All the traffic in the world streaming through your website on a regular basis does not mean much for your business if it cannot be converted into paying customers, or have a high bounce rate.

A professional looking website, with a sleek and functional design is a good start.However, without a compelling call to action, it can be very difficult to get visitors on your website to actively engage before bouncing.

What is a Call to Action?

A call-to-action is a phrase commonly used in marketing and isdesigned to elicit an immediate response from potential customers. A call-to-action is created to engage visitors to take action on your website, thereby turning them into interested or paying customers.

For example, you could offer your customers a free e-book which tells them how to solve a relevant problem, just by subscribing to your website andfilling intheir name and email. You now have the email address of a customer that has shown interest in what you have to offer and has given permission for you to send emails about upcoming offers and promotions.

This is just one example of a call-to-action.There are many strategies that can beused depending on the response you want to provoke, or the result you are looking to generate.

What is a Bounce Rate?

When a visitor lands on your website and then quickly navigates away from it, before engaging with any of the pages, this contributes to a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate is very bad for your search engine rankings, and your business in general. High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors, such as a cheap looking or unintuitive website, having nothing of value offered, or no call-to-action.

A slow loading rate for web pages is another culprit for excessive bounce rates. This is especially true if your website is not compatible with mobile devices. People do most of their shopping and searching on their smartphones these days, so you want your web pages to load quickly and work properly on mobile devices.

Attractive and functional website design, and strategic digital marketing, can help prevent high bounce rates for your website.

Strategies to Convert Website Visitors into Paying Customers

There are several strategies and approaches you can use to convert your potential customers into repeat business.

Some methods to consider, may be:

  • Assess your current position
  • Picture your ideal customer
  • Create a path for your customers
  • Design a captivating call to action

Assess your Current Position

One of the best ways to figure out where you need to go in the future is to assess where you are at today. How much traffic are you presently generating with your website? How much of that traffic is being converted into paying or returning customers?

Is your website mobile responsive? If not, you could be throwing away a lot of potential business.

Once you have determined an approximate traffic-to-sales conversion rate, you now have a measurable target to try to improve upon. You can now figure out which web pages are producing results, and which ones are not. Testing and analyzing is a good way to determine this. Test one page at a time so that the results are measurable. When making too many changes at once, all acrossyour website, it can be difficult to determine which changes were effective.

A professional digital marketing and mobile development company can be a big help with both analytics, and designing an effective marketing strategy.

Picture your Ideal Customer

Thinking about who your ideal customer is, and what problems they might be looking to solve, can help you determine the best way to approach them. By creating a fictional customer, you can put yourself in the customer’s shoes. This helps establish what their needs and wishes might be.

Visualizing your potential customers hopes and desires can help develop an effective strategy for converting website visits to sales.

Create a Path for your Customers

Once you have determined what your customers want, and assessed your current situation, you can then establish a path on your website that you want your customers to follow.

All the products and services you offer should be clearly visible and accessible on the home page. Appropriate category headings on the navigation bar are a good way to group your products, services, promotions, and information about your business, accordingly.

Design a Captivating Call to Action

An initial call-to-action should offer something of value to your customers, in exchange for their contact information. Any customer forms on your website should be simple and quick to fill out.

To convert traffic to sales, focus should be placed on the individual web pages that offer your products and services. Again, it is a good idea to optimize one page at a time to get better measurable analytics. Any pages on your website that takes a long time to load, or are not mobile compatible, will do more harm to your business than good.

Assistance from a mobile development and digital marketing agency can make a big difference to the results of your marketing strategies.

Talk to your Gentraf advisor to get an independent opinion on your website and how well it is achieving your business goals, and then how to improve it.