master1305

Focus on the benefits

Product features are always important to highlight, but benefits are the ones that speak to consumers’ emotions. A great salesman once said “You don’t sell the steak. You sell the sizzle.” This means that a steak can sound appetizing by itself. But the sound of the steak cooking can be even more powerful. The sounds, the smells, the memories and feelings associated with the steak are a much more emotional selling point than the steak on its own.

Keep this in mind when you write your product descriptions. Tell the reader not only how this product works, but how it’s going to improve their lives.

Think about television commercials for the latest smartphones. Many of them have a lot of similar features. Many of the flagship phones are indistinguishable from each other. So, companies like this will try to focus on the features that really make them stand out.

If the newest phone can take great night-time shots, you should definitely mention how artificial intelligence helps make better images in low-lighting settings. But how can you take it to the next level? Focus on the great times you have in real life… in low-light situations: Parties in clubs, bars, concerts, and weddings. With this camera, those unforgettable events will really be unforgettable!

Product images and videos

Having high-quality product images is basically an absolute must these days. However, as an avid online shopper, it’s apparent that many online shops don’t feel the same way.

A simple rule of thumb: you can never have too many product images.

Okay, you probably can have too many images, but that’s not the point. It’s better to have too many than to have too few. Show the product from different angles. Show it in use. Like the description, the images should not leave much to the user’s imagination.

Source: shutterstock/gpointstudio

Product videos can be a bit trickier. If you have the time and resources, it could make sense to do some product videos as well. A short introduction to the product, showing it in use, a 360-degree perspective. There are a lot of things you can do with video. They are getting more popular and it’s something you should also consider for your online shop.

Highlight customer support

Having reliable customer support can be a great selling-point for shoppers. They may check customer reviews for insights into this (more on that later), but there are a few things you can do to make this an obvious benefit of shopping with your brand.

Communicate your availability

Shoppers may very well look for signs of whether or not your customer support is helpful. It’s up to you to communicate your availability. If your site’s visitors see that your phone number, email address and chat bots are easily accessible, this communicates your willingness to help them, whether it’s before, during, or after the purchase.

Future Shop, one of the most reliable AV shops in the UK, even posts two phone numbers directly in their navigation. They also highlight their “free expert advice” on every page as well. If customer satisfaction really is important to your shop, make yourself available to your customers (and let them know you’re there for them!).

Source: Future Shop

Highlight your guarantee, return policy, or buyer protection

If you’re a shop owner that really stands behind their products and/or services, consider highlighting your return policy in your shop.

Whether it’s a 30-day Buyer Protection that customers can opt into like the one offered by the Trusted Shops Trustmark or a personal return policy, make sure your shoppers know the option is there for them.

Source: Solarplexius

To learn more about the Trusted Shops Trustmark or contact us directly.

Build trust

Trust is such an important element to boosting conversions and turning those unsure site visitors into customers.

Many of the tips we’ve already mentioned fall into this topic of building trust. However, there are some more things you can do to proactively boost your shop’s trustworthiness for first time visitors.

Collect and display customer reviews

As we touched on earlier, customer reviews can give your site’s visitors insights into your customer service. Obviously, customer reviews can give even more insights into your business than just your customer service.

It’s important to differentiate between two types of reviews that are important to online businesses: product reviews and service reviews.

Product reviews are reviews that give consumer feedback on the product they purchased.

Service reviews (aka shop reviews) give consumer feedback on the service of the shop. This relates more to topics like delivery and customer service.

Both types of reviews are important and are treated by Google differently. Google can display both types of reviews in the search results for both paid and organic results. Therefore, these reviews can be trust-builders before the consumer even “steps foot” in your store.

Collecting and displaying reviews is therefore important for building customer trust. In the best case scenario, you display these ratings directly on your website, so shoppers don’t need to go elsewhere to read up on your online reputation. On top of that, you should make sure you reply to reviews as well.

Trusted Shops offers shop owners Google-certified reviews that can be displayed in different ways on your website. They can also be sent to Google automatically to boost the conversion rates of your Google Ads as well.

Create an About Us page

An About Us page can be a great way to build trust as well. If you don’t have a dedicated “story-telling page”, utilise the About Us page to tell your company’s story.

If your story isn’t super compelling, that’s okay. You can share other insightful things, like sharing your employee stories or day-to-day life in the office. If people can empathize with you, there’s a higher chance they’ll buy from you. Again, this can be really helpful in niche industries as well as it gives your shop even more credibility.

For a deeper look at creating your About us page, click on the link below:

Recommended reading:
5 Things to Keep in Mind When Creating an "About Us" Page

Certifications

We already touched on what benefits the Trusted Shops Trustmark and Buyer Protection can do for your shop. However, depending on your industry, other certifications might be worth displaying on your website ranging from manufacturing processes to digital security:

SSL certificate
Fairtrade
PCI DSS certification
Vegan certification

Of course, there are lots of certifications out there. Some may be more relevant to your audience than others. This will require more research from your side.

Be transparent

Ah, transparency; the cousin of trust. This is another way that can build up some trust in a subtle way. Here are three quick ideas for adding a bit more transparency to your online shop.

Show your inventory

Depending on your shop software or e-commerce provider, as well as your inventory management tools, this could be an easy thing to implement on your website.

Not only does this give transparency about your products and your stock, but it also creates some urgency (if the number is low). Of course, you shouldn’t create false urgency by reporting incorrect numbers. However, simply displaying this number along with the other tips you’ve learned today adds another touch of transparency to your visitors’ shopping experience.

Shipping costs/options

No one likes surprises when it comes to completing an order, especially when pricing is involved. Always be sure to be transparent about shipping costs as early as possible (usually on the product page).

However, you can take this advice one step further by displaying all the shipping costs and options out there. Whether you offer free shipping or overnight deliveries, make sure users know what everything costs and who is providing the service. Depending on where the customer lives, they might have preferences for one logistics company over another.

More options and transparency is always a good thing!

Make an FAQ section

Depending on your business and your product line, it might make sense to create an FAQ page or section in your online shop. It would probably suffice to create on page somewhere rather than include it on every product page. In any case, it should be easily accessible and informative.

Source: Solarplexius

Optimise your marketing efforts

It’s important to know that many sales don’t occur during a shopper’s first visit. That’s okay. It’s just important to not give up on them. In this last section, let’s look at some things you can do to win them over after they’ve left your website (or in this first example, right before they leave).

Exit-intent pop-ups

As an internet user from the mid-90s, it pains me a little to recommend this, but the truth is that pop-ups can be really effective, especially in e-commerce stores. There are quite a few kinds of popups out there, but there is a specific one made for visitors who are about to leave your shop: the exit-intent pop-up.

As you might guess from the name, this pop-up can “sense” when a user is going to leave (when the user’s mouse moves towards the closing their tab/window, this action triggers the pop-up to reveal itself.

By offering an additional discount or some kind of incentive to complete the purchase, users may be inspired to complete their purchase after all.

Email marketing

Emails can seem as old-fashioned as pop-ups, but they can also be an effective tool for boosting conversions.

It’s worth noting that email marketing tends to work best for repeat customers, since including users into newsletters requires their permission, which isn’t easy to accomplish considering these are people who’ve never shopped with you before.

However, the task isn’t impossible. If you incentivize them to sign up for your newsletter, you might well get a few people to sign up. You could, for example, offer a one-time discount for people who sign up for your newsletter. Yes, a certain number of people will immediately unsubscribe, but not everyone will. It may well be worth the effort to get them to sign up though. After all, email marketing still offers one of the best ROIs in digital marketing.

When it comes to customer data, this is something you need to be careful about. Since the GDPR regulations came into effect in 2018, any company that does business in the EU should be aware of these regulations regarding data privacy.

GDPR regulations are also relevant for the next tip...

Retargeting

We’ve all witnessed it, and it’s probably worked on you as well. Retargeting can be a great tool to remind a website visitor of your great products after they’ve left your online shop.

Through social media ads or Google Ads, you can target those users to get them back in your site.

Once again, users need to opt into the cookies when they first enter your website, but if they give you permission, you should be good to go. With the help of various pixels, you can be getting those visitors back on your product pages in no time.

Conclusion

An online shop can always be optimised to improve your conversion rates. Turning website visitors into customers can be a challenge, since every user behaves a bit differently. That’s why it’s important to cover all your bases and show users why they can feel confident buying from your online shop, even if they’ve never heard of you before.