Leads & Referrals 101: 4 Tips to Improve Your Business’s Client Conversion

Your conversion rates are the best indicator of how well your offer is presented. It’s a percentage of visitors who take the action you want, whether it’s making a purchasing or downloading a white paper. No matter what your business is, there are some proven tactics for driving up conversion rates.

Understand Where the Process Fails

One way to increase conversion rates is to understand where and why prospects abandon you. Wait times, poor customer service, lack of trust, and many more reasons can lead to customer abandonment. You need to understand what’s happening. Websites can track customer interactions and determine bounce rate. In physical businesses, spend some time observing your customers and listening to what they say. In both cases, you might want to follow up with a survey or email and ask what the problem was.

Have a CTA

A Call to Action can make a big difference. If prospects aren’t sure what action they must take to complete a purchase or proceed to the next step, they’re more likely to decline the offer. Without a sense of urgency, they’ll feel comfortable putting off the purchase decision until some future time. For online business you should have a button or link for your CTA with a label like “Click to Buy”. Physical stores could put the same kind of subtle suggestions in graphic displays or coach salespeople to express CTAs verbally. Do some trials to find out what works best.

Perfect Your Layout

In both online and offline businesses, your layout makes a big difference. Your design should be visually appealing and easy to understand. Navigation should be simple and obvious. You want the customer to feel comfortable exploring and make it easy to find what they need. In traditional brick-and-mortar stores, signs, labels, displays and logical placement of items make the shopping experience straight-forward. If you operate a website, you’ll want to use simple menus and provide search and filter functions.

Seek Referrals

Your business will prosper if you can get referrals that draw customers to you. Referrals are more effective than marketing because people tend to trust the friend or acquaintance that made the referral more than any advertising. Social media is a good way to earn referrals, but reaching out to happy customers and inviting them to share with family and friends works as well. Professional practices especially thrive on referrals. You might want to attend an industry-specific workshop, like those that The Rainmaker Institute does for law firms to improve client conversion.

Consistently applying these ideas to improve conversion rates will grow your revenue. A smooth customer experience will also boost your brand appeal.