With Covid 19 moving everything even more digital, companies have seen their customers’ behaviour change from a brick-and-mortar first approach to a digital-first approach. This has meant many companies have to need to quickly pivot to an omnichannel model with a focus on online customer experience to maximize sales opportunities. This has been a struggle for many companies.
To make it easier -whether your target shopper is researching, looking for inspiration or ready to buy- we have compiled five simple and effective ways for businesses to increase leads and convert website visitors to paying customer.
1. Identify the optimal communication touchpoints in your customer’s journey and purchase path.
Customer experience typically revolves around touchpoints, which are the ways your business interacts with current or prospective customers. Communication touchpoints, which include interactions through your company’s website, emails, direct mail, advertising, social media accounts and even invoices, are essentially messages in which you connect with the customer or prospect in some way. Because these interactions may determine whether a prospect converts to a loyal customer or defects to a competitor, every touchpoint should be viewed as an opportunity.
To make the most of these opportunities, it’s important to identify the optimal communication touchpoints in your customer’s journey and purchase path. By pinpointing these crucial interactions through analytics that measure engagement, you can often find ways to improve the overall customer experience by curating quality content and on-brand messaging. Ultimately, this can help you optimize conversion at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
There are several effective paths to identifying and utilizing these optimal touchpoints:
- Understand who your customers are. Touchpoints can vary depending on the customer segment. Understanding whom your customers are letting you create messaging that resonates with your target audience.
- Identify your top-visited pages. Your top-visited pages offer some of the best opportunities to reach a large audience. Use them to provide clear and appealing descriptions of your brand, products or services. Include additional information, such as embedded videos or links to blog posts, which may facilitate the decision to purchase.
- Determine the highest-clicked calls to action. CTAs can help you drive traffic, secure leads and increase conversions. By targeting your highest-clicked CTAs, you can see what’s working, and use that information to improve CTAs with fewer click-throughs. To increase click-throughs on your CTAs, try adding arrows and bright colors, and decrease any clutter surrounding the text.
- Filter your analytics. Many analytics tools let you filter the source of your traffic by social or referral, which can reveal which website links or social media sites are driving the most traffic to your website. Once you know where your visitors are coming from, you can more effectively utilize these referring links by improving CTAs and overall messaging.
2. Use live chat to deliver the right message at the right time and the right place on your site.
Live chat software lets you trigger messages when visitors engage in specific behaviours on your website, letting you deliver appropriate messaging exactly when and where it’s needed. For example, you might initiate a chatbox when a visitor lands on a feature page or if their behaviour suggests they’re having trouble locating a product. These chat boxes let customers converse, via voice or typing, with a live sales expert or an artificial intelligence capable of simulating a person-to-person conversation.
Live chats work well because they engage customers while they’re already interacting with your company. Plus, by providing information, answering key questions and alleviating lingering concerns about products or services, contextual live chats often give prospects the push needed to convert them to paying customers. In fact, some industries are finding live chats to be one of the best ways to close sales. This is likely because contextual live chats let you:
- Demonstrate expertise: Concierge-style live chats are designed for engagement, often intercepting customers at critical moments in their purchase path and providing essential information or assistance. This strategic style of chat lets companies demonstrate expertise that can result in conversions.
- Deliver personalization: Live chats offer a personalized touch many consumers crave in this digital age. By letting visitors connect with a real person who can respond to their specific needs, you can build engagement and brand loyalty.
- Increase relevance: AI-driven live chats offer customers immediate access to relevant information and support. . AI-driven live chats can predict who your most valuable visitors are and provide visibility into their browsing habits. They can also be an effective way to open calls with live sales experts, letting your company collect information and direct queries to the relevant parties.
- Collect leads: Because chat boxes can usually record information, they’re a great way to get leads. The software can often register inbound and outbound visitors without requiring prospects to fill out cumbersome forms or sign up for promotional emails.
Contextual live chats may also be used to reduce customer service response times. This cost-efficient tool is user-friendly and scalable, so it’s ideal for increasing both conversions and lead generation.
3. Reduce the number of clicks by taking your customer to the product fast.
In our busy world, consumers appreciate efficiency, and the deeper a customer is on your website, the more likely they are to convert. That’s why it’s essential for your website to be easy to navigate. By taking site visitors to a product or service page quickly, you reduce the risk of losing a frustrated or distracted consumer to a competitor who offers a more streamlined website experience, and you improve your chances of converting them into paying customers.
In fact, customers should typically be able to land on any page of your website in three clicks or less.
- You can enhance navigation throughout your website by performing several important actions:
- Check for and remove broken links
- Make sure your search feature is visible and returns accurate, relevant results
- Set up clear, informative landing pages for main product categories
- Maintain consistency through coordinating design elements such as buttons, badges and text colors
- Ensure accessibility for visually impaired visitors by including descriptive ALT text with all images — especially those that are clickable — and other relevant design elements
- Supply an organized, easy-to-find website map, which gives visitors one-click access to landing pages, FAQs and other important content
- Use a mobile-friendly website design so browsers can easily shop on their phones or tablets
Be sure to consider additional navigation issues that apply to mobile users, including the ease of tapping, typing and scrolling on a small screen.
4. Remove any friction point, specifically in the shopping cart and at checkout.
Friction points are essentially hurdles that impede customers from finding value in or purchasing a product or service, and these stumbling blocks can be especially damaging when they involve the shopping cart and checkout process. these hurdles can often be minimized by following a few simple guidelines:
- Feature prominent checkout buttons
- Be upfront with your shipping cost and delivery timelines.
- Offer multiple payment options, including credit cards and digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Venmo and PayPal
- Add prominent links for customer support or a live chat if troubleshooting is required
- Make sure your checkout process is mobile friendly Include a guest checkout option for customers who don’t want to register for an account
- Add a single-page express checkout option for visitors who already have an account
5. Be transparent and set the right expectations around product availability and shipping.
Today’s consumers expect online retailers to be transparent about their practices and policies. This has become extremely important as companies continue to struggle with supply chain and inventory challenges during COVID. Transparency is particularly important for consumers who are hesitant to trust websites with their information, and unfortunately, a lack of available information or clarity may result in the permanent loss of a customer. Maybe more importantly, transparency can lead to satisfied, repeat customers and positive word of mouth, which is one of the best ways to generate leads.
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To instill trust in potential customers, making them more likely to buy, make sure to:
- Post your company’s refund policy: Your refund policy should be clear and easy to find. Better yet, if you offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, make sure to get and display this free badge prominently.
- Share buyer testimonials: Buyer testimonials can increase your company’s credibility. These positive reviews don’t cost anything, and they can provide additional information, including product descriptions and the potential value of an item or service, making it easier for a browser to make the decision to buy.
- Show “Just Bought” notifications: These real-time plug-ins display pop-up notifications when customers buy something. They can typically be customized to include recent purchases or to display only purchases in a certain category.
- Add in stock quantities at the product level: Letting your customers know when you’re running low on an item is a great way to maintain transparency while encouraging prompt sales. Inventory countdown plug-ins can display your stock quantities in real time, creating a sense of urgency that propels customers to buy now.
- Clearly message estimated shipping timelines: Customers who shop at the holidays are often buying gifts for family and friends. By providing shipping options and estimated arrival times, you’re helping them make informed decisions. Make sure to include any special offers, such as free shipping upgrades after certain dates, or complimentary standard shipping when the customer spends a certain amount.
A Second Chance at converting a customer
Sometimes website visitors just aren’t ready to buy, and not every prospect will ultimately convert to a paying customer. However, opportunities for sales don’t end when a potential buyer leaves your site. Offering customers a second chance to purchase products and services is another effective way to increase conversions during the holidays and beyond, and online retailers now have several easy options for reaching individuals who’ve left without making a purchase:
- Lead/customer capture through Live Chat: Triggering a Live Chat when a customer abandons cart or checkout is an efficient way to ‘save the sale’, increase customer satisfaction and turn your customers into brand promoters and loyalists.
- Abandoned cart notifications: Consumers often add items to online shopping carts but leave without checking out. You can reach out to these individuals through abandoned cart notifications. These targeted emails, which are sometimes referred to as cart recovery emails, are designed to bring customers back to your store to complete their purchase after they’ve had a chance to reconsider.
- Social media pixels: Social media pixels, also known as tracking or retargeting pixels, are snippets of code that let you track a visitor’s browsing habits while they’re on your website. These individuals are then retargeted on social media through paid ads, often for the exact product, they were just viewing. Even when this doesn’t lead to an ultimate conversion, pixels can help companies understand their visitors’ shopping patterns so they can generate better leads and improve conversions going forward.
- Exit surveys: When a visitor exits your site without purchasing the items in their shopping cart, you can trigger an exit survey, which asks the customer why they chose not to check out. These brief surveys can be helpful for flagging any website issues that keep customers from buying.
These second chances are also great opportunities to provide customers with additional incentives, such as exclusive discounts and limited-time offers if they decide to buy. They can also create a sense of urgency by letting them know stock is running low and they should order now rather than risk missing out on their coveted item.
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