From our partners at .US Domains.

Your website is live and fully designed for ecommerce sales and customer management. It looks professional, user friendly, beautifully designed, and aligns with your brand. But this is just the first leg of the race. To start, you must first drive customers to your website. Once they land on your homepage or anywhere else on your site, you are tasked with enticing them to stay and ultimately buy from your business. After all, website visits are just metrics, unless they result in actual sales.

As the number of visitors to your website climbs, so too should your sales. If it doesn’t, your website or online strategy might be missing some key factors.

Transforming visitors into buyers, and hopefully loyal, long-term customers, has a lot to do with web design and content. The tips below will help you turn browsers into engaged buyers and can be shared with your business customers to help them do the same. Read on for expert tips from our partners at .US domains.

Valuable content

Sometimes, the content that triggers sales the most has nothing to do with product descriptions or “buy now” buttons. Regular, quality blog posts are a great way to build trust, showcase your expertise, and establish rapport with prospective customers.

Building a successful blog takes time and getting started can feel daunting. Some good blog idea starters include:

  • An in-depth story about why you launched your business. This is a great way to build confidence with your customers.
  • A post announcing news about your company or a product launch. Like you, many of your customers are trying to generate engagement and make sales online.
  • “Top-10-Tips”content is a simple way to provide solid advice in a way that is digestible and actionable. If you’ve identified different customer personas, or know that you serve a few different niches, creating content that is specific to their needs will help you better reach these customers through Google and other search engines.

Your blog is a tool that educates and inspires your customers, but also a means to humanize your business. Your potential customers have a lot of choice when it comes to web service providers, and having a tone, a brand, and values that resonate with them can be a huge distinguishing factor in whom they ultimately choose to do business with.

Valuable offers

If you’re a business owner focused on sales, it might seem counterintuitive to start giving away things for free to new visitors. But let’s emphasize the word new. As shoppers turn to the Internet more than ever to seek value, offering generous first-time discounts and promotion codes can be a great way to spark some sales. Free product trials or promotional bundles are another great idea. Try to focus on bundling sticky products that have a long-term value for your customers. Think of these moves as an investment, as they can incentivize visitors to make a purchase and perhaps lead to more sales or word-of-mouth marketing. It also displays confidence in your own product or service.

Reviews and testimonials

“Research shows that 91% of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 84% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation,” according to an article by Inc. Sharing online reviews is an excellent way to inspire new visitors to buy. This includes sharing negative reviews, as doing so confirms the other positive reviews are real. If a review is critical, go the extra mile by posting a response acknowledging the feedback. This only shows great attention to customer service. In a crowded industry landscape, positive reviews and a commitment to transparency can be factors that prompt a visitor to choose your business over a competitor.

Thorough FAQs

Having a frequently asked questions section on your website will not only help further empower visitors to buy from you but will also save you and your team time spent fielding common queries. Similarly, a how-to or instructional guide that includes useful information on top services, such as website creation or email management, could serve as an educational piece or preview to make potential customers feel confident about adding your product to their cart.

FAQs can be specific to your product and services, but they can also include more general questions that people in your industry often have as they get started, such as “What is an SSL certificate?” This useful, high-quality content will establish you as an industry expert and can also improve the SEO of pages you want to have rank.

A great UX

If your website visits are not translating to sales, it might be worth analyzing the user-friendliness of your website. Do pages load fast? Does the website work for mobile customers? Are there too many obstacles to the final checkout and payment? It’s also worth making sure that your online business accepts a wide array of payments, from traditional credit cards to newer systems like Apple Pay.

Make sure to consider not only your user checkout environment, but the user environment for existing customers. Can customers easily navigate their account to get the information they need and to manage their products? Keeping existing customers happy is the best and easiest way to continue to grow long-term sales.

Build engagement via social media and email

Just as you would use social media and email marketing to draw visitors to your site, these same platforms can also be used to convert prospective buyers before they ever land on your website homepage. Use beautiful images and post engaging content to lure customers. Lock in their interest in a particular product and link directly to the product page. It brings them one step closer to the checkout and purchase phase.

Clear calls-to-action

Whether it’s a blog, a stellar review, or a customer case study, each piece of content and web page you create should drive the customer to a dedicated sales page. Make sure your business website is easy to navigate, has clear “shop now” and “checkout” buttons, and always directs the prospective customer to the right place. Information needs to be easy to navigate.

You can go the extra step and feature “add-on” products next to complementary services, such as suggesting custom email to customers buying a domain name or website. The flow and content of your website should entice customers to buy from you and believe in your brand.

Looking for more great tips? Check out the .US partner toolkit, full of helpful social graphics, video clips and creative assets you can use to fuel your marketing needs. Or, check out our post on how to effectively upsell.

This post was sponsored by .US Domains.