Our core mission at Right Creative is to help our clients turn their website visitors into customers. While there are a number of techniques and strategies we utilize to accomplish this mission, today I want to highlight five of our favorite strategies that we use for every client we work with.
- Make A Great Impression With Your Branding
- Drive Traffic With SEO
- Build Trust Through Engagement
- Don't Go Straight For The Sale
- Create Delight Through The Customer Experience
Make A Great Impression With Your Branding
Imagine for a moment that you are interviewing for a high-profile position as VP of Sales for some reknowned corporation. You are well-qualified, well-spoken, and you have all of the skills necessary to perform the job at a high level. When you show up to the interview however, you are wearing ratty looking pajamas. Your hair is unkempt, and you generally look (and smell) like you haven't showered in a week. Well-qualified though you may be, what are the chances of you landing the job?
Your branding and online presentation work much the same way. While it is certainly nice to think of a world where appearances don't matter - the unfortunate reality is, we are all judged on our appearance, and businesses are not exempt from this tendency.
If people come to your website and find lackluster design, poor attention to detail, and signs of not caring, people may lose confidence in you, even if you are well-qualified by all other counts.
Make no mistake... it is true that sometimes people overthink it and fail to execute out of a desire to have everything "perfect". This can be equally damaging to a business. But I think the far more common scenario is people with terrible branding, losing business without even realizing why.
The key takeaway here is to be mindful of your branding, and show that you are putting forth effort. It doesn't always have to be perfect. But there will always be a noticeable difference between the companies that put forth an effort, versus the companies that don't, in the same way that we notice a difference between those who invest in their appearance, and those who don't.
If you're unsure where to start, check out this article which discusses our brand philosophy, and what constitutes a strong brand.
Drive Traffic With SEO
With your branding looking sharp, it's time to go all-in with your SEO. Before you can turn your website visitors into customers, you need visitors in the first place.
When you first launch a new website, chances are the number of visitors to your site will be low. This is not necessarily a bad thing. This gives you the opportunity to test out different strategies to determine what is working, and what is not. If your campaigns or conversion strategies are poor, it is better to determine that early when not a lot of people are visiting your site than when you have thousands of people visiting your site daily.
Once you create strategies that work well, it's time to ramp up the traffic to your site. SEO is basically free advertising to well-qualified leads. These are people that are intentionally seeking out the products or services you offer. If somebody takes the time to go to a search engine and look up what you are offering, you want them going to your site. Therefore, it is in your best interest to rank as highly as possible for as many search terms as possible.
To learn more about our approach to SEO, click here.
Build Trust Through Engagement
It's time to put your imagination cap back on. This time, I want you to imagine that a very popular speaker is in town, giving a talk on how to become a better {{fill in the blank}}. You buy your ticket and go to the talk, eager to learn some tips to help you along. When the speaker comes out, he proceeds to talk for 45 minutes about himself, his background, and all of the things that he is qualified to talk about. Not only does he not deliver on the promise to help you improve in sales - he essentially wastes your time. This is not what you came for.
As far-fetched as that scenario might sound, this is exactly what most businesses do. They fill their websites with a bunch of content that does little more than tell visitors about themselves. There is very little value there for visitors. It's all about what the visitors can do for the business.
If you want to successfully convert your visitors into customers, you need to give them something more. You need to flip the script from talking about yourself to talking about your customer.
As the adage goes, everybody's favorite subject is themselves. So the more emphasis you can put on your users, the more favorable you are going to seem.
One way to increase user-engagement is to offer some kind of quiz or survey on your site that reveals something to your customers about themselves.
Beardbrand does a great job of executing a personality quiz that asks users a series of questions to help them decide what kind of fragrance is best suited for their personality.
Take Care Of, another incredibly well-designed site also has a fantastic quiz to help users determine what vitamins are ideal to support their lifestyle.
Both of these websites are doing a great job of engaging their users, and asking questions that let users arrive at conclusions on their own terms.
They very easily could have gone the traditional route and said "Here are our fragrances" or "here are the vitamins that we sell". But instead, by asking their customers a series of questions, they engage them at a different level.
Don't Go Straight For The Sale
If you think it would be weird if someone asked you to marry them after your first date - then this should not be a foreign concept. Asking someone to part with their hard-earned money is an intimate thing. It requires the building of trust. If you ask for money before you've established trust, it feels awkward and strained. You need time to prove to your would-be customers that you are worth them spending their time and money on. They need to feel secure in knowing that you will provide a solution to the problem they are experiencing. And this usually does not happen on the first pass. The more expensive your product or service, the more true this becomes.
When it comes to using your website as a sales tool, you need to get comfortable with the long game. Accept that you might not get a sale the first time a person visits your site or encounters your brand. Your goal is NOT to convert a new visitor into an immediate sale. Your goal is to simply build trust with that visitor. And the only way to build trust is to provide value. Not in a scammy, "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" type of way. It needs to be done in a "I'm going to give you this value, because I believe in it, and I want to see our customers succeed, with us or without us" kind of way.
That is the very reason why I am writing this article.
Everything that I am typing in this article is the same information I would give to a new client. The reality is, we like to see businesses succeed - and if they do so because of something they read from us, all the better.
When you get out of the "what's in it for me" mentality, and into the "What value can I give?" mentality - your business will start to change. Your customers will trust you more. They will leave better reviews. They will be more gracious in times of conflict. And they will recommend you to their peers.
Create Delight Through The Customer Experience
The fifth and final tip that I want to discuss today is for when a customer is ready to buy from you. If they are a motivated buyer, they will put up with a surprising amount of agitations. However, if you can make the purchasing experience agitation free, it will turn that customers' experience into a genuinely delightful experience.
Consider these two scenarios.
Scenario 1:
It's Thanksgiving, and you forgot to buy milk. You aren't sure if the grocery store is open on a holiday, so you decide to call first. Upon calling, you get an automated message with 10 options that you have to sit through. You press what you feel is the most relevant option, sit on hold for 5 minutes, only to be given a message that nobody is available, and to leave a message. Frustrated, you hang up, decide to chance it, and drive to the store. Upon arriving at the store, you see that they are indeed open. You enter, and make your way towards the dairy section. When you get there, you see that they haven't restocked the milk. There is only one ugly, damaged carton left. It's more than what you need - but you grab it, and head to the checkout counter. There is a huge line, and only one checkout lane open. The line moves at a glacial pace. By the time you get to the counter, the milk carton you grabbed in its damaged state, does not have a clear barcode to scan. So the cashier has to do a price check on the milk. They also inform you that they are only accepting cash, because their card readers are down...
Scenario 2:
It's Thanksgiving, and you forgot to buy milk. You aren't sure if the grocery store is open on a holiday, so you decide to call first. Upon calling, a customer service representative answers the call and wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. You explain that you just wanted to check if they are open, because you forgot to get milk. The customer service representative confirms they are open, but goes a step further. They ask what type of milk you need, what size, and if you would like it delivered. They explain that there may be a small delivery fee, but can have it there within the hour. When they arrive at your doorstep, even though the bill was only $5.00, you give them a $20 and tell them to keep the change.
Okay, okay. I know these scenarios might be overly dramatic - but both of those scenarios are stories you would likely tell your friends & family about. If you were the owner of that grocery store, which story would you want being told? How frustrating and agitation-filled a customers experience was? Or how amazed they were at the quality of service they received?
When it comes time for a customer to make a purchase from you, that is your time to shine. The better service you can offer, and the easier you can make it for your clients - the more delightful that experience is going to be for them. This is when you build loyal customers and genuine fans of your business. This is how you get people leaving you rave reviews. And this is how you get your customers to tell their friends about you.
Conclusion
There are many strategies that you can employ to help move a website visitor along the customer path. Every visitor that comes to your site is going to have different needs. The more you can understand and cater to those needs, the more success you will have. It is critical that you don't simply publish something and assume it will succeed. Test everything. Put structures in place that allow you to contol and measure every single decision on your website. The things that you find to be successful are the things that you should do more of. To learn more about how to set up and perform user testing for your site, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
