One of the best ways to sell online is by converting traffic into leads. Research shows that most website visitors don’t buy from their first visit to a website. In fact, most visitors will return several times before making a buying decision.
For affiliates and business owners, this is useful to know so that you can create many touch points with your potential customer. With only one visit on your website from most of your visitors, it’s going to be much harder to sell. But when you can get visitors to see your content (and products) again and again, they are more likely to buy from you.
This is just one of the many reasons you’ll want to convert your website visitor into a loyal email subscriber! Once on your email list, you can continue to follow up with useful email marketing messages which build trust with your subscribers and lead them back to your products many times. On an email list, you can extend dramatically the term with which a website visitor can buy from you.
Since most visitors leave a website within a few minutes, it’s a good policy to offer something of value to give to visitors in exchange for their email address.
Converting Traffic Into Leads – Targeted Traffic
Where do you get your traffic from? Whether you buy traffic or build content for it, you need to make sure you have the right visitors coming to see your website. Without the right targeted audience landing on your website in the first place, you’ve much less chance of getting them on board with either your email list or your product/service. What is your target audience? Your target audience is the section of the online marketplace who is going to be most interested in what you are selling.
If you create content (or run ads) which deviates from this focused intent, you can waste a lot of time getting the wrong people on your website. To make sure you get the most highly relevant traffic coming to your site in the first place, is the best place to start when considering how to get them on your email list.
To do this, consider who your customer avatar is. The customer avatar is the type of person who is going to buy your product. to find them, look at who you’re already selling to.
What are their interests, where do they hang out online? Where do they live and what is their location? The more information you can gather on your customer avatar, the better able you are to target advertising (and content) towards them specifically and obtain the most targeted website traffic possible. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Converting Traffic Into Leads – Create An Enticing Opt In Offer
Once you have a nice flow of targeted traffic coming to your site, you’re off to a good start. The next step is to create an enticing offer which would be suitable for your target audience.
Ideally your offer should give huge value to your subscriber and also tie in with your product or service which you intend to sell. You’re going to give away your “freebie” in exchange for your website visitors’ handing over the precious email address. So it will need to be something valuable! Since more and more website owners are doing this, website visitors are becoming more hesitant at handing over their details.
To get your website visitors to subscribe to your email service, you need a great offer which will help them overcome this hesitancy. You can offer an ebook, a video course or video or email training, for example. On this site, I offer a free video series to help people start an online business from scratch. You can join my email list through any of the forms or opt-ins on this website. Sign up here.
Converting Traffic Into Leads – Benefits Not Features
One of the easiest mistakes to make when you set up your opt in offer, is to talk about your offer in terms of features. For example, I offer training and education to help affiliates get better results. But website visitors don’t want to know about the features of your offer. They only care about WIIFT – What’s In It For Them! So creating a benefit driven offer isn’t always as simple as you might expect.
For example consider the two headlines I might use to encourage visitors to opt in:
- “Access tools and training to learn affiliate marketing from scratch” and compare it to this one:
- “Earn Money In Your Sleep”
One of the titles talks about the features and other one benefits. Which one is most appealing? The second one is because it explains the end result which people want and is easily understood. The other talks about features; affiliate marketing is the business model which can get you the benefit, but most people don’t really care about this! Look at the two images above and decide which is most appealing. This can give you some idea about how to position your offer to get more subscribers!
Using A Landing Page Software
A landing page is worth a mention here too. With a landing page, also known as a “squeeze page”, you “squeeze” your visitor into entering their details to join your email list. This is done by sending a visitor to a page specifically designed to capture their email address. On a normal website, there’s a lot of distractions and more choice for your visitors. They can browse around and it’s easy to miss your opt in offer. But on a squeeze page the offer is the only thing they see. They only have two options: sign up or leave! They can’t browse around like on a normal website.
Because of this landing pages can be optimised more easily for performance and you can get more subscribers per visitor than on a generic website. Here’s an example of a landing page I built for my email list:
Why use landing pages? Landing pages are particularly useful if you’re driving traffic to a website using a paid advertising platform. You’re more likely to get a subscriber sending someone to a landing page than a normal website and your marketing budget can go much further. Plus, once on your email list, you’re more likely to turn a subscriber into a customer, since you can continue communicating with them over a much longer time frame than is possible only from a website. Access a landing page software here.
Testing And Cross Testing
With a landing page software you can also cross test your pages against other similar ones. After a while of doing this over thousands of visitors, you can understand which landing pages are the most efficient and turn the most visitors into subscribers.
Ultimately cross testing landing pages allows you to get leads into your email subscription service for the lowest possible cost. Sending an equivalent number of visitors to a blog post won’t have the same effect because most website visitors don’t take any action – even with a pop up or subscription form.
But with a landing page more people will sign up. A good landing page can have a sign up rate of 40% and above if you get the elements right in terms of your offer and target your visitors according to your customer avatar. By cross testing different headings, images, form position (to the right is the best), and other factors, you can optimise your landing page to get the best bang for your buck!
Converting Traffic Into Leads On A Website
You can convert traffic from a blog website into leads too. Ideally have a few ways to give some kind of value from your website. You’ve probably already seen my popup offer and drop down webinar bar. I also use banners in my text and have a sign up form on the side of this website. By having multiple ways in which your visitors can subscribe to your email list, you increase the likelihood with which they will sign up!
Make sure the benefits of your offer are immediately apparent and they visitors can see them clearly on every page of your website. Although popups are annoying, they work! Otherwise so many website owners wouldn’t use them! Popups can be set up using an autoresponder. Here’s the one I use. I also use a drop down plugin called Icegram which lets you setup offers on timers to showcase your offer.
Summary
Turning traffic into leads is one of the best ways to monetise a blog website. But you’ll need a lot of traffic first. Before you start looking for traffic, research your target audience. The target audience is the cross section of the online marketplace who is most likely to want to buy your product or service. Once you understand your customer avatar thoroughly, you’ll get more out of your advertising and/or blogging, depending on what traffic strategy you use.
With a nice steady flow of traffic to your website, you can offer a freebie giveaway on your website and/or create specific landing pages so you can optimise your ability to turn website traffic into leads. A landing page is a webpage built to specifically turn visitors into leads. On a website, only a few visitors will opt in to your offer. But on a squeeze page you can increase this amount dramatically by cross testing your offers against similar pages.
If you’re using a website to turn visitors into subscribers, use multiple opt in offers. On this site, for example, I use a popup, a drop down, multiple banners and static opt in forms.