How to Convert Website Visitors into Customers? – A Complete Guide for 2024

If you are wondering how to convert website visitors into customers, you’re not alone. This is the ultimate goal of every business website once it’s designed, developed, filled with informative content, and then optimized with SEO.

However, this is a tough nut to crack. Stats say that only 4.8% of the total web traffic converts at the end of the day. That means you should arm yourself with the best traffic conversion strategies, tips, and tricks out there to stay one step ahead of your competition.

Here is our detailed guide make things easier for you. Follow this and see the magic for yourself.

Why You Can Have Poor Conversions Despite Great Traffic

When you develop a website and it’s content, you implement different SEO tactics to rank and attract traffic to your site. The final goal is to make money, which you do by converting traffic into meaningful business transactions.

But sometimes, you will find yourself with a lot of traffic but no conversion, which can lose you money in the long run.

Let us look at a few reasons why that can happen.

You are attracting the wrong traffic

Sometimes, you may have attracted the wrong crowd for your website.

Let’s say, you are in the business of selling office supplies. But you have implemented a marketing strategy that brought you high schoolers and collegegoers.

Yes, you will have a lot of on-lookers visiting your site for your great campaigning, but they are very likely to not need any sort of office supplies, so no reason for them to buy anything you are offering.

Some reasons this can happen are:

• Lack of customer research
• Wrong keyword targeting
• Attracting low-paying customers.
• Lack of market research of your niche.

Visitors do not find what they are looking for fast enough

The attention span of an internet user on a website is considered to be about 8 seconds. This means 8 seconds is the amount of time you have to guide visitors to what they are looking for.

Just like how you would arrange your products in a brick-and-mortar store, you need to arrange your site such that your key items are visible and accessible to the average viewer. Otherwise, they will click away to another site.

Too many ads and pop-ups

We all know what the general perception of ads is. Still, in order to do business, we will need to run ads and pop-ups throughout the site. Ads and pop-ups are a great way to capture the audience’s attention so they might want to buy our products or services.

But if you put in too much, users will simply get annoyed and leave. Try to implement one pop-up per page. You can also implement slide-ins instead as they can be less intrusive.

Hard to navigate website

Nothing is as frustrating as navigating through a badly designed website. Some forms of annoyance that come from using such websites are:

• Difficult navigation
• Slow loading
• Confusing user interface
• Poor font choice and size

Make sure your website does not have such issues. Take a look at the following website.

This overdesigned page does not tell you anything in one glance, nor can you even tell which part of it you can click or not. Unless you spend a pretty decent amount of time here, you would not even be able to tell it has anything to do with cars.

While such design philosophies are common in Japan and some Asian countries, this particular website is based in the U.K., which is not a part of the world accustomed to such layouts.

Keep in mind that you want your customers to stay on your website for extended periods of time and design them accordingly.

Weak sales funnel

Not every visitor you get on your website will buy your product or services. In fact, a very small percentage of your visitors are likely to engage in business with you.

In order to convert visitors into customers, they need to be guided through a pathway known as a sales funnel (or conversion funnel).

If your sales funnel is weak or unoptimized, you will not see the amount of sales that you desire.

How to Convert Website Visitors Into Customers

Considering all the reasons you may not have gotten a better conversion rate, we have compiled some tips that we believe will be fruitful for your venture.

Attract the right traffic

We mentioned that having the wrong traffic as an audience can cause fewer conversions in terms of business. So, you will need to make sure that the proper audiences show up on your site.

There are a few ways you can go about this. But first and foremost, you will need to understand who your target customers are. It will depend on what type of product or services you are selling and what kind of audiences are likely to buy them.

Once you know who to target, figure out the best SEO keywords that are used by them. Popular but irrelevant keywords will bring you traffic but not paying customers. So, what do we mean by irrelevant keywords? They are:

Keywords that don’t relate to your website. Let’s say you run a cycling blog. But keywords like “best kebab” appear across your pages and URL. That’s the wrong keyword for you.

Another is keywords that are too generic. For example “dogs”. Someone who looks that up might be looking to adopt dogs, dog rescue centers, generic dog pictures, etc. It is best to avoid such keywords.

Keywords that lack buying content. Consider you have two visitors who came to your site with two different keywords. One of them looked up “denim clothes” and another one looked up “denim clothes with free shipping.”

You can tell the one specifying free shipping shows more intent to buy than the other one. Implement keywords that display such willingness to buy.

Other than SEO, you can advertise on social media to bring in customers. Make sure to select relevant sites when you do so. If you are selling clothing items, Instagram and Facebook will be the best to promote yourself. Pick the platform where you know your audience is likely to be.

Use exit intent pop-ups to encourage leaving visitors to stay

Exit intent pop-ups are a great way to guide visitors to their goals as they are about to get out of your website.

Before you ask, yes, exit intent pop-ups do work. Ryan Robinson, a successful businessman and online course teacher, increased his email list by 500% using this strategy. With a success rate as high as that, there is no harm in implementing them for your site.

Exit-intent pop-ups…pop up when the user in your site hovers their cursor over to the exit cross tab button.

You can use them for the following actions:

• Encourage users to complete their checkout to reduce cart abandonment
• Ask for contact information
• Provide them your contact information to reach out
• Ask visitors to take part in surveys
• Promote certain popular products
• Offer discounts and bonuses

Make your website lively with live chats

Customers will commonly have questions they want to buy and the FAQ section can only cover so much. Sending emails to the seller can be seen as putting in too much effort so customers refrain from doing that. Hence having live chat support can help convert curious visitors into paying customers.

Try to implement 24/7 live chat support especially if you aim to do business globally. If you are a local business, let your audience that support is active and be present. Train your employees (or your chatbot) to be cordial and try to answer every question to the best that is possible. By removing doubt, you can convince customers to buy your offerings.

Keep navigation easy

A user should be able to navigate through your website easily and find what they are looking for within a few clicks. They should be able to find the information they need and make their purchase without any hassle.

One thing you can do to make navigating through your site a breeze is to incorporate a clear taxonomy. Have clear and commonly used terms for products that are used by your target audience so that they can find what they are looking for easily.

Just as how using trendy names for a formal audience will not be ideal, using formal language for teenager will be just as ineffective.

Do the following research before you decide how you are going to arrange your website.

• Chances are that your customers are already used to long running websites that are going to be your competition. Try to see what kind of naming conventions and site templates are common in your niche and emulate them for your website.
• Google ranking can tell you commonly used keywords so review them and use them to help increase your searchability. This will be especially helpful if certain products can be named with multiple things and using the common term will make sure more people will find it on your site.
• Once you are established, study your own audiences search terms to make sure you can guide them to what they need.

Implement signs of social proof

No one likes the feeling of being in a ghost town. A website with no signs of life can feel like a ghost town and visitors may not feel like buying from your site.

So, you will need to liven up your website and make it feel lively to encourage customers to buy anything. To do that, implement forums, reviews, and comment sections and encourage visitors to participate in them. Reviews are especially important as 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase decision.

Encouraging comments and forums will not only provide social proof on your website, but it will help increase engagement on customers’ behalf, and give you ample opportunities to interact with your audience and collect valuable data about their preferences.

You can also collaborate with popular content creators and influencers among your target demography and have testimonials from them displayed on your site.

Use visitor’s FOMO

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the feeling that one would miss out on something great if they did not do something about that. This is a common feeling shared among a lot of customers on whether they should buy something or not.

You will have a lot of visitors who are willing and capable of buying your products and services. But a lot of them will have second thoughts as they are about to click on the “purchase” button, and will decide against it thinking “I will just buy it later.”

However, most of the time, they usually do not come back to buy it later, which is a sale lost for you. In these situations, you can nudge them a little to a purchase decision by leveraging on their FOMO.

You can do that by offering something on the product page at the time which is only available then. It could be free shipping, a small discount, or a bonus item.

Let them know they might not get these bonus offers (or the price the product is offered then)  if they do not purchase the product right away or within a specified period.

If you offer sales discounts, you can display a countdown timer to instill urgency.

Identify marketing channels that work for you

While having insight into your customer base is a great way to grow your business, where they come from and how they find you is also important knowledge.

Google Analytics Acquisition dashboard is a great tool for understanding your business’s most profitable acquisition channels. Go to the Source/Medium view and add the Event as a conversion to the data table as a secondary dimension to get these insights.

You can also utilize pop-up questions to ask visitors how they found you. Present a list of options and let them click on it. Most people will let you know if the process is just a click of a button.

If you know where most of your traffic comes from, you can reallocate your marketing budget to run more campaigns on your successful channels and cut costs on not-so-effective ones.

Internally link your high-traffic content page to your conversion page

Sometimes, the traffic that comes to your content pages may not even visit your pages that sell your products or services. That can happen when there is no visible channel from the content page to your conversion page.

Use internal links to direct them from your most popular pages to the product/service pages.

Provide product demo videos

Replicating the hands-on feel is a very difficult task when you are selling products online. However, having demo videos available can help mitigate some of the uncertainty of not having the product on hand.

75% of visitors depend on product photos to make purchase decisions online. Having a demo video will further help in the decision-making process as videos can show off more than still photos, especially for complex devices.

Here are some tips you can follow to show off your offerings best.

• Show off all the functionalities of the product as a how-to video. You can hire a professional creator to do it for you but you can use your own phone camera to make such a video on your own as long as you are precise.
• Show the product from every angle and make sure to highlight its best features.
• Have someone be in the video or narrate it for full clarity on the instructions.

Optimize your sales funnel

We have mentioned an unoptimized sales funnel can lead to a loss of sales. So, we better make sure that does not happen.

Here are some tips to help you strengthen your sales funnel.

• Use Google Analytics to keep track of your website conversions
• Optimize your landing page by analyzing your conversion and bounce rates.
• Keep A/B testing your website elements.
• Keep working on your CTA buttons to find the best arrangement possible that attracts visitors.

Be strategic with CTA button placements

Having a clear call to action (CTA) button and strategically placing it on your website is a great conversion tool. It should be prominently displayed on your website, and it should be clear to see and easy to click.

Make sure your CTA is relevant to your product or service and entices visitors to take advantage of your offer. You can use this strategy to build leads and guide them through your sales funnel.

You should be using persuasive language on your CTA prompts as your tone impacts the visitor’s behavior. When creating your CTA content, use words such as “Buy Now,” “Get It Here,” “Register Now,” and “Download” to encourage users to convert.

Web users are very scroll-centric and instinctively scroll downwards on a website.

Randomly placing them here and there will leave your chances up to luck. Here are some strategic placements you may want to implement.

• On top of the website
• Random places under a blog post
• Sidebars
• Right above your footer

Provide free stuff to visitors

Everyone loves getting anything that is free. So why not offer free stuff to your visitors?

When asking for anything, users will generally be reluctant to provide them. But if you throw in some freebies, they will likely loosen up and maybe do as you ask them.

You want to give them a reason as to why they should provide their email, download your app, or even purchase your product. Enticing people with free stuff is an age-long marketing strategy that still works today.

Here are some giveaway ideas that may attract the audience’s attention.

• Free trials
• Free shipping
• Discounts and coupons
• Free Consultation
• Free downloads

As a rule of thumb, the freebies that you give away should be valuable. Otherwise, your efforts will go to waste.

Gamify the browsing experience

Who doesn’t like games? Everyone likes playing them. Why not turn the experience of browsing your website into a fun gamified one?

Companies that have been utilizing gamification have stated they have an increased conversion rate by 7 times than before.

While implementing it can be expensive, it is very much worth the investment. However, there are a few simple things you can start with that will not break the bank and get you started. Customers enjoy interactive websites more than just navigating a website the usual way.

You can implement quizzes or spin-the-wheel games which are fairly easy and inexpensive to do.

You can collect customer data and preferences through fun quizzes. They are also great for e-learning websites. They can be a fun way for users to test their knowledge of what they learned on the website. It will be a fun thing to do for them while increasing engagement.

Spin-the-wheel prompts are a fun way to reward visitors with a random discount. The great thing about spin-the-wheel challenges is that customers will feel they got lucky on the draw and be more inclined to avail whatever they win, resulting in conversions.

There are various other low-cost and easy-to-apply gamification methods out there. Have a look around and try to figure out which ones will work the best with your site.

Segment your audience

Not every visitor you have will be the same. Everyone will have their own preference and choices and not everyone will be equally interested in all your offerings.

As such, you cannot present everyone with the same content and offering. If you do, not only will your website suffer poor user engagement, you are likely to lose the audience you already gathered.

Some benefits of audience segmentation are:

• Better engagement
• Reduced cart abandonment
• Increased customer loyalty
• Higher conversion

Audience segmentation can be a difficult task, but it is very much worth the benefits. Some demographics that you should consider dividing your audience by are:

• Language
• Returning or first-time visitor
• Geolocation
• Age range
• Lifestyle choices

Build relationships with customers

When learning how to convert website visitors into customers, always remember that you should make a meaningful relationship with them. Having a loyal customer base is one of the biggest assets for any brand as they are not only a source of constant revenue but also spread positive word of mouth.

Learn about your audience and try to open up conversations with them whenever you find the opportunity.

Here are a few ways you can start building relationships

• Gather contact information

When users come to your site for the first time, you can ask for their contact information and their preferences. Having a list of contacts will help you build a reliable contact list to whom you can advertise your products. And the likelihood of them actually engaging in business will be high as they are likely interested in your site if they have provided their info willingly.

• Send welcome emails

Once customers opt-in with their emails, you can send a personalized welcome email. You can add in offers for a first purchase too. This is a great way to get visitors familiarised with your brand and entice a first purchase from them. Later on, you can utilize automated emails to communicate to them various offers and services to maintain a relationship with them.

• Respond to customer behavior

Try to understand what kind of messaging customers respond to and tailor your emails based on that. This could be what customers are more interested in, what offers they avail the most, and what kind of queries they usually have. If you can establish a pattern, you can even automate response emails based on that. You can even give product recommendations based on their buying behavior.

• Use surveys

Surveys are a great data collection tool you can utilize. Also, a lot of customers are eager to let you know their opinions if they are regular customers of you. Provide them with surveys to give them an outlet to express their opinions. These data and opinions will give you great insight into how to please them the most.

• Offer incentives

You can encourage people to do a lot of things. Some key activities you want your customers to do are signing up for your mailings or making repeat purchases. Offer appropriate incentives like a first-purchase discount or gifts for purchasing products of a certain value.

• Try loyalty and referral programs

Loyalty and referral programs are some of the oldest methods of relationship building which are still very effective. Have offerings for repeat purchases and for people who refer you to their friends.

Use timing and personalization when campaigning

Your website visitors will be in different phases of the buying cycle. Some may be in the initial stages where they merely browse through and look at options they would consider buying. And some may be at the phase where they are committed and looking to spend money for what they want.

You need to time your campaigns based on which phase your buyers, pushing high-effort CTAs meant to convince a purchase right away will scare away buyers in the initial phase. While informative content to already committed buyers will be a waste of effort. Consider what phase the majority of your visitors are at and apply actions accordingly.

Add some level of personalization along with it as it will let you improve the conversion rate by allowing you to serve different website content to different visitors. For example, the content you place in front of first-time visitors should be different from the content you put in front of returning visitors or someone who exhibited a willingness to buy, like someone who signed up with their email.

Recommend products based on buying habits

Product recommendation is a common practice for e-commerce sites nowadays, and for good reason. These are usually based on the buying habits of certain segments of customers, trying to predict what they would like to buy.

They are also shown along a sidebar on product pages, showing which items are bought together often. Content pieces are also suggested to visitors based on their preferences.

The biggest example of this is Amazon. Every time you go to a product page, you can scroll down to see lists of items based on the product you are looking at to give you an idea of the marketplace.

If you are wondering how successful recommendation pages are for Amazon, 35% of their sales come from it. When your product recommendations match with your audience, your sales will naturally grow.

Try to base your recommendations on the following metrics.

• Most viewed
• Best selling
• Bought together
• Recently viewed

Prevent cart abandonment

When a visitor on an e-commerce site adds stuff to the online shopping cart but leaves the site without completing the purchase, it is known as cart abandonment. The current average cart abandonment rate is around  66.5%. This means about 7 out of 10 visitors will leave the site without buying anything after adding products to their cart.

Here are a few actions you can take to encourage visitors to finish their purchase.

Email reminders: Email reminders to complete purchases of abandoned carts. There is a great chance that a reminder will be enough to close the deal.

Allow guest checkout: A lot of customers feel annoyed when a site asks to register when making a purchase. Having registered users on your website is a great source of information to expand your business.

But remember that all your efforts are made so that customers engage in business with you. If the process of registering is getting in the way of a customer buying your products, then it is a counteractive task that hampers your business.

Just let them have a guest account to buy what they want. You can try incentivizing them to register with offers but make sure not to be intrusive about it.

Add a progress bar: Adding a progress bar that depicts how long the process of checking out will take can psychologically affect a buyer into completing all the steps. It is a visual tool that elicits positive feedback and enhances user experience.

Increase payment gateway options: Most people have their preferred way of paying for things. If they cannot find the one they use on any website, they will simply look for ones that offer their payment option. Try to have as many payment options to make it easy for buyers.

Optimize your website: If your website is slow or unintuitive, no one will be willing to sit through tedious loading screens or annoying UI elements for your product. Make sure your website is running smoothly.

Implement Slide-in and floating bars

We have discussed how pop-ups, despite being annoying to users, work for their intended purposes. That being said, they are still annoying and intrusive to come across. You can implement slide-ins and floating bars as a sort of compromise instead. The best part is that they work just as well as pop-ups.

As the name implies, slide-ins are small pop-ups that slide into the view of the users. The nature of their entry makes sure they do not go unnoticed.

Floating bars are CTAs that usually show up around the homepage for a little while. They can be removed if the users do not want to see them.

Even if visitors do not engage with them, their high visibility keeps them curious about your offerings.

You can use them for the following purposes:

• Lead magnet to collect contact info
• Feedback collection
• Offer discounts
• Redirection to social media pages

Track your conversions

Just implementing CTAs and campaigns will not be able to tell you if your efforts are being rewarded. You will need to analyze the conversions that are coming from them.

You can use Google Analytics to find out which of your campaigns have the most conversion. Filter your data to segment it according to your needs and gain insights as to what works for you.

Use that knowledge to update or implement new designs or ideas for your site. Focus on campaigns that work and cancel those that don’t.

Track your visitors movement

With tools like hotjar or crazy egg, you can keep track of the movement of your visitors, more particularly, where they are clicking. These tools show you a click map which indicates which part of the pages are being clicked on the most.

The highlighted areas indicate the areas that are being clicked with colors indicating the intensity of it.

You can gather valuable insights on which of your links and CTAs are being clicked on with this and adjust accordingly.

Offer money-back guarantees

Most customers who are willing to buy anything online only want some sort of assurance about their product quality and timely delievry. Money-back guarantees not only put their mind at ease but also show confidence on the part of the website.

Stop directing people to your homepage

One of the reasons you may get more traffic than sales is if most of your backlinks take your traffic to the homepage. This may not seem bad in the first place but if visitors get directed back to your website, they are more likely to engage with more specific stuff.

If the backlinks take them back to your homepage, they are less likely to start searching for stuff from there. You need to land this traffic from specific places around the internet to a specific webpage.

For example, if a backlink from a Facebook post about bicycles comes through, you need it to be on a page about bicycle content or even the product page that sells them.

The likelihood of such a person buying a bicycle is high so directing them to the sales page will ensure a healthy conversion rate. As a reslut, avoid backlinking to your homepage.

Invest in paid and retargeting ads

Even after implementing exit-intent pop-ups on your site, chances are, some of them will still leave. A lot of customers who have used your services can also stop using your services for many reasons. However, that does not mean that you should consider these leavers as lost customers.

You can try retargeting them with paid ads on social media to encourage them to come back. You can try addressing the reasons in these ads so that they return to your website.

Sometimes, a reminder or just an acknowledgment of anything wrong with your website can show goodwill on your part and earn the trust of customers.

Paid ads can also help spread brand awareness and bring in new traffic. Overall, paid ads are a worthy investment that can bring you old and new customers.

A/B test your content

A/B testing is a way of measuring two different methods on different web pages to figure out which is more successful.

We have provided a lot of tips for you that you can implement. All these methods have worked for one website or another depending on each unique circumstance. But we cannot gurarantee that implementing all of them will work.

So, what can you do? Implement different methods for different web pages simultaneously. You can label them as A and B and see how they perform.

For example, you can set up different CTA prompts for different web pages and compare the results between the two after a fixed period of time. Use the one that was successful during the test.

It is a long and tedious process but always keep doing A/B tests with different techniques. This way you can implement successful methods and stop using unsuccessful ones.

Tools to Convert Visitors Into Customers

Here are a few more tools that we have not mentioned before that will help you when you’re learning how to convert website visitors into customers.

• MailChimp (Email automation tool)
• Button Optimizer (CTA optimization)
• Usability Hub (UI/UX and website navigation evaluation)
• Five Second Test (First impression test)
• Convertize (A/B testing tool)
• Qualaroo ( Exit intent pop-up tool)
• Moz (SEO and analytics tool)
• Mention (Social media monitoring tool)
• ProProfs quizmaker (Gamification tool for quizzes)

Wrapping It Up

Having traffic with no conversions can indeed be frustrating. We hope that by following this blog, you will be able increase your conversion rate. Getting conversions take time, so you will need to keep at it and be patient. Eventually, you will see the results you are hoping for.

FAQs

Q. What is considered to be a good conversion rate?

Ans: For e-commerce sites, average conversion rates are between 1.84% to 3.71%, while average conversion rate across other industries is between 2.35% and 5.31%.

So, you can consider a rate between 2-5% to be good depending on your industry and target audience.

Q. How does engagement rate affect conversion rate?

Ans: As we know, traffic does not necessarily indicate a good conversion rate. However, if more people engage with your content and campaigns in your website, your conversion rates will go high.