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How to increase sales from your website landing page visitors

Eight key actions that will get you more sales from your website landing page visitors

 

  1. Why it’s important to remove pointless visitors from your data
  2. Following up on identifiable companies that land on your website pages
  3. How to create a better landing page than all your competitors combined
  4. Why you need tons of case studies/testimonials … and in the right place
  5. Pricing – why you need a page even when choosing not to show your pricing
  6. Live chat – helps to avoid losing out to competitors
  7. Video and imagery on your landing page – comparing yourself to others
  8. International targeting – why you’re losing potential sales from overseas.

 

 

Types of people landing on your website page

 

People landing on your website will be one of two types:

  1. Potential customers
  2. Pointless visitors

The first needs no explanation, but the second does …

A pointless visitor is one or a combination of the following:

  • Someone from outside where you sell to (e.g. countries that you don’t supply)
  • Someone who has found your page, but purely for the information, and who will never buy
  • People who want to sell to you
  • People who already supply to you
  • Competitors
  • Internal staff

 

Why is this important?

 

Why is it important to determine which website visitors are potential customers or pointless visitors? 

Because you need to be comparing sales/enquiries gained to the number of visitors who were ‘potential’ – NOT those who were ‘pointless’.

Compare the following two scenarios …

Scenario 1 – ignoring pointless visitors

  1. 100 visitors land on your website page during a month
  2. You feel that you’ve had two enquiries from those visitors
  3. Your success rate appears to be 2%

Scenario 2 – removing pointless visitors

  1. 100 visitors land on your website page during a month
  2. You identify 40 visitors who would never be potential customers.  For example, people from outside your geographical target area, or people who want to sell to you
  3. That leaves 60 website visitors
  4. You feel that you’ve had two enquiries from those visitors
  5. Your success rate is 3.3% (two of the 60 relevant visitors).

Many businesses compare levels of sales/enquiries to the overall number of website visitors landing on or viewing a page.

That comparison can lead them to think that their website page or marketing are vastly underperforming when reality is that many of the visitors should have been initially excluded from their analysis.

 

How to know which landing page visitors to exclude

 

Google Analytics CAN partially help here, but it’s weak compared to A1WebStats (which you can try free for 30 days)…

This video shows how A1WebStats helps to filter down website visitors so that only a smaller number are considered to be potentially customers.

As you can see from that video, we started with 175 visitors who landed on that page, and ended up with 92 after removing visitors from countries that aren’t in the target market.   It’s those 92 that you would compare to the level of sales/enquiries gained.

 

Increasing enquiries from website visitors

 

As you can see above, your starting point should be to identify only those who could potentially have become customers.

When you compare that number to your level of sales/enquiries, you will have a percentage success rate.

For example, you started with 100 website visitors to your page and ended up with 60 and you got 6 enquiries, which would be a 10% success rate.

Whatever your success rate, there’s always room for improvement.  These strategies apply to the majority of business types and can be undertaken independently of each other …

 

Companies and people identification

 

A core part of the A1WebStats system provides you with actionable information that will gain you more results from your website visitors – companies identification and geolocation.

It identifies companies in two ways:

  1. By their IP address
  2. By their geolocation (this is normally a partial address with a postcode/zip code)

This video introduces companies tracking by IP address:

This video focuses on tracking companies by more than their IP address, using their geolocation (postcode or zip code plus partial address):

It’s also possible to target individual residential properties (more useful for B2C activities), as you can see in this video:

Although useful to capitalise on the knowledge that people within companies have been to your website (including what they looked at page by page), the ideal situation is for ‘company visitors’ to be proactively contacting you because your website has given them enough reasons to do so.  This leads onto …

 

Beat the competitors

 

This will be the best use of an hour of your time that you’ll make in the months ahead.

  1. Make a list of your competitors.  If you don’t know who they are then search Google for phrases relevant to your industry and list the competitor websites that appear.
  2. Go to each competitor website and identify parts of those websites that impress you, and probably impress visitors to their website.  For example, plenty of testimonials/case studies, or use of video within the page.
  3. Make notes of all the positive aspects of competitors websites.
  4. Feel pleased that none of your individual competitors have got everything right on their websites, but that you now have a combination of factors that would be powerful when combined together within your own website.
  5. Make a list of website strengthening activities that you can undertake in the weeks and months ahead, staying motivated by achieving the result of a website that combines all the strengths of your competitors, but all contained within your own website.

Implementation of the website strengthening activities will take time, effort, and sometimes money.   

What’s important is not to burn out trying to do everything at once.  Pick some quick wins you could be doing and diarise them in for action, always intending to return to the full list of website strengthening opportunities.

 

Case Studies & Testimonials

 

Think about what’s in the head of visitors to your website, especially on the page they land on.

One important thing they’ll be thinking about will be:

Who have you done this for, and what did they think of what you provided?

If your landing page is a product or service page, are you providing numerous examples of what you’ve done for people, making those the priority of the page?

Here’s how to get website page structure WRONG:

  1. Describe what you offer in plenty of detail.
  2. Include a few case studies/testimonials.

How to do it RIGHT involves answering the question that the potential customer is thinking about:

  1. Briefly describe what you offer.
  2. Provide several brief excerpts that summarise case studies/testimonials related to the subject of the page that the potential customer is on.  Each of those would link to another page that contains the case study/testimonial in more detail.
  3. Then provide more in-depth information about what you offer.

People ask us: “how many case studies is enough?”.

The answer is: enough to impress people to keep reading and then make contact with you.

This means upwards of 6-10, each of which is focused on the individual topic of the website page the person is viewing.

You may be wanting to sell more blue widgets and so one or two case studies are not going to be enough.  What you need is several of them.  This makes the potential customer think like this when they’re on your blue widgets page:

  1. They sell blue widgets.
  2. They have lots of summaries of case studies related to blue widgets, and I can click through to more detail on any of them.
  3. I’m now convinced that they have the experience needed for me to want to read more on the page, including the detail of the blue widgets service they offer.
  4. Now I’m ready to make contact with the company because they’ve impressed me with their evidence of work done, and made sure that was highly visible to me on the blue widgets page.

Fail to focus on case studies/testimonials and you’ll fail to get the levels of sales and enquiries that you want.

 

Pricing

 

Many websites don’t show their pricing, for these reasons:

  1. They want potential customers to make contact first of all and then find out their pricing.
  2. Pricing is dependent on the customer.  For example, a larger order may provide better pricing.
  3. They are actively trying to charge whatever they think the customer will bear.
  4. They don’t want competitors to see their pricing.

Websites without pricing, or at the very least, an indication of pricing (for example, case studies of what people paid to get a certain level of service or product), will lose potential customers because lack of transparency creates a feeling of distrust.

A very real example in our own industry is Lead Forensics, who never show pricing and are well-known for charging whatever they think the client will pay.   Compare that to A1WebStats, who always ensure pricing is very clear on our website.

The ideal solution (that will gain you more enquiries) is to always make it clear what your pricing is (for individual products and services that you offer).

The compromise is for you to get more of an understanding of whether lack of pricing is losing you potential customers.   Here’s how you do that:

  1. Create a ‘Pricing’ option in your main navigation bar (so that it’s always visible).
  2. On relevant pages, include graphics that encourage people to look at your pricing.
  3. For both the above, link website visitors through to a pricing page that doesn’t actually show your pricing, but includes generic text about your pricing being customised to the needs of each customer.

The point of doing that is so that you can track the numbers of visitors who get as far as your pricing page, including from your service and product pages.

This will enable you to get an insight into the levels of people who are interested enough in pricing to click through to that pricing page.   If those numbers are strong then it shows you that the subject of pricing is important to potential customers, which then gives you the opportunity to return to the whole topic of pricing. Without any call to action encouraging people to view pricing, you will be unable to understand one of the reasons why you don’t get more sales/enquiries from your website visitors.

 

Live chat

 

Live chat on your website tells your potential customers that you’re available to them and can possibly answer their question quickly.

Many people prefer to use live chat to interact, instead of sending an email or picking up the phone.  This is so that they can remain anonymous until that dialogue has reached a point where they’re happy to share their details.

Live chat doesn’t need to be costly.  Tawk.to is a free and full featured live chat service.

Live chat can be utilised by most businesses that have two or more staff.  It’s not so great for a one-person business because, when enabled, that person has the potential to be regularly interrupted by live chats, which takes them away from the flow of what they were doing.  However, if a business has someone whose role includes interacting with customers and prospects, then live chat should definitely be used.  It’s certainly worth looking at the websites of your competitors.  If they’re using live chat and you’re not, then it’s likely that you’re losing business to them.

 

Video & imagery

 

Some imagery on websites is pointless because it just exists to break up the page. 

No-one is interested in stock photography.  In fact, they are likely to subconsciously reject the website that’s been lazy in its use of imagery.

Imagery and videos should always act in a supportive manner, providing either value to the website visitor or reassuring them that it’s beneficial for them to make contact.

The starting point is to look at pages of your competitors websites and compare them to the equivalent pages of your website, focusing in particular on video and imagery.

If the imagery or video on competitor websites are better than yours then it’s a great opportunity to make note of that and plan in what you’ll be creating to replace what you’ve currently got. 

Ask yourself what’s good about videos on competitor websites, plus what’s bad?  For example, maybe they try to cram too much into one video, making it too long.  Your answer to this would be to create a series of shorter videos that respect the time of website visitors by allowing them to focus on the video element(s) that matter the most to them.

Where are competitors getting imagery right or wrong?   As an example, would you feel warmer towards a business that has a website that profiles only their senior management, or a website that profiles all staff – sending out a message that everyone matters?  This is something that’s actually worth bringing in additional help on.  With multiple people, ideally those who have never seen the websites of you and your competitors, you have the opportunity to ask them what they think about the range of website pages you show them, which would be both your own website pages and also those of your competitors.  Within their observations they will likely include reference to imagery and videos and how they made them feel.

 

International focus

 

If your business can sell to businesses in other countries, how well does your website portray that message?

If an overseas website visitor is on your service or product page, they will have these thoughts in their mind (likely in this order):

  1. Do you sell to my country?
  2. If you do sell to my country, have you got evidence of how impressed those customers were?
  3. If you do sell to my country and can prove it, then I’ll invest more time in the website.

The vast majority of websites have a very weak focus on their potential customers from overseas and this is easy to see evidence of within website visitors statistics.

In this video, you’ll see how a website is actively losing potential customers from overseas …

The solution does require some effort to create but will provide the reward of gaining many more sales and enquiries from overseas.

All you need is a graphic (e.g. of the World, or Europe) that has a call to action such as: Delighting customers worldwide for 25 years.  See examples from your part of the world.

That acts as a click through to a website page that ideally allows this to happen:

  1. They click on their part of the world (e.g. Europe).
  2. That takes them to a page that allows them to click deeper into specific parts of that area (e.g. France within Europe).
  3. Within the detail level page (e.g. France) it shows case studies and testimonials related to customers in that part of the world.   And plenty of them – the more there are, the higher the potential to gain the sale or enquiry.

 

Your next steps

These tips are not an attempt to provide every method that will gain you more sales and enquiries from those landing on your website, but they do cover the biggest issues that stop website visitors from engaging to the point of making contact.

Even if you committed to undertake just one of these recommendations, you’ll see improvements in enquiries from your website visitors, which will then incentivise you to focus on the other recommendations.

If you have any questions about these strategies, please feel free to contact us for some free input that will help you further.