How to convert inbound traffic to customers

10 effective ways to convert inbound traffic to customers Now that you have acquired your anticipated web traffic, what is the next step? The next step is simply to ensure your web traffic readily converts to leads. Conversion entails getting your prospective audience to respond to your Call-to-Action (CTA) on your website. This is very important because after responding to your CTA, your prospective customer is moving further down the buyer's journey and one step closer to a sale. If website traffic is the number of visitors to your site, conversion rate gives the number of people who took your desired action. When you go through your company's website, do you see areas where you can convert those visitors to leads? Do you focus on getting their email address to follow them? The conversion rate is, no doubt, the most useful metric in digital marketing; because having just traffic alone is of no use if the visitors to your site don't end up buying your products or services. Everyone is definitely interested in making sales and profits, and that can only be achieved by increasing your conversions. Now, you may ask- "why do I keep getting traffic, but no conversions?" The following may be the reasons: • You don't know enough about your audience; since making steady sales requires a strong understanding of your audience. • Acquiring the wrong traffic is likely the main reason why your high traffic website is not converting. If your keywords don't accurately reflect what your products are, or how your target audience searches, you're likely attracting the wrong set of people. • Rendering poor assistance to leads: helping your leads move through the sales funnel, is essential. Even your most qualified leads likely won't be ready to convert immediately after finding your company's website. • Your offer is not compelling enough: to compete online, you need something more compelling than local convenience. You need to spot out why your product or service is the best and state in clear terms why it should be chosen above others. • Your interface is too complex: if users can't figure out how to make a purchase or operate your product, it is extremely unlikely that they will convert. • Your web design may need an update; an outdated website can make your prospective customers lose interest, resulting in a high bounce rate and no conversions. For an increase in traffic to lead to an increase in conversion, the traffic must consist of highly targeted users (targeted with compelling purchase-intent content) being funneled to high-converting pages. Having said a lot, how then can you convert inbound traffic to customers? These 10 strategies will produce results before you know it!

1. Create good content for your target audience

A target audience is a representation of the type of people who buy your products and services. When defining your audience, you'll identify their job titles, demographic factors, and lifestyle attributes. By creating good content targeted to your web site visitors, you'll attract website traffic that has a higher probability to buy your products and services. To improve visitors from search, make a serious effort to increase the number of blog articles you write. If those blog articles have keywords and phrases strongly integrated into the blog strategy, they will largely improve your search results and impact visitor numbers. You might also decide to change your website's URL naming conventions and impact results quickly. When you change a services page to a page with a question in the URL, Google sees it as a more valuable page. Your goal at first is not to make sales to your audience, but to rather help them with valuable educational content. For example, instead of just posting blog articles, it is more effective to post conversation starters. Then follow up with supporting information to fuel the conversation and engage your audiences. Conclude the mini-campaign with content that people can download. In this way, you are not only driving up social media reach numbers and new visitors to your website, but you're also giving those visitors the opportunity to convert into leads across various social media sites; ranging from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Your website needs to have a variety of different pages for different phases of your prospects'buyer journeys. You need pages for awareness, pages for consideration, and pages for decision-making, and you need offers that align with those pages. 2. Create effective calls-to-action A call-to-action is an image, text (like graphics, buttons, or links) that prompts a visitor to take action, like registering to download an eBook or attend a webinar. Effective calls-to-action give explicit information on the offer is all about and include action-oriented verbs like download, get, etc. If you put a Contact Us offer on an awareness page, the conversion rate would likely be very low, because the people on that page may not have intentions to communicate with you yet. If you put a Request a Free Trial offer on an awareness page, they are not going to convert, either. The reason is that free trials are usually bottom-of-the-funnel, decision-making offers and putting them on the home page or every page is an error you should always avoid. You should rather take your website through a mapping exercise where you identify the role of each page in the buyer journey. Then add the right offers to the right pages. These pages have to get added if you want to give visitors the experience they need to convert from visitors to customers. Make sure they lead a prospect to the relevant page or landing page designed specifically for that purpose. 3. Create effective landing pages By definition, landing pages refer to possible segments where many of your conversions will occur. They are specifically designed to convince visitors to sign up for your email list, download a lead magnet, start a free trial, or buy your latest product or service. Landing pages are the website pages where a visitor completes a form in order to receive your content offer. Landing pages keep the promise made in the call-to-action and the best place to start is by targeting high-traffic landing pages. Through a series of optimization strategies, you can double, or in some cases triple, the conversion rate on these already well-known pages. 4. Improve your pitch by consistently emphasizing your value proposition A unique value proposition answers the question of why should I buy your product or service instead of all the other options available to me. Each segment of your lead conversion process should give the visitor reason to take the next step. For instance, the call-to-action should incent the visitor to click to the landing page, the headline of the landing page should incent the visitor to read the body, the body should incent the visitor to complete the form to become a customer. In digital marketing, it is very important that you improve your pitch. You just need to know what works for your audience. If you are selling bags for instance; a lot of people know what bags are, so you don't need to explain how they work or what they're for. You just need to bottom-line why your bags stand out as the most preferable choice. 5. Display case studies, testimonials, and social proof Make it a point of duty to collect reviews from your customers, ask previous customers to create testimonial videos, and mention any high-profile customers you have had dealings with, at their consent. If a popular person in your industry has used your product and gave it a pass mark, state that fact on your homepage, landing pages, and elsewhere on your website. Social proof, case studies, and testimonials are all effective ways to convince your website visitors to convert. Your aim is to convince them that they are not staking their trust on something new and untested. You should ensure that you boost their confidence in what you have to offer. 6. Offer free trials and place offers Another way to improve conversion rates is to create opportunities for free trials and place offers across your site more strategically. Free trials let your customers test-drive your product before they decide to go for it. An e-commerce company that targets web entrepreneurs once ran a series of viral giveaways for prizes like 100 books on entrepreneurship, lifetime paid accounts for online tools like Evernote or Dropbox. In other words, they focused on the kind of offers that appeal exactly to their target customers. You can also do something similar; create partnerships and offer special packages and deals with other products. 7. Use email marketing sequences You probably have gone shopping at your favorite mall for something you needed badly, but ended up not getting what you needed, despite the varieties the vendor had to offer. In some cases, that doesn't mean the sale is lost; because you might likely return days, weeks, or even months later to check again. If the sales associate keeps in touch with you, he or she can shorten that lead time and encourage you to buy faster. Email marketing sequences can bring your un-converted customers back. You might start with a reminder that your product or service is still for sale, then outline its key features and specific benefits. In another email, you might offer time-sensitive discounts. Alternatively, you could use social proof or testimonials to provide an incentive that would attract them again. 8. Use remarketing Remarketing is basically advertising to an already existing audience. A remarketing ad is an advertisement that displays for consumers who have interacted with your website in some way on a previous occasion. For example, a consumer finds out about one of your blog posts via Google search, then visits Facebook and sees an ad for your product. Surprisingly, this works so well. According to WordStream, remarketing ad impressions positively correlate with conversions. In other words, more impressions mean more conversions. 9. Optimize your website for mobile use Optimizing your website to improve its mobile usability can significantly contribute to a more satisfactory user experience and also has the potential of increasing the customer's intention to purchase the product. By simplifying your web site's navigation and graphics, and re-adjusting the size of 'click-to-call' buttons and other icons, it will become much easier for users to find the product they're looking for and contact you if needed. Any customer would value a well-thought-out, clean, and straightforward web design which can significantly speed up the purchasing process and result in more inbound calls. If you have already optimized your site and you experience drops in inbound calls, you can also go further to ask callers to rate their mobile site experience and leave a feedback, so that you know what needs to be worked on. 10. Improve your online customer support Even if your goal is to get more inbound calls to your call centers, you would still benefit from establishing a very reliable online customer service that focuses on offering needed support to your customers. Services such as online web chat and web calls are great ways to engage customers, thereby offering a more personalized online experience. If your clients require further support and more explanation on products, your web chat agents can easily redirect them to contact the call center. Implementing web chat or web calling software can also give you a better overview of the complete customer journey, from the moment they enter your site's landing page to the finalization of purchase. Combining online conversion solutions with offline inbound calls will help you better understand your customers' purchase behavior and in turn, optimize your marketing campaigns. With all of these in mind, you are on your way to likely get more conversions that will boost your sales and website performance.