Optimize the Customer Journey to Increase Conversions and Profits
Now that you have set up the proper testing processes for your marketing assets to increase the conversions on your website, it’s time to take a closer look at the customer journey, especially for your top funnel prospects. At every step along the way, your customers need a clear path to conversion. Are they on the product page of your website? Perhaps recommending a related piece of content about that specific product, a case study or white paper chalk full of information will push them right along the funnel?
No matter how engaging and informative your online content is, your visitors are going to have questions about your offerings. Self-service and virtual assistants help alleviate the friction when your customers aren’t finding the answers to their questions when on your website. Being there to support your customers’ queries can be the difference between more sales or bounced traffic.
Self service has been proven to directly impact and increase conversion rates. Learn more about how Build.com did it here.
70% of the sales process is over before anyone ever makes contact with you. The customer journey for your site traffic must be cleared so that the valuable people visiting your website can easily navigate and discover the information they need in order to make a decision and ultimate buy from you.
Self-service also delivers highly relevant, targeted marketing offers to drive action and conversion rates. Let’s say that a customer is asking “Does this product also come in black.” Self-service has the ability to not only give relevant information and answer the specific question on the product page, but can also include a call-to-action inside of the answer, to drive sales and boost conversion. Delivering marketing offers that are timely and relevant to the question asked is in essence grabbing the low-hanging conversion fruit on your website and is an easy win for increasing profits.
Improve Your Website Analytics
This of course goes without saying, but you need high-grade insights into the people who are visiting your website in order to improve conversion rates. Google analytics is of course the marketers’ go-to for understanding what links visitors click on, what they read on site, what information is most compelling and how long they stay. But there are even more advanced online analytics tools that can actual behave like a “mind reader” of your customer to better serve your site traffic. You can instantly see what questions your customers have at each specific spot along their online journey. This can feed changes and upgrades to your marketing content and messaging by focusing on the Voice of the Customer. By understanding what their pain points are and how you can better address what matters to them you can affect website conversions. Please your customer, increase sales and profits. It’s that simple.
Without the proper web analytics your conversion funnel is broken and your map for customer action is muddled. You must be armed with online tools to review the status of each phase in the sales funnel. As mentioned earlier, everything must be tested, but testing relies on your ability to track and analyze the results of your marketing campaigns. Follow your online prospects all the way down the funnel into your CRM for an advanced strategy to improve website conversions.
Give Em What They Want – Social Proof
We’re all just a little bit tainted. We’re desensitized to online advertising and marketing as a society. We tend to place more value on authentic people sharing positive experiences. This seems to counter consumers’ fear of blindly trusting companies’ overdone marketing messages, which seem to promise disappointing results.
People are driven to belong to a group. It’s natural and the online world has quickly adapted to this very basic human need to give people the tools necessary when comparing companies’ offerings, products and services. This “Social Proof” is a tool used by marketers to create positive engagements with people which increases conversion rates and impacts what your traffic will buy.
Real reviews from real people on your product pages is a great online tool to give credence to your messaging. This injects a level of transparency to companies and improves the user experience for visitors – which increases conversion rates. Self-service platforms that support dynamic FAQs and user feedback via ratings on answers also build trust. This juices up the companies’ content by giving their site traffic a reason to believe what they say.
Testimonials and case studies are invaluable for increasing conversion rates and delivering the information needed. Your prospects want to hear how real people from real companies benefited from your product and the less “marketing” language included in these valuable assets, the better. Remember that most people visiting your site are educating themselves with the information you provide before they ever make an order or decide to buy. Landing pages will also benefit from social proof in the form of customers’ logos and testimonials from well known companies. Before your prospects take action, they need to know that they are following in the footsteps of other intelligent decision makers that went before them.
