The Missing Link: What’s Keeping Your Site from Getting Truckloads of Sales

Here’s a tough pill to swallow: More traffic doesn’t always lead to more sales.

It’s frustrating to know that all the time, effort, and money you poured into your traffic generation strategies didn’t impact your bottom line.

You then rack your brains for an explanation — “What am I missing here?”

And then it hits you.

It doesn’t matter if you run an online store, a niche blog, or a local business website. If you want your traffic to convert into paying customers or email subscribers, you need to pay attention to the experience you offer them.

Everything that matters to your potential customers, from your brand’s trustworthiness to their confidence in your products, depends on how well their interaction with your website goes. That’s why you need to start investing in strategies that will take the user experience on your website to a whole new level.

In this post, we’ll discuss the most important components of an experience that leads visitors down the conversion path.

Let’s begin.

1. Reliable CRM Features

To win the trust of your potential customers, you need to stop seeing them as numbers on a spreadsheet.

You must be in touch with who they are, what they want, where they’re from, and why they came to your website. In doing so, you can develop personalized content and experiences that are specifically tailored to their specific needs.

A Customer Relationship Management or CRM platform can help by providing a bird’s-eye view of your existing leads. You can track customer interactions, schedule messages, generate reports, and gauge how close they are to making a purchase decision.

However, plenty of businesses become overburdened with tools that manage their daily marketing and sales activities. That’s why, when selecting a CRM platform, it’s important to choose a provider that supports integrations with all the other services you use.

Leading WordPress CRM Software, for example, features a number of integrations that allow you to seamlessly integrate other popular tools into your ecosystem. This includes software for customer support, email marketing, e-commerce, and marketing automation.

2. Develop Compelling Content

You may have heard this phrase dozens of times before, but it’s worth repeating:

In the online marketing space, content is king.

The only way new leads can determine whether or not they should trust your brand is to look for content regarding your value propositions, product selling points, brand story, and mission. Of course, they may also rely on user-generated content, such as testimonials and product reviews.

What you need to do is design your content strategy from the ground up with your target audience in mind. Ask yourself, what pieces of information will convince them that you’re worth the investment?

Do they need a clever explainer video that introduces your product in detail, or are they looking for in-depth guides that prove your expertise?

Of course, you can refer to your CRM software to learn what piece of information leads are looking for. You can also conduct content research externally to find topics that would pique your audience’s interest.

A great place to start would be a Q&A website like Quora — where you can find questions in your niche that your potential users are asking.

For example, if you’re trying to promote an email marketing platform, all you need to do is insert a keyword like “email marketing tips” and wait for suggestions to pop up.

Another benefit of using Quora is that it doubles as a content distribution channel. After building content around relevant questions in your niche, you may also promote it by embedding a link while answering similar queries.

Content Curation is a Must

If you plan to do content research, some alternatives to Quora would be BuzzSumo, Google Trends, and Feedly. Below are additional tips that will help you develop compelling content for more conversions:

• Spice Things Up with Visual Content
  To make your content more eye-catching, incorporate the use of visual content such as animations, infographics, and videos. Apart from increasing engagement, visual content also makes your posts more shareable on social media.
• Use Compelling CTAs
  Defining your calls to action (CTAs), like “Buy Now,” “Get Your Free Copy Now,” and “Learn More,” should be a crucial part of your content strategy. Their main purpose is to give visitors that one final nudge into committing to a purchase decision.
  
• Focus on Actionable Value
  The law of reciprocity states that giving value to someone makes the said person get the urge to give something valuable in return. That said, make sure every piece of content you publish has actionable insights that help customers accomplish one of their goals.

3. Leverage a CDN

When it comes to user experience, you simply can’t afford to ignore your website’s performance.

Statistics show that 40% and 53% of desktop and mobile users, respectively, will choose to abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This means you’re missing out on around half of your site’s potential sales if you don’t improve your website’s loading speed.

A recommended strategy for websites that depend on visual content, such as online stores and business websites, is to use a CDN to reduce latency for users.

Short for Content Delivery Network, a CDN is basically a globally-distributed network of proxy servers. These “Points of Presence” are in charge of storing and delivering web content to users near them.

Apart from the speed benefits, certain CDN providers also add an extra layer of protection against Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks. This will help you maintain your website’s stability and avoid the losses associated with unexpected downtimes.

4. Poor Pricing Structure

Finally, your pricing strategy is often the deciding factor in your website’s sales.

It’s not rocket science — if your customers aren’t convinced that your product or service is really worth the price tag, they’d probably leave during the checkout process and look elsewhere.

The good news is, there are several pricing strategies you can use to heighten the value of your offerings in the eyes of your customers:

Price Anchoring

One of the best ways to make a $1,000 product look cheaper is to put it next to a $10,000 product.

Price anchoring is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It’s based on a cognitive bias that pertains to a person’s tendency to latch on to the first piece of information presented to them.

Inducing Fear

You can instantly increase the value of your product or service by highlighting the costs of missing out. It could be in the form of lost time, reliability issues with a cheaper brand, or more costs down the road.

Bundling

Lastly, a great way to reduce friction in the buying process is to bundle items that are commonly bought together. The bundle is then sold at a discount to encourage more customers to make the leap as you start to sell products twice as fast.

For example, let’s say that products A and B are priced at $50 each — totaling $100 when bought together individually. As a bundle, however, the products can be bought for only around $90 to $99.

Of course, you need to rely on thorough cost analysis and profit projects to determine the best price for your bundled products. What’s important is that you can improve customer relationships, which definitely has more long-term value than sales.

What’s Next

Online success takes more than just getting tons of traffic to a website.

Remember, if you want your marketing efforts to yield profitable results, you need to put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes. Think about the elements that impact their experience with your website.

Optimizing your site for maximum sales may take a while. But with the strategies above, it’s only a matter of time before you can sit back and watch the cash roll in. Cheers!