In the world of ecommerce, the number of site visitors who convert – or in other words, those who purchase your product or service – is a definitive measure of success.
Each visitor to your site undergoes what is commonly referred to as a buyer’s journey; this signals their progression through the research and decision phase (where they are merely site visitors), towards purchasing your solution (when they convert into customers).
For online businesses, this journey is characterized by different stages in the sales funnel. Every business utilizes different ways to optimize each stage of their funnel, to increase their conversion rates.
Here’s the catch: the number of people who reach the bottom of your funnel (converted customers), is directly affected by your traffic, and how engaging your website is.
Unsuspecting Visitors Present An Opportunity
Not everyone who clicks your ads, or visits your website, is likely to have heard about your brand before.
Usually, visitors are inclined to click on your website link based on your web copy, or content snippet that appears in the SERPs. At this stage, they may be interested in learning more about the problem they face than a barrage of available solutions.
These casual browsers – or cold traffic – make the majority of your online traffic especially if you are new, or relatively unknown. These visitors might be aware of a problem they have, which your product promises to solve, but devoid of trust, they are least likely to buy from you.
This does not mean that you don’t have the opportunity to pull them into your sales funnel. Cold traffic can be presented with the right information to develop awareness, carefully targeted to ignite their interest, and further pushed to cultivate a strong desire for your solution – and finally, to convert.
Pulling Them Into Your Sales Funnel
Using ‘guerilla tactics,’ as too many pop-up discount ads on your site in order to convert cold traffic into customers does not work – especially when if the lead hasn’t warmed up to your solution yet. The right approach is to provide visitors with authoritative, and quality content that works or is designed to gain their interest.
At this stage, all communication and marketing efforts should be focused on developing a relationship, and gaining the trust and confidence of the site visitor. Here are some tips on how you can pull unsuspecting visitors into your sales funnel:
Maintain A Professional Blog
It requires patience and time to build trust with cold traffic, and so, you should focus on pulling them in with valuable content, and authoritative blogs, on your site.
A well-maintained blog offers your company the chance to address pain points that interest site visitors into coming to your site, while also portraying – albeit indirectly – that how your authority and vast knowledge over the topic makes you an ‘expert’ worth trying.
Here’s a real eye-opening statistic: About 55% of marketers say that blog content is their top inbound marketing priority.
Why? Not only because blogs rank well, and attract organic traffic, but because they allow businesses to present information that is required to push cold traffic down your sales funnel.
On average, businesses that maintain and update their blogs, produce 67% more leads per month! Devoid of the pressure to convert, visitors can make their way through different pieces to gain a better understanding of their problem, and why your solution is the best.
Complement Your Site Content With Videos
Video marketing is not a new phenomenon, with 87% of marketing professionals already leveraging it as an important tool for retaining visitors’ attention.
The effectiveness of video content is the main reason for its success, 54% of consumers are willing to see more video-based content from a brand they support.
The advantages of using video in your marketing efforts are manifold. Not only does the audience prefer watching videos over reading long articles, but they are also likely to understand it more.
A viewer’s understanding of a company’s product or service increases by 74% when they watch a video, as compared to when they read written information. Hence, videos are a big plus for organizations who are looking to push visitors into their sales funnel.
Increase The Use Of Infographics
Concise, straight-forward, and highly valuable – infographics represent the perfect mix of design, writing, and analysis, which is ideal for the data-driven market and consumers.
It doesn’t come off as surprising that 40.2% of marketers believe infographics are the best performing visuals on their website.
For cold visitors, infographics present a concise, yet valuable, depiction of information backed by statistics. Important topics and common problems, faced by consumers make for excellent topics for an infographic, as the visitor can be educated in considerably less time.
Infographics work best when used with blogs; they capture your visitors’ interest by providing an element of storytelling backed by visuals – allowing you to present bland and difficult-to-consume research statistics, in an interesting way.
Businesses can also utilize another type of visual to capture their visitors’ interest – infographical memes, as they are catchy, and have gained massive popularity over the years.
Gather Information Through Incentivized Downloads
Visitors come to your site, and read your content – so what is the next step?
To retain visitors on your site, you have to keep them engaged through different modes of communication — an excellent way of doing so is to offer them free downloadable reports, e-books, and guides.
A well-placed and well-strategized lead magnet acts like an incentive for site visitors to provide their contact information. In other words, incentivized downloads make potential buyers feel like they got something valuable in return, while also allowing the business to diversify their marketing efforts through different channels – for instance, email marketing.
Unsuspecting visitors amount for a large amount of website traffic. While they may not be initially interested in what you have to offer, organizations can use content marketing, and incentivized tactics to lure potential buyers deeper into their sales funnel.
