3 Specific Ways to Convert Website Visitors into Customers

You’ve done your due diligence. You’ve got your buyer persona created. You know the buyer’s journey inside out, backward, and upside down. You’ve optimized your site with keywords your persona is searching for.

Congrats. You’ve just completed the first step of the inbound marketing methodology. Attract!

So… now what? Do you just sit back and wait? What do you do once the right kind of people are actually visiting your site? That’s the million dollar question on the web these days.

What in the world do you do with your visitors once you have them?

For starters, you can let your newly optimized website do the heavy lifting for you. That’s what it’s there for, after all; to convert website visitors into customers or qualified leads. That’s what you do next. Here are three surefire ways you can do that.

1.) Use Call to Action Buttons Strategically

Don’t you hate when people use that word? “Strategically.” What does it even mean? Here's my strategic advice: just ask your visitors to take the next most logical step toward doing business with you. That step is defined by what page they’re on and where they are in the buyer’s journey.

For example, if they’re on your Pricing Page, the next logical step would be to view your pricing plans. If your prices are not already listed on the page, you should have a CTA asking them to download your free pricing sheet.

Tip: Make sure your CTA verbiage uses value language, not cost language.

If they’ve already downloaded your pricing sheet, then you have their information in your system.

In that instance, you should use a Smart CTA.

Many marketing automation platforms have Smart CTAs or something similar. A Smart CTA will recognize a return visit to your pricing page and compare that with what the system already knows about the user. If the user has already downloaded your pricing sheet, it wouldn’t be very logical to ask them to download the same thing again.

Your smart CTA will dynamically change to offer up the next most logical step to nurture your prospect down the sales funnel. In this case, that step should be to contact you for a custom quote.

A Smart CTA can have as many or as few options as you’d like. Always have the default CTA set to be a top-of-funnel offer – such as a newsletter sign up or subscribing to your blog feed. The default is what will be displayed to new users or those who don’t meet any of the criteria for more specific CTAs. If you have more relevant top-of-funnel offers based different pages of your website, use those instead.

2.) Use Smart Content

Smart content is a lot like a smart CTA, except you can do so much more! Like a smart CTA, smart content uses information about the current visitor’s history on your website and serves them content predefined by you based on that information.

Let’s look at the pricing page example again, this time with smart content.

Without smart content, the pricing page copy would be the same as it normally is. Something the user has already seen. That’s dull and uninteresting to that user. There’s no value to them in that copy.

Instead of enticing the user to download the pricing sheet they just downloaded a week ago, use smart content to serve them something else. 

By making the pricing page copy the default smart content and pairing that up with the default smart CTA, you’ve got a powerhouse conversion page on your hands!

With smart content, you can change the content of the pricing page to match the smart CTA - all you have to do is set both up with the same criteria.

Your default smart content should try to entice the visitor to download the pricing sheet. The next piece of smart content should recognize when the user has already downloaded your pricing sheet. Then, it can use copy to sell the benefits of a custom quote from your company. What value will you deliver? Why is a custom quote so important? What kind of questions will you ask before giving the quote?

Then, your custom quote landing page can use the same verbiage the user already saw on your pricing page. This level of congruence and consistency works to build trust between the user and your website, making it more likely the person will feel comfortable handing over more of their personal information.

3.) Nurture Them with Email

Back to the pricing page example. Let’s say the smart CTA and smart content still aren’t getting the job done. You’ve already got the visitor in your system. You can see that they keep coming back to your pricing page, but they never download the pricing sheet. What do you do now?

Create a workflow

The entry criteria of a workflow can be any number of things - I like to use pages viewed. The pages a person views provide a great deal of information about what they’re interested in. If not, then why would they visit those pages?

The criteria for the workflow is easy:

• Visited the Pricing Page
• Did NOT download the Price Sheet Offer

Once you have the criteria set up, send them a series of emails linking to content about your business’ pricing and why it benefits the user’s business. It could be a blog post you wrote, or a case study from a real-life client with quantifiable results related to your pricing model. Or both. The goal here is to nudge the user towards taking that next step.

Tip: Make sure to follow email marketing best practices when doing this.

Final Thoughts on Converting Website Visitors into Customers

In order to make your website work for you, you need to invest in making it better. It won’t happen overnight. In fact, it may take months or even years – depending on how much traffic you get and how much you’re willing to invest. I can promise you one thing: if you take the plunge to turn your website into a 24/7 sales tool, it’ll pay off in dividends in the long run.

I’d also suggest looking into hiring an inbound marketing agency. You’ll get the benefit of a full team, with only a fraction of that cost.