The process of turning traffic into customers is called ‘conversion’ and it’s one of the hardest things you will ever have to do in the online world.

Knowledge is power here and knowing how to convert people is extremely important. These three steps are excellent if you want to have people go from ‘eh’ to ‘yeah!’ and start buying from you.

1. Show What You Have to Offer

Banner ads from huge stores and shops are created so that they are easy to read and easily identified by the viewer. They also take advantage of the fact that people on the internet are looking for a quick answer and so the banner ad provides that answer and acts as though it’s the only answer to your question. Banner ads should also be bright, cheerful, but non-intrusive and may or may not have little additions such as the ability to search for something through the advertisement without having to navigate elsewhere.

Should your offers follow the same sort of pattern? Of course! Your ads should be clear, simple and breathtakingly obvious.

Start with your product and then add in ‘extras’ and then a little bonus item at the end of it to make the consumer feel special. It’s all about bringing the customer in and making him or her feel as though they are exclusive and well liked.

You can always do a bit of research on large stores and how they do their ads to get an idea of how to design your flash banners. It takes some practice.

2. Build Trust and Rapport With Well Written Content

It’s easy to copy/paste from others (particularly the supplier of the goods you are selling), but like many so called short cuts, it is often more damaging than helpful. Readers will quickly see that you took no time out to actually talk about your product and so they will lose faith in it as well. Take the time out to write content that is informative, interesting, and not simply revisions of keywords over and over again.

• Interesting, relevant content is one of the major keys to conversion because it builds trust, a rapport, and makes people more likely to buy from you as opposed to someone else.

Remember, if you are truly passionate about what you are doing, others will pick up on it and will become passionate about what you are doing too. A copy/paste job will just drive people off.

• Studies have shown that business owners and website owners have, on average, seven seconds to get a user to decide whether or not to buy from a business. SEVEN SECONDS! And to business owners’ collective horror, that time is dropping.
• Some studies pin the attention span of a web browser at four seconds.

illustration showing conversion on-time

Sites which take longer than four seconds to load are often abandoned. Seven seconds, four seconds; no matter how you look at it, that’s not a lot of time and you don’t want to waste it. Your content should grab your reader from the first sentence and then carry them through to your final phrases; and with luck, to the Buy Now button!

On the other hand, once you have grabbed a viewer, they are far more likely to stay and read more about you which is good news for your business and makes good content even more important.

3. Have a Goal for Each Page

The main goal of any site and many of its pages is to get across your ‘call to action’.

The call to action refers to the final bit in your site where you lead your reader and your traffic to buy whatever it is you are selling. It is sometimes as simple as the link to your product at the bottom of an article to a line such as: If you are sick of blankety-blank, try XYZ.

Some businesses don’t want these on every page though and that’s ok. After all, you don’t want your site to become a walking advertisement; users will get annoyed and the search engines may drop you like a hot potato. Google in particular has been growing tougher on sites with only ‘fluffy’ content and no real benefits to users.

• Each page you put on your site should have a goal in mind, the overarching one being of turning traffic into consumers.
• You can do this by committing some pages to doing things like building trust and giving reliable information on something related to your product.
• A page can also be dedicated to things like getting followers for social media, a contact information page and a way for people to communicate.

The more goals you have in mind, the more likely it is that people will come and stay and thus meet one or more of your goals. In this way, your website will be come a success and you will see the maximum number of conversions.

Remember that converting people into consumers can be a complex process, involving the building of trust, rapport and loyalty, but these three steps will put you well on your way to doing all of those things.

image: dan

• convert traffic to buyers
• how to convert web traffic into consumers

• Branding, Professionalism, Unique Business and Quality of service are the major milestones required to satisfy your customer base.
• Apart from these, Showing “business evidence” to your customer brings in major impact to your business. Lets see, how it wins new customers in detail ?

Building The TRUST.

TRUST is one of the major factor which lays between your business and customers. The more the trust may lead to more benefits to your business. At the same time, building Trust is the toughest part of your business online.

• Showing evidence in terms of Proofs, Testimonials, Video’s showing the reality are few of the important evidences for your business.
• It gives the confidence to your customers and makes them to trust you.
• Customers do believe your words and believe in what you recommend to them.
• Here is Microsoft’s small biz resource on building Trust.

The Evidence !

Driving More Profits.

When you are able to build the Trust, definitely you could drive profits. Whatever you offer from your web site, either a product (a digital ebook or software) or a service (SEO or web design services), you could drive more customers. You could drive more sales and hence more profits. When there is a lack of trust, you could not achieve anything with your business.

Repeat Customers.

One of the toughest part of business is getting repeat customers. You will get repeat visitors only when they are satisfied with your service. When satisfied, customers will come back to your business.

• Trust + Quality of service are the two major stepping stones in business.
• Build trust by showing evidences.
• And keep Quality everywhere in your business.

Lets see few examples on how to show evidences in your business ?

• Product Video Demo – A video showing a demo of a product or your service. It should give the big picture about your business. It should be the marketing video.
• Testimonials – Showing REAL testimonials directly from the customers site. Instead of putting fake testimonials, if you directly show them in your customers site, it shows trust worthy.
• Results/Reports – Reports are the major evidences that you could release from your web site. For example, if you are running a SEO service, you could show the results of your SEO service for one of your customer.
• Business Case Studies – Case studies are experiments that you conduct with your business. Showing such example studies brings in more believe on you.
• Yearly Achievements – List down your achievements to the customers, it shows the progress/growth of your business in a wider spectrum.
• Live Trial Demo’s – You could offer trial demo’s to your visitors so that they could try out your product/service. If they are satisfied, for sure they will become your customers.

Apart from Quality, showing evidences brings in TRUST and converts every visitor coming to your site into Customers. Hence business evidences are 100% required to win new customers !

image: jared

Whats Is Customer Acquisition Costs ?

It is defined as the cost spent to acquire or get a customer to your business. In general, acquiring the customer involves giving your service (say, selling a product). You may have to spend money to get new customers (that’s one of the way) by means of advertising. But as a means of measuring this you have to find out, how much money that you spent to get one customer. There comes the customer acquisition cost.

Example.

Say, you are spending 1000$ to get 10 customers then Customer Acquisition Cost is 100$ per customer. For your business to gain profit, your customer has to buy products from you for more than 100$. So it all depends on how far you are utilizing the customer for your business ?

What Is Lifetime Value Of Customer ?

It is defined as the revenue generated from an acquired customer for the lifetime. Once you acquired the customer, it all depends how you are devising the customer into repeat customer. What drives to make him repeat customer ? Its a simple answer, Quality service. Yes, when your business serves quality service or quality product you shall gain and hold the customers for the lifetime.

Example.

Say, you got a customer for 100$ and for the first time you are generating a revenue of 120$ from him. When that customer likes your service & he comes back again. This time you are making another sale for 120$ that means you gained 120+50 = 170$ from a single customer as profit. As said earlier, it all depends how you are devising a customer into repeat customer.

So as a business, you have to maintain the value of a customer high and customer acquisition cost as low in order to gain profits for your lifetime. The quality of your business plays major role in deciding this trend.

I would like to thank Sitepronews.com for creating an awareness through their article (Track And Measure Your Advertising, Customer Acquisition Costs, And The Lifetime Value Of A Customer).

• CLV acquisition cost
• customer liftime value acquisition costs
• definition: lifetime acquisition

Taking your ecommerce store to the next level is the most crucial part of the business. Having a great web site design and offering quality products for sale that everyone is doing today. But what makes you to come out of the competition ? and what helps you to move to the next level of successful ecommerce business ?

Show Related Products For Sale.

As a first step, add a related product column in each of the product description page. If you see the greatest ecommerce sites like amazon.com or ebay.com, it shows you the bunch of related products. This drives the visitors to look for more and more products that he is interested. This keeps your visitors to move around your web site browsing through the products.

Instant or Limited Offer, Converts Great.

Giving up instant offers like “offer open for next 12 hours”. This really converts you more number of sales quickly. Selling online is almost same like the real world shop. Showing instant and limited offers drives the visitors to buy more things. Because your visitor may be looking for some product and the same mind set drives him to take your instant offer.

Frankly Show The Product Price.

Don’t hide anything from the visitor. Show the product price frankly. This really builds the trust between your business and your customers. Maintain the honesty and tell the product price before they go for ordering.

Always Look For Satisfying The Customers.

Customers are the ultimate profit source for your business. You should do all kind of works to maintain the good relation with customers. Because you should convert the visitor into customer and then customer into repeated-customer. Thats the winning factor of ecommerce based business. Have a deadline or time-line in serving the customers query or problems. Deliver the product in the right time as mentioned before ordering the product.

To with stand your business, you must catch the customers in your hand. You should follow these steps to build customer confidence for your ecommerce business because everyone should believe your business and service.

Tweak Your Web Site Design And Content.

The most proven rule in web site design, Keep it simple. Have easy to navigate pages. Write compelling and great content about the products. Give out both positive and negative sides of the product.

Some times telling the negative points may help the buyer to fully understand the product. Thats a good marketing method of driving visitors to buy. This really improves the page rank on search engine results. In return, you will get tonnes of visitors free of cost, 100% profit on sale. Know this rules of ecommerce website, thats a nice article with lot more related stuffs.

Provide a 360 degree view of the Product.

Show the multiple images about the product is good. At the same time showing a 360 degree 3-D view of the product shows the real appearance. This helps the visitors to visualize the product. Have a flash designed animation that really suits here. Also, you could show the list of products as thumbnails in the main page. This helps the visitors to easily browse through the available products.

Plan Your Business Steps.

A business plan is most important part of any online business. Have the business plan with your hand and take the actions based on that plan. Without planning, you could never take our business to the next level. At least you must cover the basic elements of the business plan, otherwise it may lead to a failure business model.

If you are not comfortable in taking all these steps, keep this lingo in mind, “Quality service, continuous quality service”. Have a great business.

• e-commerce bring sales to next level