Written by Steve Nelson - http://www.startupguys.net/author/snelson/
Website conversion is a concept that expresses the ability to make visitors do what we want, namely purchase a certain product or service. The most common misconception about increasing conversions is to increase the website traffic.
Well, I disagree to this to an extent. I believe, converting the existing visitors on priority and then working on acquiring targeted traffic only.
This article will focus on converting the visitors into clients and to do so, all you need to to do is to build a strong relationship with the visitor.
Building a relationship with people you already know is fairly easy, but the key to building a relationship with a visitor about whom you do not know much (except some stats, i.e. the IP, location, time he spent on the website, pages he browsed and so on) and converting visitors into clients is to engage them on your website interactively, so you can know more about them!
Let’s see how we can do so:
Step 1: Offer help through related content; probably the easiest way to do this is to develop FAQs and link them to all the landing pages, so the visitors should not leave the website due to unavailability of information. Along with FAQs, attach a contact form for questions that FAQs do not answer.
Step 2: Offer a free /trial product; of course you should not offer without grabbing the visitors’ basic information, i.e. name, email, phone, company etc.
Step 3: Have Call to Action on all pages; whatever action you want your visitor to take, make sure you have a call for that action on the page. You can have multiple calls to action, depending on the page content.
Step 4: Phone contact; a great way to stay in touch with people is to offer them a phone number that can be accessed without any money. Your main goal is for visitors to call, so use large font and place your number in a visible spot.
Step 5: Live chat; a crucial tool for you is the live chat. This means that you have the possibility of talking to your clients in real time, without the need for a phone. Younger visitors are likely to use this option more. When a person gets on the chat, use your first name and be polite.
Try and build up a strong relationship because customers acquired on a 'relationship' basis are not just customers - their word of mouth can bring you more business!