How To Improve Your Visitor To Buyer Ratio

The first step to building a successful website is to ensure that it's user-friendly and mobile responsive. The hard truth though, is that the majority of your website visitors won’t convert to buying customers. It's therefore important to establish a strategy that’ll capture these visitors and encourage them towards the action you'd like them to take. Here are eight ways to achieve this:

1. Craft a clear and compelling value proposition

Your value proposition gives visitors a reason to buy from you, as they want to know what’s in it for them. Focus on strengthening your value proposition, which must be differentiated from what the competition is offering. Communicate it effectively by refining it into a single and credible sentence (minus the jargon), and test it to see how it resonates with visitors.

2. Segment your audience

Smart marketers segment their audiences based on each lead’s spot in the sales funnel. Some may have joined your list as part of the purchase process, others as returning customers, and there may also be a few who are unsure of what they need or want.

Audience segmentation also determines how you communicate and reach each type of visitor. For example, you could target top-of-the-funnel visitors with explainer videos or free e-books, while bottom-of-the-funnel leads just need discounts and other reasons to buy.

3. Increase trust

People want proof and evidence before they can buy from you, so you need to back up anything you claim with proof. Go over the claims you make on your site and then offer proof in the form of:

• Customer testimonials
• Social proof from customers that use your service
• Results of scientific studies or tests
• Case studies & third-party reviews (such as Trustpilot)
• Demos

This makes your visitors know they aren’t betting on an untested product or service, and they can confidently buy from you. Seek to build trust by adding trust elements to your site such as credibility from third-party support, which includes citations and articles in reputable publications. 

4. Use remarketing

Sometimes, your non-paid marketing efforts can be made more effective when coupled with paid ads. Remarketing helps you figure out how you can convert visitors to buyers, by displaying ads to those who have previously interacted with your site. Remarketing ad impressions correlate positively with conversions, and you can run such ads via several channels to find out the ones that yield the highest conversion rates for your site’s traffic.

5. Create a conversion-focused design

Having a website alone isn’t enough to improve conversions. Its design is more of an art than it is a science, but to improve your visitor to buyer ratio, you need to balance both.

Some conversion-focused design rules you can follow include:

• Simple, user-friendly site layout
• Designing with your buyer persona in mind
• Optimising product pages based on your audience’s demographics, goals, pain points and other factors
• Adding a buy-back guarantee or no-questions-asked policy
• Using tangible action verbs with your calls-to-action
• Using fewer input fields
• Choosing strong and compelling headlines
• Humanising your brand by adding video content

6. Use A/B testing

A/B testing helps you mitigate decision making risks by experimenting and innovating, or exploring new opportunities to improve your visitor to buyer ratio. This technique, also known as split testing, lets you create alternative versions of your pages or content, and see the conversion rate for each, and which page or content performs better.

The goal is to test continuously with at least one or a few tests at a go, so you can learn what works and what doesn’t. You can also test forms, colours, fonts and choice of words to get a clearer picture of what makes your visitors express an interest in your product.

7. Carry out sales funnel audits

Your sales funnel ushers visitors and qualified leads towards the final sale. SMEs that harness big data intelligently can offer the best experience to customers, including tailored content at each stage of the buyer journey. By carrying out an audit of your funnel and incorporating A/B testing, you can see what works best, where visitors drop off more, and figure out how to improve it.

8. Add incentives to take action

Your site should include an indication that the action needs to be taken immediately. This can be achieved by adding compelling text next to product listings. On the other hand, you can send urgency notifications to visitors who visited the site but ignored these call-to-actions. If the product isn't a limited edition, or there is an endless supply, you can give out free gifts or time-sensitive bonuses and discounts for purchases completed within a specific time frame. 

About the Author

Roberto Garvin is Co-Founder of Mofluid - a mobile app for e-commerce stores. Mofluid converts your Magento Shop into a great Mobile-App for Android and iPhone.