Gone are the days when you would have to meet a sales executive in person to be able to purchase a product or service. Today the rapid rise of the Internet has meant the erosion of personal touchpoints with the consumer. Instead your website is expected to perform this role. Considering that an inanimate web page is going to take the place of a human interaction, it is quite a difficult task to convert a visitor to a customer, right? Wrong, we say. Your website can be as effective, if not more than your sales personnel.

Website to convert traffic

While you may have taken all the necessary steps to direct relevant niche segments of visitors to your site, it is also essential to have a measure of how many you're able to convert from these visitors. To increase traffic, you may have used SEO techniques, better site navigability, shopping cart, easy payment gateways if yours is an e-commerce site, user friendly interfaces, engaging content etc. However, with all the trouble you have taken, your senior management is going to want to see the ROI. Out of the massive amounts spent on driving traffic to the site, how many have actually stayed to be customers?

Backend research

One of the best ways to analyze your conversion rates is to scrutinize the behavior of your visitors. Do they perform varied actions like downloading files, filling a form, signing up for a newsletter or a free ecourse, do they take the effort to spend money for a paid ecourse, etc. Or do they leave a form midway without filling it totally, do they navigate the site and then leave, or do they simply take one look at the home page and decide your site is not good enough for them. Analyzing these behavioral patterns will help plug potential loopholes in your website. For example if the home page is not attractive enough, there is no reason for a visitor to dig further, right? Also, if there is no site map or site navigation is difficult, the visitor might lose patience and look elsewhere. You do not have the luxury of hoping your visitor will stick around. In the few minutes a visitor comes to your site, you need to have enough "hooks" to engage him or her and convert it into a sale.

Conversion:

Is it just a sale or much more? When we talk about conversion, most of us think it's to do with getting the final sale. However, conversion can mean many things, especially considering the fact that the webpage is a substitute now for personal interaction with customers. Therefore all visitors to your site are potentially in differing stages of a sale. For example, some may be recurring visitors, in which case it means they obviously find something in your site worth coming back for. Others may be downloading files from your site, or signing up for newsletters. Then there are others who subscribe for products or services. This would be known as a sale. Therefore analyzing the different stages of conversion and plugging loopholes is your best bet at increasing sales.

Other tips to increase traffic to sales conversion

Some of the ways in which you could convert traffic into more sales can be by:

Offering easy site navigation - This might be easier said than done. You could try analyzing customer behavior to figure out which sections of the site are being left midway by visitors.

Relevant content - It helps to have relevant content which users are looking for. Noone likes elaborated content and puffery and frankly people don't have the time to read through everything. You need to have direct, specific information that lands bang on target.

Better SEO - This will certainly raise search engine ranking and might drive more traffic. But after that you need more engaging content to lure visitors to make a sale.

Credibility - It might help if your website is linked to more reliable websites to ensure better credibility to your site, especially if it's new.

All in all, conversion into sales is an ongoing process and can happen at any moment of the visitor's experience of your website. You just need to keep in mind that your site is your only interface with your customer.