How to Convert Online Customer Engagement Into Sales

You may have no trouble attracting customers to your website, but it’s just not translating into success for your sales targets. There can be any number of reasons for this disconnect. Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to identify and solve the problem. Read on for our guide to getting your sales strategy back on track.

1. Identify your digital shortcomings

One reason your forecast sales are low might be that you’re attracting the wrong audience. Most products are sold with a specific target audience in mind. If your marketing messages are vague or misdirected, it’s possible the visitors you are attracting to your site aren’t particularly interested in your wares.

Alternatively, the problem could be with your broader site design. People might struggle to move around your website or find what they’re looking for, either because it’s poorly designed, it doesn’t load quickly, or there are too many popups on it. If they have to return an item, they may find the process too arduous.

They may even feel your site isn’t secure or seems untrustworthy, meaning they don’t feel comfortable making a purchase. You might need to consider introducing a zero trust security framework or multifactor authentication.

These points might not solve issues around low customer engagement, but confronting them is a solid starting point for understanding the potential causes.

2. Understand the sales funnel

Another method for improving sales figures is understanding your customer’s path toward a purchase. This is where the sales funnel comes into play.

In simple terms, a sales funnel is a way of visualizing a customer’s journey toward buying something. This journey typically consists of four stages:

• Awareness (The customer becomes aware of your product or a problem they need to solve.)
• Interest (The customer evaluates your brand based on the solutions you offer.)
• Desire (The customer looks at specific aspects of a product, like pricing and features.)
• Action (The customer makes a purchase.)

The ‘funnel’ concept reflects the fact that each stage typically has fewer customers than the one before it. 

Consider creating an omnichannel customer journey map to help you identify the best way to reach out to your customers at every stage of the funnel. This will go a long way towards finding the gaps in your funnel. 

However, a sales funnel isn’t the only tool to consider here. Building a quality thank you page or producing quality content is a great way of encouraging sales, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into the stages detailed above.

3. Build a content strategy

With quality content in mind, you should look at the path your customers are taking in more depth. It starts with the awareness stage: conveying to customers you’re here to solve a problem.

Implementing a detailed content strategy is a good way of doing this. Part of that strategy can include publishing a series of blog posts that you think will hook the interest of your audience or using Instagram captions on your social media posts. However, it’s important not to be too ‘sales-y’. Instead of focusing on a product’s features, focus on the problem it can solve.

For example, take a look at this article on what it means to scale a business. It provides useful tips and advice on how to grow a business that provides real value to the reader. 

Publishing these kinds of articles on your website helps you get the attention of search engines. This, in turn, helps draw people to your business—even if they’d never heard of you before they went looking for a solution. 

The specifics of your blog posts will vary depending on your industry and business goals. However, researching SEO (search engine optimization) is always useful. This allows you to add features to your writing (such as keywords and links) that will appeal to search engines, and get your work in front of prospective customers.

If you get to a point where you want to be more direct in your marketing messages (on a website or through a social channel, for instance) you should think about where your customers arrive on your website. Creating a strong e-commerce landing page can help give your customers that little extra push in the right direction. One example is this landing page for meal preparation company Gousto, which offers a clear CTA to sign up for the service, and tempts potential customers in with appetising links to their most popular recipes.

4. Improve your sales copy

Writing great blog posts is an excellent way to get people to your website. Next, you have to ask yourself what happens when they get there. 

A key area of concern is the sales copy on your website: the type of thing you find on product descriptions, email signups, and other sections. If this doesn’t encourage a conversion, your efforts higher up the funnel will have been in vain.

If you think sales copy is a weak link in your chain, take some time to refine it. Consider what you want each piece of sales copy to accomplish and who your audience is (which should be clear at this point). Then, work to write something that encourages them towards a certain action.

One approach that often works well is storytelling—conjuring up a familiar scenario for your readers that your product can easily slot into. Try to avoid using language that is too complex, and, as with your blog posts, think about the benefits of the product rather than the features it has. 

You can further boost your copy’s accessibility by pairing it with images and video. While these may not fit everywhere, they are extremely popular with today’s internet users. The key is to keep things short and snappy—users love video content, but they don’t have time to sit around. Keep videos down to a couple of minutes long, and make sure the first ten seconds grab the viewer’s attention or they’ll scroll right on past.

Refining your sales copy like this is a great step towards having more interactive content, which is a surefire way to better customer engagement. You might want to pair them with something more sophisticated, like interactive videos or even an interactive infographic.

5. Look at your customer support

Even if you offer impeccable product descriptions, it’s possible people will still have questions about what you have to offer. That’s where live chat can be very useful. It allows customers to get answers to their queries easily, and reduces problems on your website, like shopping cart abandonment.

A live chat option can also help increase customer trust in your website. It tells people that you are here to answer any questions they may have, and this can encourage them to shop with you or recommend you to someone else. There are many tools available that can be used to refine this kind of customer service. 

You can opt for chatbots, human agents, or a mixture of both. AI chatbots are evolving fast, and can now offer much more than a selection of canned responses. Generative AI learns as it goes, refining its answers as it takes in more data. This can support your customer service teams, freeing up human agents to deal with the most complex, sensitive cases.

Live chat can be a significant commitment for a business, but it’s worth considering as a means of boosting customer engagement. If you don’t feel it suits you, you might want to look at other options, like FAQs or a client intake form.

If your business uses CRM technology, you can increase sales with CRM too. This is because it allows for better storage of contacts, sales opportunities, and other customer communications. It can even—with the right data—help you anticipate customer needs ahead of time. A social media reporting tool can help you with this for your social platforms.

6. Refine your call to action

Ultimately, you want your copy and customer support to result in conversion—a purchase, a newsletter signup, a subscription, etc. This usually means clicking a button on a web page (known as a call to action), so it’s important to think about this button.

Practically speaking, the CTA needs to be highly visible on a web page. Make sure it’s not too small or too big: a button up to 50 pixels tall is often effective. Keep the words used on the CTA to a minimum, and ensure they’re legible. Even the button’s color can have an impact: orange and green are frequently effective, but use what works best for your site.

Finally, think about CTA placement. We tend to scroll toward the bottom of a web page, so putting a CTA there makes sense. However, putting a CTA somewhere more unexpected can increase the chances of someone clicking on it. This won’t work in every scenario, but it’s worth considering for blog posts, for instance. This could be informed by your customer effort score.

An attractive site is about more than aesthetics, though. Attract customers to an e-commerce store by looking at things like SEO, brand collaboration, and even a rewards program.

7. Look beyond the sale

It’s easier to sell to someone that you’ve sold to in the past. An easy route toward conversions is thinking about what will engage existing customers.

You might want to encourage a customer to re-purchase the same product, particularly if it’s something that can be bought multiple times. Cosmetics and foodstuffs are two examples, and it doesn’t take much to encourage a return for this kind of item.

You can also upsell or cross-sell to a customer during or after the sales process. Upselling means replacing an item with a more expensive one. Cross-selling means adding a complementary item to an existing order—like highlighting a t-shirt when someone has a sweater in their basket, for instance. 

Another post-sale activity you can consider is examining levels of customer satisfaction. Asking customers about the journey they’ve embarked on with you helps identify any lingering issues you may have overlooked.

Closing the deal

Making more sales for a business is often about refining the messages around your products. You need to have a clear sense of who you’re selling to. You also have to know which problems your product or service will solve.

Work to have clear marketing messages both on and off your website via a comprehensive content strategy and thoughtful sales copy. Offer quality customer service and make it easy for people to buy what you’re selling. Taking these steps is likely to have a positive impact on your sales figures.