Turning your website visitors into your customers

When someone comes to your website to take a look around, there’s no way to find out who they are and what they were looking for.  You can use tools like Google Analytics to find out how they got to you, what pages they looked at and how long they stayed but who are they?

Getting some sort of contact information is obviously very useful to a business, having a conversation with that person is more likely to lead to you doing business with them than if they just visit the website.

So what can you do to find out who is taking a look at your company:

• Contact Form: Rather than just showing your e-mail address and telephone number (which should both be on every page on your website) and hoping they get in touch, providing a contact form lets visitors tell you a bit about themselves and shows that they want to learn more.  As well as asking the usual (name, contact details), think about the things you’d ask a new potential client on the phone and see if they are willing to divulge that information (nothing too personal obviously) or list the products and services you offer and ask them what they are interested in so you can get the right person to get back in touch with them.
• Privileged Content: What information can you provide on your website to tempt people to hand over their details?  You could offer to post them information such as a brochure and then they have to give you their mailing address but is there something they can download or an area of your site you can keep only in return for an e-mail address.  To make sure the address is valid, you can send the links to the “private” parts of your site in the e-mail.
• Mailing List: Offer to keep visitors updated via a regular e-mail that you send out.  There are a number of mailing list packages available (ManageMail is the mailing list product developed by Trembirth Design) that make the process easy to manage and reminding your clients what you do can can lead to more sales.
• Prize Draw: As well as sending information you can offer a monthly prize draw for anyone sending you their details.  The prize depends on how much you may get out of potential sales but a bottle of wine is a good start or a popular choice has been an iPod costing around £45.

Getting the contact details of your site’s visitors is the first step in turning that visitor into a customer, once you’ve got the contact details, it’s down to you.