If you are looking to sell more online by increasing your conversion rates for your online advertising, you need to know the right process. There are powerful, proven strategies that will help you enjoy higher levels of business and personal success and profit. Don’t forget to follow them step by step, or your competition could beat you while you lose customers due to low conversions.
1. Market Research
If you want to convert more visitors to customers, your first step should be research. The reason research is so important is, the more you understand about your customer, the more you can persuade them. Smart marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals all understand that their customers have hidden desires. You must tap into these desires if you want to persuade them to buy from you.
Jason Kulpa, CEO of Underground Elephant, suggests hiring experts to help out with market research to ensure your online advertising campaign initiative gets off on the right foot. “You research, not by reading university studies, but instead by seeking out communities where your ideal customer congregates. If you don’t know who your ideal customer is, you need to brainstorm that first. With the internet, you can cast a wide net, but that’s no excuse to lack the fundamental information about your prospects. Come up with a defined vision of your target group’s age, location, gender, income, and hobbies. This will position you to have more conversions than ever before,” said Jason.
2. Competitive Research
Don’t stop at researching your customers. You’ve got to know as much about the competition as possible. They will be your biggest obstacle to making more sales. Your ads don’t exist a vacuum; your target audience is being bombarded with all kinds of messages every day. They need a way to differentiate one from the other. Therefore, look at what your competition does, and strive to be unique.
3. Sales Funnel
You must understand that every conversion follows the guideline of a basic sales funnel. Angie Meeker at OptinMonster describes a sales funnel: “A sales funnel is simply a tool for visualizing where your prospects are in the process of making a buying decision. A sales funnel is wide at the top because prospects with all level of engagement enter and eventually the most engaged ones are channeled to the bottom of the funnel to be turned into sales and repeat customers.” First the prospect must know you, then they need to understand what you can do for them. Eventually, they might be persuaded to buy as they progress in your funnel. Understand which pieces of your advertising accompany the various portions of your sales funnel. Create highly focused display ads (lead generation), landing pages (for expanding on your message and building value), and finally the call to action (CTA). Give the visitor an opportunity to sign up, buy, or otherwise behave in your preferred manner.
4. Attention
Your initial ad will be the attention-getter. It must call out to your audience based on what you learned about them in your research. Use big claims and bold statements to shock prospects into clicking through to your landing page. If your headline is boring, they won’t even stop as they scroll through the rest of their social media feed, app, or search engine.
5. Interest
It’s not enough to capture attention with the obvious. You need to have them entranced, to direct their energy further into your funnel. You do this by providing interesting data that is relevant to their problems. An especially effective tactic is to help them realize that their problem is larger than it seems. For example: “Being overweight isn’t just unsightly, but it can cause diseases as well.”
6. Desire
When you’ve convinced the prospect that they have a real problem, and that it’s possible to solve it, you need to start building their desire. They must want your product specifically, therefore it’s time to start listing your features of your product or service and tie them to benefits. If you do this correctly, they will feel the need to urgently own whatever you’re offering.
7. Action
When you’ve built up desire through a sales letter, you can finally ask for the money. Do this outright by posting a button such as “buy now.” Remember, if they already made it this far into your funnel, they will want to buy, so don’t be shy.
8. Follow-up
The follow-up might just be the most important and overlooked portion of online ads. Your conversion rate should be calculated on a long-term basis, not just one day, week, or month. Sometimes, a visitor will hit your site and not buy until a year later. Track this behavior with software so you can tell if your follow-up plan is working. For example, you may find that sending 20 emails is more effective than sending five. Just remember to always follow up, or you could be leaving money on the table. A great starting point is to create a phone template to call them personally. This is rare today, and will convince prospects that you care.
9. Referral
Your customer is not only worth the price they pay for the initial product, but also their potential lifelong value. Many people will offer you referrals, such as friends or family, if they love the results you helped them achieve. This could represent two or three times the profit per customer than you originally thought. So don’t forget to ask your most loyal fans to share your brand with their inner circle. It could mean the difference between a failing or a thriving business.
10. Pivot
No matter what business you are in, there could come a time when you need to pivot. This means that you assess your current conversion rates and consider changing your advertising. Perhaps you can add or remove pictures, headlines, copy, or offers. The point is that you continue to improve instead of stagnate. Pivot every few months and you’ll soar ahead of the competition. Fail to do this and your market may just move beyond your reach.
When it comes to inbound sales, online copywriting is a must. You will always convert more people with your ads when you understand how to craft your message. Thanks to quality research, effective positioning, and all the other tips above, you’ll be in great shape to win more deals. Then, you can sit back while more sales and profitable relationships role in easily.