Attracting an influx of website visitors is good for business, especially when you’re looking to get more attention to your products and services.
However, the real profits come in when you turn those visits into loyal customers. For this, you need a well-detailed plan, an understanding of your customer journey, and effective use of customer touchpoints to amplify your brand offerings.
That’s exactly what I aim to unveil in this post. I’ll be sharing six tips you can follow to turn clicks into customers. First things first:
What does client conversion mean?
Client conversion refers to the process of making potential clients or leads take your desired action.
For example, they could:
- buy a product on your ecommerce site
- schedule a meeting
- request product demos
- download an ebook
- submit a form
It all depends on the specific goal of your landing page. All these actions are aimed at, ultimately, generating sales.
6 best practices for client conversion
An effective way to boost your client conversion rate is to prioritize your target audience. I’ll discuss six effective best practices to ensure you ultimately gain actual customers from clicks:
1. Start planning the conversion
When planning your client conversion, start by defining your goals and objectives. What specific action do you want your visitors to take? Is it to purchase something, subscribe, or book a demo? Once you understand your goal, you can tailor your customer journey in that direction.
Your conversion plan should outline key details like:
- Your desired call to action
- Your target audience – demography, pain points, and online behavior
- Conversion funnels you’ll use
- Strategies you’ll adopt– for instance, social media marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, paid advertising
- Timelines and budget for conversion
- Tools you’ll use
If you’re working with a team, indicate the roles and responsibilities of each team member. Define performance metrics that’ll help you track the effectiveness of your plan— I’ll talk about this later.
2. Understand customer journey
Typically, the customer journey covers the full experience of discovering your brand, engaging, and eventually becoming a paying customer and a brand advocate.
To understand your customer journey, you first need to visualize your sales funnel, which shows the stages potential customers may pass through until they buy. You should also understand what drives their decisions at each stage. Generally, these stages include:
- Awareness – when they discover a problem or need and are seeking a solution.
- Consideration – when they see potential solutions to the need and realize they need a product or service.
- Decision – when they choose a product or service and decide to buy.
- Retention – when they become repeat customers.
- Advocacy – when they promote your brand.
For each stage, determine specific conversion actions a particular customer might take. Let’s say you’re a fashion brand, customers in your awareness stage may:
- Read blog posts about how to pull off a corporate look
- Explore product categories in search of a particular outfit
As you assess your ideal customer journey, consider the types of questions customers may ask at each stage and what they’re trying to achieve. Here’s a depiction of what a typical customer journey would look like:
Also, assign emotions to depict how prospects are likely to feel about their customer experience as they move between phases. Are they curious, skeptical, or frustrated? See a more detailed example below:
Use insights from your customer journey map to optimize your website. This may mean improving your existing content, targeting specific keywords, or creating new customer engagement opportunities.
3. Identify key touchpoints
You also need to map your customer journey based on major touchpoints. Touchpoints refer to direct or indirect contacts a customer has with your brand.
Identifying these touchpoints is crucial to creating an effective conversion strategy. It can also help you create a smooth transition through various stages of your buyer journey. For instance, you can distribute quality content across each touchpoint and pull in clients to your website or landing page, where they usually buy.
Common customer journey touchpoints include:
- Social media
- Paid ads
- Email marketing
- Blog posts
Now that you’ve identified your touchpoints, you want to tailor your new shiny content based on user behavior and preferences. For example, my business has multiple touchpoints like social media and tons of blog posts anyone can find on my food PR agency website – they just need to click on the blog section. Our blog readers would typically prefer in-depth content that explores specific PR topics. In contrast, potential clients on social media respond better to concise content.
So, that’s exactly the kind of content we offer on each platform.
Here’s a sample blog post:
Source
Now check out our Instagram and X profiles:
To further maximize these touchpoints, we use this concise content on social networks to boost audience interest and pull organic traffic to the website.
As a brand if you rely on email marketing, create newsletters that provide value to your audience. Follow email writing guidelines. For a professional touch, use a digital business card and add it as your email signature, customized with links to additional resources for specific audiences. Online resources can help you find the right digital card solution for your business.
When deciding the type of content for each touchpoint, consider, too, where potential buyers go when they need information. For instance, if someone wants to know how to handle a PR crisis or write a press release, search engines might be one of the first places they check. So, we opt to create relevant blog posts with target keywords about these topics instead of crafting other types of content tackling them.
As a final tip, ensure consistent branding across touchpoints.
4. Create client tiers
Client or customer tiers are strategic categorizations of customers based on a predefined set of criteria. These criteria aim to reflect the value of various customers to your business, their engagement levels, or their purchasing behavior. The idea is that customers get access to more benefits, services, or rewards as they move into new tiers.
Typically, customer tiers aim to encourage customers to engage more with your brand so they can bring in more value.
Here’s a guide for defining customer tiers:
Identify relevant criteria for creating the tiers – This should reflect the value that customers bring and their potential for future engagement. Consider factors like purchase frequency, engagement level (website visits, social media interactions, etc), and average revenue the customers generate.
Use a straightforward structure – Stick to 3-5 tiers at most. You also want to create a clear distinction between each customer segment. Define the specific attributes that will make a customer qualify for each tier.
Here’s a sample tier model:
- Tier 1 or Basic Tier – for new customers or those with occasion purchases. These groups could have benefits like early access to special promotions, welcome discounts, exclusive content, etc.— anything that’ll get them to buy more.
- Tier 2 or Premium Tier – for regular customers with more consistent engagement and purchasing habits. They can get more personalized benefits like special product recommendations, access to express shipping, or exclusive loyalty programs.
- Tier 3 or VIP Tier– for more profitable customers with frequent large purchases and brand referrals. This group can get all benefits from previous tiers along with others like dedicated customer service reps, access to exclusive events and product launches.
Choose creative and catchy names for each client tier and let your leads know that these tiers exist. Also, show prospects how to gain more from your brand through these tiers. Check out Ulta’s tiered membership structure:
Automate – integrate your tier system with marketing automation tools. This way, you can automatically segment your target customers.
As your customer base grows, regularly review your tier system and adjust your criteria if necessary.
5. Make landing page messaging effective
Your landing page should help guide users through their customer journey and initiate a conversion. So, it should have clear and effective messaging, just like your other touchpoints.
Tailor your messaging to target leads at various stages of their journey. Remember to focus on your client’s interests. For instance, in the awareness stage, you could emphasize the pain points that prospects may have and how your product can solve that problem. In the decision phase, highlight the positive outcomes prospects will gain from using your product.
Additionally, keep your messaging concise and ensure it’s easy to grasp your unique selling proposition. In the example below, Mindshare Digital uses benefit-driven copy to highlight its USP. Notice the concise copy.
Also, remember to use attention-grabbing headlines that either highlight your key offering or the problems you intend to solve. And, your call to action should tell users exactly what you want them to do. See the “talk to us” CTA in the example.
You can use generative AI tools to fine-tune your messaging. This would simply require feeding your rough draft to the AI tool and prompting for ideas to enhance clarity and improve your copy.
6. Set up metrics and monitor performance
Setting up key metrics will help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in boosting your customer conversion rate. You get to see how well you’re attracting new leads and converting them. You’ll also determine which touchpoints bring in more customer conversions and which ones perform poorly. That way, you’ll know what to focus on.
If you’re using Google Analytics or any other web analytics tool, here are key metrics to look out for:
Website traffic – number of visitors your site gets over a period.
Traffic sources – where your site visitors are coming from. For instance, organic search, social media, or direct referrals. Here’s what this report would look like:
Conversions – percentage of visitors who take a desired action. It indicates how effective your site is in converting traffic into leads or customers.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): average cost of acquiring a new customer. It helps you assess the efficiency and ROI of your marketing and sales efforts. You can determine this when you assign a value to each goal conversion on your website. See the example below:
You can also use heatmap tools like Hotjar to visualize clicks and interactions on your site. This can help determine which pages are keeping users engaged.
To set up tracking on your site, configure your analytics tools based on your conversion or revenue goals. This would usually include setting up “events” or “goals” that are triggered when users perform a desired action. You’ll also need to add UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes to links in your marketing campaigns so you can easily track where traffic is coming from and know the most effective channel.
Based on the performance insights, you can begin to adjust and optimize your marketing strategy for better results over time.
Conclusion
Converting clicks into customers is one major objective of any online business.
Today, we saw that detailed planning lays the groundwork for your client conversion strategy. You should understand your customer journey, create client tiers, identify key touchpoints, and use effective messaging. Don’t forget to track relevant metrics so you can make adjustments to your tactics if needed.
What are you waiting for? Start generating more client conversions and ensure business growth.
About The Author
Chris Norton
Chris Norton is the host of the UK’s 7th largest marketing podcast, Embracing Marketing Mistakes, and Founder of award-winning B2C specialist PR agency Prohibition. His social media training blog is listed in the UK’s top 10 PR blogs. For tons of digital PR tips, you can follow Chris here @chris_norton.
