Many brands believe they’re doing well if traffic numbers on their website pages are going up. But if their conversions aren’t rising at the same rate, it usually means there’s a problem with their marketing funnel.
After all, “website visitors” and “customers” are two very different things.
According to data collected from several sources, around 2-3% of website visitors actually convert. This means that roughly 97-98 people out of every 100 that go to a website leave without taking targeted actions.
Most businesses respond to this by simply paying for more traffic, but a cheaper and more effective approach is to just go ahead and improve the website’s conversion capabilities.
Improving your conversion rate often has a massive pay off, multiplying across every channel you run. Unlike a fixed-period marketing campaign (whose effectiveness stops the day it stops running), conversion rate improvements are an investment that continues to reap dividends, well into the future.
Why Website Traffic Doesn’t Always Lead to Sales
Website traffic doesn’t always lead to sales for three main reasons:
Improper Intent Targeting
One big issue is improper intent targeting. Consumers with “informational intent” convert at a far lower rate than consumers with genuine “commercial intent.”
Think about the difference between someone searching online for “pizza recipes” they can make at home and someone searching for “pizza takeaway.” The first person is probably going to use ingredients already in their pantry or visit a local grocery store to make their pizza recipe. They’re not going to order from a pizza restaurant (unlike the latter).
In other words, if your website is targeting informational intent rather than genuine commercial intent, you are missing a trick. All of your effort is going into low-conversion activity.
Lack of Trust
Trust is another problem. You may have the best-looking website and the most compelling landing pages, but if website visitors don’t know who you are or what your brand stands for, then you’re unlikely to buy.
Trust is built by various signals on your website, such as:
- Visible names, addresses, and telephone numbers of real people in your organisation
- High-quality content
- An overall quality experience
If these are absent, you’re in trouble.
Excessive Friction
Lastly, your website might not generate sales if there’s a higher level of friction involved in using it. A poor user experience can make it difficult for customers to buy products or services. Many professional service firms like accountancy firms and law firms fall into this trap.
Understand What Your Visitors Want
Understanding more about what website visitors want is one of the best ways to transform them into customers. Optimising a page is essentially impossible until you know why the visitor is there and their objections to purchasing.
Most conversion issues relate to failing to overcome customer pain points. So what can be done to fix it?
The most effective conversion tactic is to connect new customers with your sales support team. This costs almost nothing, and your staff can answer objections that they have over the phone.
This approach is particularly useful for high-ticket recurring subscription sign-ups. Forwarding them to a sales representative immediately can encourage them to pay ongoing fees.
A low-effort tactic is to offer on-site polls. If a customer gets to the checkout page but doesn’t convert, send them a quick survey to ask them what prevented them from buying today. Just provide them with a few short options, such as “the price was too high” or “I found a better product elsewhere” to get an overall feel of what went wrong.
A similar tactic is to interview recent customers. Ask them who they compared you against and what finally convinced them to use you. Then use this information to enhance your existing marketing campaigns.
During this process, don’t be afraid to use various technical tools that can help you understand your website visitors more. For example, Google Search Console allows you to query data per page and shows you what people were actually looking at when they landed. If there’s an intent mismatch, it will often show up here.
You can also use software to record sessions and produce heat maps showing you where visitors are going on your website. These solutions show you where people stall, what they scroll past, and where they bail.
As a general rule, provide customers with a “deliverable” when they reach your website. Build it around the idea of immediately proving to your customers that you can provide what they want.
Create a Clear and Compelling Value Proposition
Creating a clear and compelling value proposition is also essential. A value proposition is a plain statement of what you do, who you serve, and why what you offer is better or different.
Don’t turn your website content into a slogan, tagline, or mission statement. Instead, keep it in clear, simple language.
But how do you do this effectively?
Perform the 5-second test
The first step is to perform the 5-second test. Show someone who doesn’t know anything about your business your company’s homepage for 5 seconds, and then ask them:
- What you sell
- Who it’s for
- What they should do next
If they can’t answer all three of those questions quickly, it’s a sign that there’s something wrong with your website communication strategy.
Provide a structural formula
You should also provide a structural formula when detailing your value proposition. The audience should know:
- What the outcome of following through with you is
- Who specifically benefits
- The pain of using any alternatives
Use real examples of how your product or service is beneficial on your webpage to prevent it from sounding abstract to poorly-informed customers
Avoid things that destroy your value proposition
Finally, you should avoid things that kill the value proposition on your web pages. Don’t just talk about “world-class service” or “innovative solutions.” Avoid talking about your company’s history.
Instead make your landing page all about the customers.
A good test is to write something and then see whether your competitors could use the exact same sentence on their home pages and landing pages. If they can, then the content probably isn’t adding value.
Optimise Your Calls to Action
Optimising your calls to action is essential for your website to generate sales. Failing to do it properly is one of the leading reasons for poor conversion metrics.
The goal of CTAs isn’t just to be noticed. It’s to provide your audience with the “next step” they should take. In many cases, this isn’t forwarding them to a sales page or a checkout. It could just be signing them up for a call with one of your reps, or providing them access to a trial account.
When you’re creating your calls to action, make sure they match the prospect’s stage in your sales funnel.
- Informational content should have a low-commitment request (e.g., “Download our comparison guide” or “Get the checklist”).
- Commercial pages should have more high-commitment CTAs (e.g., “Request a quote” or “Book a session”).
Make sure your CTAs are written personally and suitably for your audience. Don’t just use generic “Submit” buttons. Instead use “Get my free quote” or “Sign me up for free stuff.”
Another tactic is to ensure that you’re only using one primary CTA or action instruction per page. Using multiple CTAs on the same page will divide your audience’s attention, and your results may not be as good.
If you do decide to include multiple CTAs on the same page, repeat the same one. Don’t change them as you go.
Don’t worry if the CTA is above or below the fold. Most audiences are willing to scroll if they think they’re going to receive something valuable to them.
Build Trust With Social Proof and Reviews
The next step to transform regular website visitors into customers is to use social proof and reviews, probably the most powerful tool in all of digital marketing.
The goal of these techniques is to transform a prospect’s internal thought processes. Instead of them thinking something like, “This looks okay, but I’m not sure,” you want them to think, “I trust this company, and I know that they will deliver on what they promised.”
Of course, social proofing reviews come in different quality levels:
- Results-based testimonials that appear with a name, company contact information, and a photo that prospects can check directly
- Third-party, independent rating sites like Trustpilot, G2, and Google
- Case studies of existing clients with real numbers
- Recognisable client logos appearing on your website
- Volume signals such as the number of customers served and years trading
- Vague praise quotes and generic star ratings
You can further improve your social proof and reviews by serving them to prospects who will benefit from their content the most. For example, suppose you have information that a particular type of prospect is looking for a company with better customer service. In that situation, you’ll want to show them verified reviews and testimonials from former customers and clients who rated your customer service offering highly.
Try to avoid vague praise quotes and generic star ratings from undisclosed sources. Users are becoming more sophisticated, and they don’t fall for these tactics anymore. Worse still, it can make your brand seem cheap, amateurish, and even untrustworthy, which is the opposite of what you want.
Remember, around 97% of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business, 85% say that positive reviews make them more likely to buy and, 93% have made purchases after reading reviews, underscoring how important social proof is in the sales funnel.
Interestingly, AI tools are being used more than ever to discover local businesses. The AI usage rate has jumped from 6% a year ago to 45% today.
Don’t aim for a perfect star rating, though. A 5.0 rating on Google or Trustpilot reads as fake, despite these platforms being challenging to defraud. Research suggests peak confidence usually occurs in the range of 4.2 to 4.5 stars. In fact, some negative reviews can actually be positive for your brand, particularly if you respond to them intelligently.
Finally, if you sell high-ticket products and services and work over the long term with specific clients, provide real photos and details about them with their permission. Prospects can then approach these individuals or companies for independent verification and referrals.
Create Landing Pages That Convert
Creating high potency landing pages that convert is another powerful lever to boost website conversions.
Start by defining what your landing page is for. It isn’t just another general page on your website. Instead, it’s aimed at an audience from a single traffic source and has a single conversion goal. (For example, it might be traffic coming from your YouTube videos who want to obtain a lead magnet from you).
Landing pages tend to convert at a far higher rate than conventional website pages. Figures suggest the top 10% of landing pages convert to 11% or higher.
A high-converting landing page should have the following elements:
- A headline that matches the source and reassures the prospect that they’re in the right place.
- A subheadline that adds more detail and reinforces and creates confidence in the prospect that they are on the right site.
- A hero image or a short demo video display.
- The actual product, service, or tool being sold.
- An offer plainly stated.
- Benefits that are framed as outcomes and not features.
- A proof block that provides trusted reviews and testimonials.
- A short FAQ section dealing with objection handling.
- A single CTA repeated throughout the page.
- Some sort of risk mitigation offer, such as a guarantee, a free trial, or a no-obligation quote.
Landing pages shouldn’t have competing offers on them, unnecessary fields, or even main navigation. Instead, they should focus solely on the conversion and give users as few reasons to bounce back to Google or a social platform as possible.
Make sure that you only have one page per campaign, audience, or service. It’s okay to have multiple landing pages tailored to specific audiences, as long as you test each page’s independent conversion ability independently.
Make the Buying Journey Simple
Increasing conversions also requires making the buying journey as simple as possible. The best way to do this is to remove friction rather than add persuasion. Don’t assume you need to write more content to generate the conversion. Just make it simpler for customers to click and buy whatever you sell.
The average cart abandonment rate is surprisingly high at over 70% according to many studies. The reason is usually that extra costs, such as shipping and tax, are cited at the end of the sales journey and not at the start. It can also include things like forcing customers to create an account or delivering an overly long checkout experience.
Of course, many people are simply browsers who add items to their cart and never had any intention to buy in the first place, usually around 40-50% of B2C users.
The following are some friction points that may cause your customers to convert at a lower rate:
- Surprise shipping and tax costs. Fix this by stating costs on the product page.
- Forced account creation. Fix this by setting up guest checkout options.
- Too many steps in checkout. Fix this by reducing the number of fields and adding a progress indicator.
- Limited payment options. Add more payment options through your merchant services provider.
- No way to ask questions before purchasing. Fix by adding a phone number, FAQ section, or chat feature to overcome last-step customer pain points.
The best way to decide which of these to focus on first is to walk through your own buying journey as if you were a customer. Identify stages where you might feel frustrated or concerned, and then improve your processes.
Of course, if you’re a B2B service provider or you only sell services, then the checkout isn’t the main friction. Instead, it’s response time after the inquiry and the speed of follow-up moves. Try to reduce this time as much as possible while also offering prospects a maximally convenient outcome.
Use Forms and Lead Magnets to Capture Visitors
Forms and lead magnets are among the best ways to convert website visitors into long-term paying customers. And it’s all about timing.
In reality, most website visitors aren’t ready to pay you today. Therefore, you need a capture mechanism, like a form or a lead magnet, so you can maintain your relationship with that particular customer once they leave your site, which many of them inevitably will.
When it comes to lead magnets, a good rule is to only ask what you need to have the next conversation. A name and email is usually enough.
If you need to collect more information, use a multi-step instead of a single-page form. Many customers are willing to go through multiple steps because the first step often feels like a sunk cost for them. For example, if they enter their name and email on the first field, they are much more likely to provide more information on the second field before accessing the lead magnet. Furthermore, even if they do not provide all of the information, but only some, you can still use this in your marketing campaigns.
Make sure you label all your inputs, input lines, design lead magnet, and capturing systems for smartphone use. Don’t use CAPTCHA unless spam is a genuine concern for your business.
A note on lead magnets
Lead magnets are incredibly popular right now, but just make sure the trade is worth the email address for prospects. Don’t give them generic ebooks that give them nothing. Instead, provide templates, checklists, cost guides, and comparison sheets. These are much more likely to convert because they are higher value.
What to do after email capture
What to do after capture often matters more than the capture itself. The best practice is to have an immediate email sequence in place that onboards the client and provides them with more reasons to overcome any resistance to buying or pain points that they might have. Just make sure that you follow compliance requirements in your jurisdiction for personal information processing.
Test and Improve Your Conversion Strategy
Once you’ve set up your website using the strategies outlined in this guide, the next step is to test and improve your conversion strategy.
The best approach is to find high-performing web pages in similar industries and copy their best practices. Generally speaking for A/B testing, you should check the performance of:
- the offer itself
- the headline and message
- the page structure
- the form length and fields
- the guarantees and risk reversal copy
- the visual details
You might think things like images and button colour matter a lot, but in general, for most industries, they do not.
The best tools are Microsoft Clarity, which is free, GA4, VWO, and Hotjar. These allow you to perform structured testing on various different types of web pages and landing pages so you can see what’s working and what isn’t.
Turn More Existing Traffic Into Customers
Finally, you’ll want to look for ways to transform your existing traffic into customers. People who continually return to your website are often leads, even if they don’t buy. Your job is to figure out what it is they want.
- Directly ask customers who arrived on your website recently what prevented them from converting. Sometimes they’ll tell you that they’re just creating a wish list, but other times they’ll ask you for a discount or whether you can clarify something for them.
- Put specific proof next to your primary CTA. If existing customers can see how you’re helping their peers, they’re also much more likely to believe that you can deliver for them as well.
The nice thing about turning your website into a highly optimised conversion funnel is that the investment will last for a long time. Once all the systems are in place, the job is done, and you can focus on other marketing efforts.
