Getting a lead is only the first step in the sales process. You still need to convert that lead into a sale. The following secret strategies are used by top Internet marketers to maximise their conversions of leads, by focusing on the behaviour of each individual prospect rather than treating prospects as a mass of identical beings.
Pay attention to anonymous visitors
Most people do not pay any attention to their site visitors, other than general website analytics to analyse their behaviour, until they have become a lead. The top Internet marketers know that much can be determined about a visitor’s interests and sales readiness by paying attention to which pages are visited and which actions are taken. This information can be tracked and assigned to an anonymous record. Then, when the visitor finally sees an offer that is too good to resist and gives you their lead information, you can tie that lead with all of the website activity that occurred prior to creation of the lead. This is especially valuable in that it tells you which offers the person saw on your website that weren’t compelling enough to act upon, so that you can incorporate more of what was successful into the offers that were not.
Base reactions upon behaviours
Common Internet marketing practices provide similar website experiences to everyone who enters the website through the same landing page. Top Internet marketers, on the other hand, pay close attention to every action a visitor takes while on the website, and deliver a website experience designed to maximise the conversion of a visitor with those behaviours. For example, the person who takes action after reading the headline of your landing page is exhibiting different behaviour from someone who scrolls to the end of the landing page, carefully reading the entire text, before taking action. The second person may have required more information to become convinced, or may be a more cautious person who wants to know all of the available facts before making a decision. Someone who views information on all of your products has a different buying mentality from someone who jumps directly to the product page for a specific product. By studying their behaviours, you will be able to make your sales offer when it is most likely to be accepted.
Recycle leads
Top Internet marketers know that prospects need to complete certain actions on the website before they make a purchase. Someone who downloaded a free ebook may not be ready for a high-ticket sale just yet. Rather than bombarding all leads with offers for all products indiscriminately, top Internet marketers monitor visitor behaviours to determine where they are in the sales funnel and treat them accordingly. Someone who has downloaded free items may be offered more free items, with an option to buy a product, while someone who has already purchased many products may be offered a chance to buy a new product, with a bonus of something free.
You’ve spent a lot of time and money directing traffic to your website. Unless you can then convert that traffic to sales, all that time and money is lost. These five tips can help you to optimise your landing pages to increase your conversion rate and make sales from your traffic.
1. Eliminate confusion
People may have come to your website from many different places. If they clicked on a link in a Facebook ad, Google text ad, Twitter tweet, or other limited character advertisement, they may not be entirely certain where the link will take them. By reiterating the question posed in the ad at the top of the landing page, you’re reaffirming that they’ve arrived at someplace that will answer that question for them.
2. Clearly answer the question
People don’t want a long, convoluted explanation. They want a short, concise answer to their question. Give them that answer as quickly as possible. If the answer is complex or has multiple parts, use a bullet list to keep it brief. Most importantly, make sure that the answer focuses on the value of your product or service for the person. You can then elaborate on the elements of the answer, if they’re not convinced to click on your first call to action.
3. Streamline your page
If you want to give your landing page the same look and feel as the rest of your website, you can do so with colour, font, images, and other elements of branding. Don’t use the same navigation as the rest of your website, since it allows people to leave the landing page and explore the rest of your company website rather than focusing their progress to a converting sale. Limit the number of things that require the newest browsing platform, distracting special effects, or, even worse, things that play automatically without giving the user a way to stop them.
4. Track calls to action
Give every call to action on your page a specific link so that you can track visitor progress. Are visitors clicking at the top of the page, somewhere in the middle, or after reading the entire page? Does that behaviour change based on where the visitor came from? This also allows you to spotlight where people are abandoning your sales funnel and test the results of changes to your wording or layout more precisely.
5. Limit registration fields
Once you’ve finally convinced the prospects to buy, they can still change their minds if the registration form requires them to supply what they feel is intrusive data. It’s generally accepted that each additional field on a registration form beyond the email address loses you about a third of your prospects. Therefore, only include those fields you absolutely need to qualify the sale.
To increase your conversions from website visitors, you need a professional website that visitors feel can be trusted. A clean, uncluttered website design that can be easily navigated lends a professional feel. One simple way to make your website more trustworthy is to use certification logos from your shopping cart system or other authentication system. The best way to make your website more trustworthy, however, is to use testimonials.
Text testimonials
Software exists that allows you to create a JavaScript text box on your website that can display a variety of different testimonials from your happy customers. Depending on implementation, the text may be replaced at various intervals or may slowly scroll up the box. This sort of feature lends itself to short testimonials of no more than a sentence or two. Because you are showing a great volume of testimonials, the individual testimonials do not have to be perfect. The human touch of unique phrasing, odd spellings, and unusual focus adds realism and additional believability. If your company is known for one thing, such as rapid delivery, the occasional testimonial talking about other facets of your company, such as customer service, rounds out the picture of your company as trustworthy and reliable.
Showcases
Showcases are longer testimonials, usually including photographs or other visual information demonstrating the situation for the customer before your company was hired, or your product was purchased, and the vastly improved situation afterwards. They are frequently multiple paragraphs in length. Because of this, they are often located on a separate webpage devoted to customer success stories. You can feature one showcase on your main webpage, or offer links to them in a JavaScript box similar to the one used for text testimonials. Because of the nature of showcases, images that capture the essence of the customer experience as well as a few key words make the best links.
Video testimonials
The most believable testimonials are video testimonials. After all, people have a finely developed sense of when another person is lying. They will trust someone giving their testimonial in video format more than they will trust that exact same testimonial in text format. The keys to making a convincing video testimonial are to connect the video with the product or service. Instead of simply filming a “talking head” against a boring backdrop, show the person using the product or service while talking about how wonderful it is. This engages the viewer and makes your product or service seem more familiar even while it stresses the value and trustworthiness. You can also intersperse video of a customer speaking with voice over still images. That lets you demonstrate the before and after nature of the testimonial much as a showcase does while keeping the power of video.
In order to make sales, you can either cold call, blindly hoping to stumble across someone interested in your product or service, or you can follow up with leads that have already let you know that they are interested in your product or service. Which sounds easier to you? But even when generating leads, there are easier ways to get leads, and harder ways to get leads. One of the easiest ways to get leads is with a well-crafted free offer.
Offer something truly valuable for free
To get someone on your mailing list, you probably already know that the best way is to offer your website visitor something in exchange for giving you their email address. However, often people make the mistake of offering something of little or no value, or a private-label version of something that is available from a number of other locations on the Internet. Instead, it needs to be something unique, and applicable to the interests of your customers. (The Internet Marketing Academy offers visitors 6 “cheat sheets” that cover the basics of Internet marketing in exchange for their email addresses.)
To further enhance visitors’ desire to give you their email addresses in exchange for your offer, make your offer time-sensitive or exclusive with a limited availability. You can also add social proof of how many other people downloaded your offer. All of these elements encourage a visitor to get your offer now, rather than thinking about it and coming back later, which they will rarely do.
Offer something newsworthy
This practice is known as “newsjacking”. If you are the first company out of the gate to offer something related to a hot trend in the news, people who are searching for information about that news will see your offer in the search results. You can also pay for ads related to those news terms. Just be certain that your offer is actually related to the news item, and is not misleading a person into responding in return for something that does not address the issue in which that person is interested. The best offers are how-to guides that match whatever the hot news topic is, capturing leads who want to take action.
Catch the eye quickly
Your potential lead is scanning a page of search results or reading a web page. How can you catch their attention in less than a second? Create a headline that promises to deliver a benefit that they need, or that promises to save them from a situation they fear. Use attention catching words such as “secret”, “surprise”, or “unknown”. Phrase your headline in the form of a question, to further engage your potential lead. If you can get them responding to your headline, it’s an easy step to getting them to respond to your offer.
There are really just three ways to make more money from your website traffic: increase visitors, get each customer to buy more on average, and increase the conversion rate of visitors to customers.
Obviously, these are all desirable. However, the one that’s going to have the most long-term benefit is increasing your conversion rate. Think of your conversion rate as a measure of efficiency. The higher it is, the more money any other investments in marketing will make for you.
An Example of a High Conversion Rate
Consider a business run by one man out of his home. He has only about 3000 visitors to his website per month. He is an affiliate marketer of high-end appliances retailing for roughly £250, and 30% of the visitors buy from him. He makes well over £63,000 per year, and runs his business on a part-time basis. He offers an unconditional satisfaction guarantee for 30 days and rarely has a product returned.
Think about that: in a world where 5% conversion rates are considered great, he must be doing something extraordinary. A close inspection of what he does shows that it will work for most businesses that want to work on the basis of integrity; especially those are offering a genuinely superior product at a higher price.
He spent almost 4 years building his business from nothing to its present level of success. He did so slowly, with a lot of care, and didn’t make very much money in the first year. But he was never playing a get rich quick game; he was in it for the long haul.
His website is extremely information rich. He provides lots of good information in an easy-to-read format, and he never misleads or exaggerates. He shows the value of his products through concrete examples and testimonials, as well as offering point-for-point comparisons between his high-end products and those that are less expensive.
Because he’s actually offering the best product of its kind in the world, based on objective tests and evidence that the customer can verify, the sale really requires no hype. He’s not looking for everyone to become a customer; he’s looking for those who appreciate quality in this kind of appliance and are willing to pay for it. That’s an important lesson to achieving a high conversion rate: don’t try to be all things to all people. Instead, focus on one particular demographic of customer and offer them something that’s of unique value to them. Become the expert.
The Secret of Seven
Here’s an insider secret that applies to most, if not all, online businesses. It’s been called the secret of seven. Research has established that online customers tend to purchase products with a price ending in the number seven at rates that can be as much as 50% higher than the same product priced differently. Pricing your goods and services in numbers that end in seven will also increase your conversion rate.
Small businesses fight for every bit of money they earn. Competition for sales is incredible, and businesses must adapt to changing markets or lose out on sales. The Internet can be used as selling tool in one of two basic formats. The first is to use it to reinforce an existing store front. The Internet would be used to help bring in customers at a local store. The second is focusing solely on Internet sales, with no store front at all. In this case all advertising would be undertaken online and all sales would be shipped. For local sales, the online advertising methods must take a different tack. Instead of using broad advertising methods to reach as many people as possible, advertisments should be highly focused and limited in scope.
The Importance of Local Listing
The first thing you will need to do to use the Internet to market your business is update all your local listings. Go onto Google and make sure that your company is listed as a local business. Also check out sites like superpages.com or yellowbook.com and make sure that your information is listed and correct. You will also want to ensure that the keywords listed are directly related to your business. While niche market keyword usage is a necessary part of selling online to the general public, when you are selling locally you can use broader search terms. There is less competition for local business than there is for international. Where a solely Internet based business might need to use more awkward phrases, a local business can simply list their focus. You might also want to place a listing on a site like citybizlist.com to ensure as much local exposure as possible.
Incorporate Social Media
Once you have all of your listings up and running, you will need to start looking at other advertising methods. It does not make sense to pay for preferred listings on search engines to promote local business, but it does make sense to consider paid advertising on social networking sites. Facebook offers tremendous advertising potential. Not only can you create your own business Facebook page, but you can also buy local advertising. Much like advertising in a newspaper that distributes in your area, buying Facebook advertising allows you to keep your focus very narrow. You can advertise locally at a very inexpensive price. Facebook can also be used to create interest using different promotions. You can do give-a-ways, raffles, competitions, and more, all run through your Facebook page. It will take time to build up a large enough audience, but the investment is well worth it.
One of the biggest mistakes most Internet marketers make is they don’t realize what is going through their prospect’s mind when they are surfing online. You have to really delve into what your prospect is thinking about at the time they come to your website when you’re trying to make money online.
This blog post will give you a good profile of the typical prospect. Keep this in mind when you are writing your ad copy.
1. Your prospect has tons of distractions!
When your prospect is online, they are experiencing a lot of distractions. Among these distractions includes endless pop-up windows, e-mail notifications, and instant message alerts.
In other words, there is a lot of chaos going on online when your prospect comes to your website. They have tons of distractions and your sales message has to cut through all that in order to get their attention.
2. Your prospect has a lot of problems going on in their life.
Today, people are being bombarded with all kinds of challenges. This includes financial, health, and future concerns. Most people work in jobs they hate and basically do not go out and meet interesting people or go to interesting places.
Your website has to be the most exciting message they have read all day. Assuming you target that prospect’s hot buttons, you will be able to get their attention, and perhaps turn them into a customer.
But none of that will work if you do not realize your target prospect has a lot of problems going on in their lives and are constantly distracted.
3. Your prospect is being bombarded with advertising messages constantly.
We live in an over-advertised society. There are advertising messages attacking us via billboards, television, radio, and storefronts. It is literally impossible to escape this.
You have to realize this when you create your advertising and website. Your prospect has probably been pitched tons of times before they see your website. So you have to make sure that the advertising message on your website cuts through all the noise in your prospect’s life.
So keep these three tips in mind as you construct your website. Knowing what your average target prospect is going through, and what you’re up against, will help you create a website that will grab your prospect by the lapels and force them to read your ad.
Most people think they can write anything on their website and get sales. This is simply not the case. You need sales copy that is going to get people’s attention, get them reading all the way to the order button, and yank out their wallet and buy.
This blog post will reveal 5 secrets to writing sales copy that can boost your conversions.
1) Pretend you are taking to your prospect at a bar or restaurant.
One way to make sure your sales copy is customer-centric is to pretend you are talking to your prospect at a bar or restaurant. What happens is you will start to write like you talk and in a conversational manner. After all, a sales letter is simply a face-to-face sales pitch in disguise.
2) Use short sentences and small words.
Most people read at a sixth-grade level. Therefore you do not want to insert large words into your sales letter as your prospect could get lost in your copy!
3) Give it to someone in your market to read.
One of the best things you can do is give your sales copy to a person in your target market. If they come back to you and just say, “That’s nice”, then you need to rewrite the ad.
But if they read the sales letter and ask you, “Where can I get that!” then your sales copy should work!
4) Get right to the point.
You are not writing a novel or short story. You need to get right to the point in your letter if you are going to pull people in.
One way you can do this is by using the famous copywriter Gary Halbert’s introduction he used to implement all the time. It goes like this:
If you’ve ever wanted to lose weight, then this will be the most important message you’ll ever read!
See how this get’s right to the point? You can easily modify the above for your own market.
5) Keep your target audience in mind.
Your typical buyer is going to have many distractions. They could be at home with 24 different pop-ups on their computer and Twitter notifications. That’s why your advertisement has to cut straight through that to get their attention.
It’s no secret that having one time offers can boost your bottom line. Offering more of your products and services after the initial sale is a perfect time to get more people to buy from you.
However, most marketers really mess it up when it comes to writing copy for one time offers. Especially offers that are made immediately after the order, or “one click upsells” where people can automatically add more products to their shopping cart.
Here are some copywriting tips that could boost the conversions of your one-time offers.
First of all, people who buy your one time offers are already going to be “warmed up” to you. After all, they have already bought from you and all you need to do is carry on the sales conversation.
This may seem simple but a lot of marketers sell their one time offers like their lead product: with a lot of information and benefits about the seller to boost desire in the product.
The tested way to start off a one-time offer is to continue the conversation in your customer’s head. This is done by simply thanking her for the previous purchase and that you want to present another way they can solve their problem or better their life.
In other words, they are already a “warm” prospect. You don’t need to warm them up by talking to them as if they have never heard of you before.
As a result, expect your upsell copy to be shorter than usual. Unless you are selling an item that’s way more expensive then your initial offer, your sales copy will be shorter in length.
It is a also a good idea to talk about the previous product/service they purchased in the copy.
For example, if you are selling an information product and you are upselling your customer on a more expensive home study course, you can tell your customer the upsell will show them the “HOW” of what the initial product covers—that they will get more of the benefits they want to experience. This is why they bought your lead product in the first place.
So take action on these copywriting tips for upsells. They could really boost your upsell conversions through the roof!
One of the big mistakes most marketers make is they don’t tell people what benefits the product is going to give them.
For example, they will go on and on about how they were “founded in 1976″ and “devoted to “excellent customer service”.
But what the customer wants to know is: What’s In It For Me!
You see, there is an old saying that when you’re a marketer and are writing copy, you have to tune into the radio station “WIIFM”. Which stands for “What’s In It For Me!”
For one thing, you cannot let prospects assume the benefits they are going to get.
You have to explain to them what’s in it for them–what kind of benefits your product is going to get them and how their life is going to be better as a result.
One way to do this is to ask yourself, “So What?” or “Who Cares?” after each sentence of copy you write. This will force you to get after the deeper benefits of why your product/service is going to make your prospect’s life better.
Further, your copy should have more “you’s” than “I’s”. If you have a lot of “you’s” that means your copy is focused on the customer. If you have a lot of “I’s” it’s all about you, and your copy isn’t going to maintain your prospect’s attention!
Because I have bad new for you: the customer doesn’t care about you! The only reason she’s reading your sales letter is because she wants to know what’s in it for her.
Sure, you can have a story in your sales letter about your company or yourself, but it should be a brief anecdote.
So the next time you write copy, imagine your target customer is over your shoulder watching everything you write.
Also, try to get someone to read your sales letter that’s in your target market. If they read it and ask you, “Where do I get this?” then you know you’re on the right track!
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Getting a lead is only the first step in the sales process. You still need to convert that lead into a sale. The following secret strategies are used by top Internet marketers to maximise their conversions of leads, by focusing on the behaviour of each individual prospect rather than treating prospects as a mass of identical beings.
