‘Wine and Dine’ Your Prospects to Convert Them

A recent article on conversions compared the process to trying to establish a relationship with someone. This metaphor is a clever way to look at converting potential clients, with the main point being that conversation should be the driving force throughout the process. There is no one point of conversion; instead, nurture your leads in multiple ways on their journey to becoming loyal customers.

Start With a Corny Pick-up Line

When trying to get someone’s attention in a bar, people often resort to using pick-up lines. They need to distinguish themselves somehow from the others and, while often cheesy, these lines usually get attention. The conversion equivalent, then, is crafting a creative, compelling headline that will make your site stand out from amongst the crowd on the SERPs. Try writing something that is a pun or a play on words—sure, it might make someone groan, but it WILL make them more apt to click on it!

Dazzle Them With Your Witty Conversational Skills

In the bar, once the woman falls for the man’s line, he now has to back it up by engaging in a riveting conversation that will keep the lady’s attention. At this point, body language comes into play, so there are a lot of things going on. What this means for conversions is that once you’ve lured someone onto your site with an irresistible headline, you have to keep the conversation going by delivering them the information you promised in the SERPs. Don’t just rely on text alone; much like body language enhances conversations, inserting appropriate images will make your text pack a punch. Just make sure that your content and images pertain to your initial headline and don’t go in a different direction than you indicated. Just like no lady likes to be led astray by a lounge lizard, don’t make your prospects feel duped by a bait and switch!

Don’t Beat Around the Bush

Once the bar guy gets to talk to the girl and things are going well, what should he do? If she seems interested, he should at some point directly ask her for her phone number and maybe a dinner out. If he doesn’t clearly make his intentions known, there could be a miscommunication and a missed opportunity for a real love connection. Similarly, once you have gotten a prospect to your page and you have offered them compelling, relevant content, it’s time to seal the deal by making it crystal clear what the next step is. Make sure your call to action, whether it is to buy a product or sign up for a newsletter, very apparent so there can be no doubt in the prospect’s mind what comes next. Keep the conversation going by providing step-by-step guidance so they don’t get confused and abandon your site.

Yes, the metaphor is kind of silly, but contains many useful parallels to how you should go about winning over leads--don’t rush the process and always be available and helpful. Your prospects will discover that they just can’t live without you!

For more ideas on how to gain conversions, check out FindYourSearch.com’s article over at Posterous.

Landing Page Optimization

Landing pages play an important part in converting visitors to customers, so great care needs to be taken when creating these pages. A landing page is a specialized page where someone is directed when they click on your link from an email or social media sharing sites. Since the landing page is the first thing visitors new to your site will see, it’s of the utmost important to make sure this page is optimized for optimum conversion. Following are a few suggestions for making the most of your landing page.

Keep it Simple

The primary purpose of a landing page is to tell your visitors what you want from them, whether that be purchasing a product or signing up for a service. Thus, you want to have as few distractions as possible to divert visitors from the main call to action. Avoid superfluous images and text that can overwhelm and divert a visitor from the reason why they’re on the page to begin with. Your landing page isn’t the place to experiment with different fonts and design elements. The best plan of action is to keep the fonts simple and easy to read and to use white space and headers to organize your information.

Put the Important Information Above the Fold

People want to be able to find the information they seek and do so fast, so it’s extremely important to place your call to action towards the top of your landing page. You definitely don’t want to make visitors have to scroll over halfway down the page to find the sign up button. Make it as easy as possible for them to find the appropriate information by putting it at the top of the page and list the less important data below it.

Hone Your Content

Since your landing page’s function is to achieve a conversion as quickly as possible, you’ll want to use text sparingly, yet effectively. You don’t want to throw up just any old content; rather, it needs to be carefully crafted so it has the most impact. After all, it is the wording that will be doing the selling, so you need to pay attention to every word, from the first line in the headline to the last one in your call to action. Just remember to keep your message clear and to the point to avoid any confusion or uncertainty.

Keep in mind that there’s no exact science to landing page optimization and that constant testing and experimenting is necessary to find what will work best for your particular company. If you aren’t getting the results you are after, try tweaking your headlines and the wording of your copy. Don’t get discouraged if at first you aren’t able to succeed—just keep trying!