Three Proven Ways To Convert Visitors Into Buyers Online

KATHERINE REYNOLDS LEWIS
September 12, 2012
Andrea Mohin
The New York Times

Quick Tips:
If you are monitoring only your traffic, you are wasting money.

Place your phone number prominently on every Web page.

Try to attract leads that are ready to buy and not just exploring.

When potential customers search the Internet for Botox or laser hair removal in the greater New York City area, Verve Medical Cosmetics has long been easy to find.

But the company’s Web site has been more successful attracting visitors than it has been converting those visitors into new customers, according to Michele Bracci, the company’s director of marketing and the wife of its founder, Dr. Stephen Bracci.

So the Braccis decided to give the site a face-lift. They redesigned it last year to emphasize the qualities they believe make the business stand out from other nonsurgical medical aesthetics companies. They added before and after photos, emphasized Dr. Bracci’s qualifications and 12 years of experience, put their clinics’ physical addresses on the home page and made the offer of a free consultation more visible.

Most important, they moved the company’s phone number to the upper right corner of the home page, with a prominent encouragement: “Call Us.”

“People are really not going to fill out a form,” Ms. Bracci said. “They want to call and talk to somebody who’s knowledgeable. We knew what made us different, but we weren’t doing a good job of showing it.”

After the redesign, comparing the first quarters of 2011 and 2012, Verve had a 20 percent increase in the number of qualified phone leads from the site and an 18 percent decline in the average bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who left the site after visiting just one page.

Staff members now monitor site metrics on a monthly basis and track where customers learn about the company. “We decided at an early stage that we were going to stay on top of our game,” Ms. Bracci said.

With widespread consumer Internet use entering its third decade, most small-business owners know it is important to have an effective Web site and to find ways to attract traffic. But many struggle with the challenge of converting traffic into revenue — or they make the mistake of ignoring Web conversions while spending money to build traffic.

“One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is that people don’t measure their Web sites’ conversions,” said Gabriel Shaoolian, chief executive of Blue Fountain Media, an online marketing company in New York City that works with Verve. “So much money is wasted.”

KNOW HOW VISITORS USE YOUR SITE The three most important elements for a small business selling on the Web, Mr. Shaoolian said, are solid guarantee and return policies, responsive customer service and a prominently placed phone number at the top of every page. Even business-to-business companies, he said, should invest in clear messaging, developing a few short phrases that speak directly to customer needs and are accompanied on the site by a call to action such as “contact us” or “view our portfolio.”

The goal, he said, is for business owners to bring the same rigor and detailed attention to online efforts that they employ offline. Most owners of retail stores can tell you what their last 10 customers bought and which shelves they browsed, he said, but when it comes to their Web sites, many owners have no idea.

The Mass Firearms School in Holliston, Mass., runs television, radio and print campaigns, but most customers who walk through the door have first visited the Web site, said Steve Hathaway, chief executive of the four-year-old firearms safety training company. “We believe that our Web site is one of the biggest drivers of business to our company,” he said. “The Web site is the landing pod for our other advertising campaigns.”

The company’s primary goal for the site is to communicate professionalism. “When people come to us, they’re trusting us to teach them on a serious subject matter, the lawful use of firearms,” he said. “It’s really important to us that the navigation experience for the consumer is very positive, that they can find their way around, that they understand what we are as a company.”

Mr. Hathaway created the original site himself, based on his 1990s-era software-coding knowledge and limited design skills.

After a professional revamp two years ago that updated the design and allowed customers to browse and sign up for classes online, there was a 58 percent increase, comparing 2011 with 2010, in the number of lead conversions and a 30 percent drop in the bounce rate. The company recently opened a shooting-range sports center, so Mr. Hathaway wanted to be prepared for growth and planned to review the site regularly.

ASSESS YOUR REDESIGN It is important to work closely with your marketing vendors on the messaging and keywords your company adopts, said Michael Reiss, founder of Landover Associates, a tech recruiting firm in New York.

In a recent Web redesign, Landover’s consultant inadvertently positioned the firm as an information technology recruiter. That resulted in inappropriate calls and leads for infrastructure jobs rather than for the software developers and engineers that the firm actually places.

Quick Tips:
If you are monitoring only your traffic, you are wasting money.

Place your phone number prominently on every Web page.

Try to attract leads that are ready to buy and not just exploring.

“You know your business best,” Mr. Reiss said. “You need to make sure the business model is communicated properly. I’m sure we had a delay there over months because they saw me as an I.T. firm.”

Along with the redesign, which included a cleaner look and more prominent action buttons, such as “send résumé,” Landover also established an Internet-integrated Twilio phone number that helped the company identify which calls were the result of Web visits and made it easier to quantify the impact of the redesign. Over all, Mr. Reiss said, calls rose 54 percent and social media referrals jumped 44 percent.

Dungarees.net, which sells work clothes, incorporated customer product reviews into its site design and introduced a recommendations campaign in the last year, aiming to move customers from shopping to buying, said Darren Baldwin, the company’s e-commerce manager. Mr. Baldwin found that visitor time spent on a product page increased 10 percent with the addition of customer reviews. To encourage more engagement, the site started sending e-mails to customers after a purchase, prompting them to review their new products.

The site also adopted the iGoDigital software platform to determine appropriate recommendations for customers, based on items they browsed, purchased or put in their shopping cart. The system also sends recommendations to customers who abandon a shopping cart, a strategy that Mr. Baldwin said yielded a 17 percent sales conversion rate, compared with a 6 percent rate for the company’s noncustomized marketing e-mails.

FIND CUSTOMERS WHO ARE READY Dungarees.net focuses on specific keywords so the site will come up in searches when customers are ready to buy a certain item, rather than reaching people during the research phase of their shopping. For instance, rather than focusing on searches for “work jackets” or “Carhartt jackets,” the site places its ads with searches for “Carhartt J140,” the product number for a popular style of jacket made by Carhartt.

ConstructionDeal.com, which connects contractors with customers, has similarly personalized the shopping experience in order to make relevant promotions and offers, said Aaron Rose, vice president for marketing for the Los Angeles-based site. For instance, users who watch a tutorial on social media marketing receive a follow-up e-mail promotion related to the content they viewed.

“We uniquely identify each of our users and their activities,” Mr. Rose said. “We’re able to trigger more relevant, more targeted promotions, whether it’s e-mail or sales calls.” As a result, he said, the number of people who registered for a free account increased to 12 to 15 percent of visitors from 6 to 8 percent.