Turning Clicks into Sales: How to Convert Your Site Visitors into Customers

When launching your website, the simplest and most direct measure of success is the number of visitors. The higher the site stats, the better for you. But if you’re an online business, you don’t want to settle for just a high number of clicks. You actually want people to buy your products or avail of your services. Your goal is to have a high conversion rate. Here are five ways to achieve this:

Tailor your site based on audience demographics. A practicable way of doing this is to have customized landing pages for your different target markets. It may be as simple as having country or regional pages that automatically load based on the location of your visitors. Figure out the demographics of your target audience, and present your products and services according to their needs and interests.

Provide fewer choices. This may seem counterintuitive. People like to have choices. But it turns out that having too many options actually makes us unhappier. It’s more difficult to decide and we end up suffering from regret, questioning whether we made the right choice and wondering if we missed out on the stuff we didn’t choose. The lesson: don’t overwhelm your visitors with the enormity of your product line. Present a few options at a time. They’re more likely to buy and they’d be much happier with their purchase if they just have five rather than 25 products to choose from.

Make it easy to compare products. While you don’t want to confuse potential customers with so many products to choose from, you also don’t want to deprive them of the information they require before making a purchase. Design your product pages to make comparisons easier. Highlight the important specs and key differences. Making comparisons is a key part of customer decisions.

Be transparent with your pricing. A major turn-off in e-commerce sites is to advertise dirt-cheap prices and then pile on the additional fees on the last page of the check-out process. This marketing trickery is sure to annoy your customers and makes you come off as a scammer. State your prices clearly including add-ons and other fees before asking for credit card details.

Simplify the payment process. When a visitor has reached the checkout page, it’s almost a done deal. Don’t mess it up. Make the online form easy to fill out and make sure the customer doesn’t miss any of the required fields. Annoying errors and repetitive loading of the checkout page can turn a potentially successful transaction into a failed business deal.