Converting Visitors to Contacts

How to Convert a Website Visitor into a Contact

You may look at your web analytics, sit back and feel good about yourself. You may see the number of sessions and page visits increasing week-on-week and think that you have finally got your web strategy on-track. And, whilst increasing visitor numbers is a good thing, it can be like running a shop where many people come in a browse your stock. They are interested in what you sell but they leave without buying or any interaction.

Being able to give customers something they value in exchange for their contact details changed the way we shop, and the same is true online. If you can do this you are well on your way to converting visitors to contacts.

So how do you get them to stop?

Give your visitors a reason to STOP and enter into dialogue with you. Sign-post interesting articles, offer free things or discounts, downloads of educational information or other valuable content.

More than likely they are passing through your site as they have been directed from a search engine which has picked up a keyword from some of your content, maybe an interesting blog entry. As they skim through your blog post it’s your opportunity to offer up something more. Something they weren’t expecting, something of real interest, for example, and something they can download and read later.

These ‘Calls To Action’ or ‘Adverts’ can be placed in your sidebar, or in the middle or bottom of your web page, and could contain text and images. You might even use pop-up messages that appear on the page after the visitor has stayed on the page for a set period of time.

Don’t overdo it though, try and keep it to one message and one advert per page, and make your message very relevant to the main page content. Also, if possible, try different versions of the same advert, test them, and use the one that works best. See A/B Testing.

What To Do When a Visitor Clicks Your Advert

A visitor who clicks on your ‘Advert’ is showing more interest in you than one that just reads your page and leaves. But you don’t want to just give your content away for free, you want them to identify themselves by leaving their contact details.

To do this, take your visitor to a Landing Page (also called a Squeeze Page) when they click on the ‘Advert’. The secret here is to give the visitor less and less options to distract them. To do this try using a simple page that has all the main navigation hidden, a clear reinforcement of the value of the download, and a short form for them to complete.

Again, try and test different versions of the page as well as different headlines and text, to see which works best.

Now that you know them

So what’s next? Well that depends on the type of product you are selling, but most likely they’ll need more warming up, so add them to your newsletter subscription list, where they continue to get relevant and targeted information from you. See Email Marketing.

In Summary