THANK YOU to the WIX BLOG for outlining below five very simple tricks you can apply to increase your conversion rate and turn strangers into loyal customers.

01. Make your CTA (call to action) pop with placement and color

Despite all of the work you put into your gorgeous website, the most important element on it is your CTA. These are short phrases that prompt your online audience to take immediate action. If your goal is to sell your products, have potential clients book your pilates class, or you want more newsletter subscribers, make sure that the CTA to make these objectives possible can be easily seen. If someone scrolls through your entire website and is unable to find your CTA with a quick glance, you’re doing it wrong. Placement is key.

Another arguably easier way to allow your CTA to stand out is with color. This color doesn’t have to be supernova bright, but rather something that contrasts well to its surroundings. Better yet, for consistency sake, you could choose a color palette for your business and use the accent color for your CTA. A prominent and bold element creates a sense of urgency in your visitor’s mind that you should take advantage of.

02. Create a blog

While it’s important to keep your eye on the bullseye when it comes to achieving your goals, it’s also very important to see the entire target. This way, you can catch people in your field without them directly searching for you. What do I mean by that, exactly?

A random stranger isn’t just going to go to their web browser and type in your URL to start shopping. That’s just not how it happens. The process tends to start with research on the user’s end so they can compare and contrast the options for the product or service they are looking for. While there’s certainly a chance that your site will pop up during this search, that may not be enough to sway someone who is deep in the research pit.

Now picture this: What if you’ve created a blog about your industry and you regularly write informative posts about it? Well, if you habitually share your expertise on your blog, this not only helps your website’s SEO ranking, but it also increases the chance of someone finding your content in search results and in turn, your product. Even if your blog post isn’t directly advertising your product or service, if it provided value to the reader, they will remember that and likely remember your brand as well. The more blog posts you write and publish, the higher the chances that your articles will appear within the search results when someone is doing research about services or products in your industry.

At the end of the day, providing valuable knowledge about your industry within your blog will strengthen your bond with readers, making you more trustworthy to them. If they trust your word, they’ll probably end up trusting your brand.

03. Keep the user experience simple

It’s very important to make sure you don’t make things more difficult than they have to be. (This applies to life, but we’re talking specifically about your website here.) From the second visitors land on your site, a potential customer wants to see what they came for, or at the very least, see where they need to go to get where they want. The key to achieve this is to ensure your UX, (or user experience) is kept clean and simple. In the most plain terms, UX is about creating an accurate experience for the users of your product. That means meeting their needs through the structure, hierarchy and navigation of your app or website.

Your challenge is to be able to keep things clean while being able to anticipate and address the needs of a visitor. This can easily be solved with something like an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page, allowing you to keep things streamlined while remaining informative.

04. Add testimonials to your site

‘Herd behavior’ is the behavior of individuals in a group acting collectively without centralized direction. People feel more comfortable making decisions if they realize that different consumers with similar profiles to their own have chosen a certain brand. Basically, it’s what people (likely including yourself) do when they’re going through their “research phase” for a product or service. They will ask their friends, family, co-workers, and scour online sources for criticisms and praise.

This is where adding testimonials to your website can make this part of the research process easier for your potential customers. Showing testimonials from real customers gives insight and honest opinions about your product. Even showing some less than perfect reviews of your services (at your own, very careful, discretion) shows that you’re not just trying to butter them up. Clients will appreciate your honesty.

Of course, the best way to get testimonials is to ask for them. So, while a one-off customer who only intended to make a one time purchase may not be into it, a repeat customer just may. You could even incentivize a customer by offering a coupon for a (read: honest) review of your products.

05. Give them an offer too good to pass up

Unfortunately, you can have everything perfectly in order and it still not be all puppies and rainbows when it comes to conversion. If you’ve set everything up to the best of your ability and still find your site or biz missing the “star quality” that competitor A or B may have, then it’s time to up the ante.

Add some wow-factor by giving customers a deal that they won’t find anywhere else. While you run the risk of being depicted as “too good to be true”, it won’t matter when others find out your offer is legit and far too good to pass up. This type of deal is especially helpful with people who constantly teeter when shopping online, leaving countless abandoned carts in their wake. Change their minds with a fantastic deal they can’t afford to miss out on.

Triggering FOMO (fear of missing out) on a sale is used very often in marketing, so put it to use.