How To Convert Website Visitors Into Customers Without Being Too Aggressive

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Convert Website Visitors
Photo via Envato Elements

If you have an online business, then you’re likely most concerned with two things: attracting relevant visitors to your website and converting them once they’re there. Whether you’re selling services or products, driving traffic to your pages is just the beginning – your success hinges on your ability to capture leads and close deals.

If you’re wrestling with how you can convert visitors to paying customers on your website, it’s worth thinking about your own experience when browsing the web. You probably don’t like things being forced upon you, like email request popups that interrupt when you’re in the middle of reading an article. The problem is these practices are commonplace, and it’s part of the reason why the average conversion rate for popups is just 3.09%.

Even if the aggressive tactics do work, it can paint a negative picture of your company and reduce the level of trust that your audience has in you. Yet a website that is too passive doesn’t convert anybody either.

The trick is to keep people interested and drive leads in an unobtrusive way that feels natural to the visitor’s flow, so they don’t feel coerced. This can make their experience with you positive as well as giving you the business you need to pay your bills.

There are several ways to find this sweet spot, and here are some of the best.

Display the right popup at the right time

Where most websites go wrong is that they show the same generic popup regardless of what the user is doing, and this creates friction in their experience. The distraction gives them time to pause and decide maybe you aren’t the place they want to buy from after all.

Business management platform vcita solves this problem through offering a much greater level of control than the alternatives. Through vcita you can create popup widgets that are optimized to fit the intent of the page your audience is viewing. Rather than the standard “Sign up for our email list” popup, you take direct bookings on your service description pages, onboarding your new lead directly to your CRM and even requiring prepayment for service bookings if you like.

What’s great is you can have different popups depending on what page you’re on and control it even further by showing after a specific delay. Let’s say your website has significant amounts of free content. One article could be about the importance of yoga to your health, and you could set it up so that after the visitor has read 50% of the article, they see a popup telling them they can attend a free trial yoga class on Zoom.

The more aligned the visitor’s intent is with the call-to-action you offer, the more likely people will be to convert. You can wait until the reader is actively engaged with a particular page before showing your fly-in offer to avoid scaring an audience member off too soon.

Through vcita, you also have significant control of the look and placement of the popup itself, and you can position it so it is obvious but not in the way for the user. A simple change here could have an outsized effect on the visitor’s decision to view it as a nuisance or a convenience.

Ensure your free content offers match your services

When you have more than one product, it can be difficult to structure your website to give the correct prominence to each one. Often you see websites with a variety of free content, but then they try to sell you something completely unrelated. This gap creates waste, as the net is too wide.

At other times, the free content actually matches the paid products but the middle layer of lead magnets doesn’t demonstrate this clearly enough. Especially for service based websites, freebies are a great way to develop trust with the visitor and increase the likelihood they purchase.

Mark Manson's Website

Mark Manson handles this particularly well. He offers four different free ebooks on his website, each of which require you to sign up to his email list. Through his email marketing platform,  Convertkit, he can then add a tag to that visitor and he knows they have an interest in that particular area.

Through email marketing he can now retarget and nurture them with paid products. On his website, you never feel pressured to enter his sales funnel, as the free ebooks seem completely in line with his other content.

It’s easy to create an ebook of your own to show off your expertise and make a customer more likely to purchase from you. Canva has many templates to choose from to make the process painless. You can display these prominently on your website and let your visitors self select what products you should market to them.

Systematically A/B Test

While your gut feeling can inform your decisions, data should be what drives them. It’s possible to tinker with your website in a million different ways but be none the wiser to whether it’s having the effect you want. A/B testing using professional software means the conditions are kept stable and reliable conclusions can be drawn. It involves showing different users different options and tracking the data on their engagement.

If you use WordPress, then MonsterInsights enhanced with Google Optimize is the best option. Here you create “experiences” where the same URL could take the user to any of a number of different page variants. If you have enough traffic, you can support multiple different pages at once to speed up the process. Yet if your existing visitor base is small, it’s better to stick to just a version A and a version B.

Google Optimize

Once you launch the experiment, you’ll be able to see at a glance a comparison based on conversion rate. Google even calculates the probability of a certain option being the best one to avoid you needing to do the hard work with the mathematics.

The opportunities are endless, depending on what your website is. For a physical product-based website, you can test out different product images to see what converts the best. You can test out many versions of sales copy. There’s the potential to go down to the most micro-level for testing. Another option is to combine A/B tests with vcita’s popup customization to find out what popup works best on each page.

Wrap up

In order to work out the best conversion optimization setup for the specifics of your website, you  will need to commit to significant testing. One size fits all solutions won’t cut it if you want to maximize the benefits from your traffic.

Regardless, your funnel is always most likely to see the best performance when you’re able to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and clearly understand what calls-to-action will resonate best with them in what situations.