Building a beautiful online store with all the bells and whistles is great—unless no one converts on it. With the average website lead conversion rate for eCommerce websites at a measly 2.36%, finding ways to improve your store’s conversion rate is crucial.
To make it easier for you to improve lead generation and grow your revenue, here are seven tried-and-true ways to convert your online store’s website leads.
Seven best ways to convert website leads
- Add a Customer Chat widget to your website
- Launch a quiz to improve lead generation
- Offer SMS opt-in for exclusive promos and deals
- Create a sticky bar to get sign-ups
- Use a slide-in box to convert more website leads
- Deliver targeted messages for maximum engagement
- Grab visitors’ attention with a Page Takeover pop-up
1. Add a Customer Chat widget to your store
More and more online retailers are using Live Chat to connect with website visitors, for good reason. It’s easy to implement, helps facilitate purchases, and is available to website visitors 24/7.
In fact, over the last few years, website chat has been a leading customer support medium, with over 41% of consumers preferring Live Chat over any other channel.
You can find the customer chat in a bubble at the bottom right-hand corner of your site—you’ve probably seen it before. When a visitor is browsing, the chatbot displays a message to encourage them to interact; when the visitor clicks, the chatbot can immediately respond. It’s instant customer service!
Once a shopper enters into a conversation with a chatbot, you can:
- Send website visitors through an automated flow. Depending on your business, this flow can collect contact information, deliver a lead magnet, or help surface products shoppers are looking for using marketing automation. You can build these flows to engage and guide a potential customer towards completing their shopping task.
- Start a live chat. If a website visitor wants to talk to a human, you can connect them with a customer service agent to answer their questions. With ManyChat, you can manage all these conversations in the Live Chat tab in your dashboard.
Printlulu, a South African online printing company, uses ManyChat’s Customer Chat widget to welcome visitors on their site and help guide their journey up until the moment of purchase.
When the window pops up on their homepage, you can choose from four immediate conversation starters: Why Printlulu?, Design help, Talk to a human, or Get a quote. These starters make it easy for customers to navigate through the website, and encourage a conversion like an email sign-up, lead magnet download, talk to sales, etc.
When using customer chat to convert leads, keep these best practices in mind:
- Build your automated conversations around user intent. If a shopper is on your homepage, they may benefit from being able to choose from a few conversation starters that will guide them in the right direction. If a shopper is on a category or product page, you may want to shoot them a quick Let me know if you have any questions message to minimize purchase friction and overcome a reluctance to buy.
- Offer 24/7 live support. Whether you have Live Chat on your homepage, product page, during the checkout process, or on any other place on your site, make sure you have live support available at all times in case a shopper needs human help. With ManyChat, you can automatically alert support representatives when someone needs help so they can immediately respond.
- Learn about your customers. Customer chat can be more than just queueing up complaints. Open up conversations with your customers using exploratory questions about their interests and preferences so that you can provide them more relevant product recommendations.
- Offer a first-time buyer discount. If you know it’s the first time someone is shopping in your store, offer them a first-time buyer discount at the end of your flow. It’s a nice way to thank website visitors for their time and encourage a conversion.
According to Forrester, 53% of customers are likely to abandon their online purchases if they can’t find quick answers to their questions. Use website chat to create a better shopping experience for visitors and improve conversions in your store.
2. Launch a quiz to improve lead capture
Quizzes help convert web leads because people love to find out more about themselves. They offer an interactive experience through which shoppers can engage with your brand and leave with a favorable impression.
Yet a good quiz doesn’t just create quality leads. It also initiates real conversations through which you can talk to your audience and get to know them. Quizzes also help you learn about your shoppers’ preferences and interests to sell to them more effectively in the future.
hideAWAY Handmade, an online retailer selling organic body products, uses a “Find Your Fragrance” to capture and convert new website leads.
After a user completes the quiz, they discover the best product for them based on their answers and receive a coupon just for completing the quiz.
When building your quiz, remember to:
- Choose a fun title. How many quizzes have you seen named “Which [insert thing here] are you?” Probably a lot. Create a catchy title that will encourage people to click through and take the quiz in your Messenger bot.
- Use GIFs and images to help represent answer choices. Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Using images helps people absorb information faster and respond quickly, rather than forcing them to scan through a jumble of text to choose an option.
- Create hypothetical scenarios. One goal of quizzes is for people to learn about themselves. Hypothetical questions like, “What if you …” or “I’m most productive when…” is fun to answer and helps people imagine and think while taking your quiz. The more the fun quiz, the more likely they are to complete it.
Read more: How hideAWAY Handmade Used ManyChat to Generated Over $100K in Revenue in One Month
3. Offer SMS opt-in for exclusive promos and deals
SMS Marketing has seen extraordinary growth in recent years, with over 48.7 million people expected to opt into business texting by 2020 (a 23% increase from 2016).
SMS benefits both parties: you gain a direct line to a customer’s phone, and shoppers can stay informed about deals, promos, join loyalty programs, and more. Considering 75% of consumers don’t mind getting texts from a business, it’s a good idea to start encouraging potential new leads to become SMS subscribers.
You can place a pop-up widget on your site to grab shoppers’ attention and convert them into subscribers for your future marketing campaigns. Cara Reel, a maternity photographer, uses a ManyChat SMS Modal pop-up to acquire new website leads for her subscriber list.
The messaging is short, sweet, and to the point.
Cara is not the only one leveraging this feature to boost her business. Marketers from all different industries have seen up to 30% revenue growth by using ManyChat SMS marketing.
An SMS contact form enables you to create new opportunities to connect with website visitors and encourage sales. After they opt in to receive SMS messages, you can send them through a specific welcome flow to collect contact information, deliver a first-time buyer coupon, or even have a conversation in Live Chat.
Keep the messaging concise when building your widget. Tell potential subscribers exactly what they can expect from signing up (e.g., exclusive deals, early access, loyalty points) to get people excited to join and encourage conversions.
Attract and convert website leads with ManyChat. It’s free to get started.
4. Create a sticky bar to get more sign-ups
If you don’t want to disturb website visitors while browsing with a pop-up widget, an opt-in bar is a great option because it’s low-profile and blends with your site. You can set it up as a sticky footer, or allow it to float at the top of a particular page. You can even decide to reveal it after a visitor has been on a page for a certain amount of time.
RewardBee, an online survey platform, uses the bar opt-in. They offer visitors the chance to stay up to date on surveys and rewards in Messenger, then when a visitor clicks the CTA, they automatically convert into Messenger subscribers.
As an eCommerce marketer, you can use the sticky bar for various reasons:
- Welcome visitors to your site
- Showcase important information
- Highlight one-time sales
- Promote seasonal offers
When using an opt-in bar, keep your call-to-action (CTA) succinct, yet powerful. You only have one line to convince a visitor to sign up for your list.
Aim to make the opt-in bar as relevant to the customer as possible. For example, you could show different deals on specific product category pages, whereas on your homepage, you might offer a first-time buyer discount.
5. Use a slide-in box to convert more website leads
A slide-in box hovers at the edge of your website visitor’s screen. It’s an excellent alternative to pop-ups because it’s less in-your-face and remains at the bottom or side of the screen and doesn’t block content. Visitors will notice it immediately.
As with the opt-in bar, you can use a slide-in box to promote a lead magnet. PokeNerds, an online Pokemon card and product retailer, showcases their latest giveaway through a slide-in box in the image below.
A slide-in also gives you more latitude to be creative. You can add a headline, body copy, image, and CTA, plus various options to display the widget to website visitors. Because it’s a more discrete opt-in tool, you can pair it with other options like the sticky bar to create additional conversion opportunities.
Read more: How to Get Traffic to Your Website
6. Deliver targeted messages for maximum engagement using a Modal pop-up
A Modal pop-up appears in the center of a user’s screen. It’s an effective tool for eCommerce stores because it captures a shopper’s attention and allows you to showcase your offer without distractions. Visitors have to make a choice: click out or subscribe. If your offer is compelling, the Modal pop-up can help convert more website leads and grow your contact lists.
Wolverson Fitness uses a Modal pop-up to offer a first-time buyer coupon to site visitors. The fitness equipment retailer encourages a conversion by offering a 10% discount and access to the “Wolf Pack,” a community built around the brand.
When creating your Modal pop-up, keep timing and messaging in mind to maximize visitor engagement. If you want to capture new visitors immediately, time your Modal pop-up to display a few seconds into a user’s session on your homepage.
You can also check your analytics to find high-traffic pages, such as category pages, product pages, or blog posts, and consider adding a Modal pop-up to one of them.
Remember to align your messaging to the page on which you place an opt-in form. A new shopper entering your site via a category page from organic search may have different intentions than a visitor from social media who lands on your homepage. The more relevant the messaging, the higher the conversion rate.
7. Grab visitors’ attention with a Page Takeover pop-up
A Page Takeover pop-up transforms any page into a high-converting landing page. As a visitor scrolls through your site, the Page Takeover suddenly blocks the content with a prominent call to action they can’t ignore.
Unison Audio, a soundbank and beat packages seller, uses a Page Takeover pop-up to capture a potential lead before they exit the store. The messaging “Don’t leave empty-handed” is a terrific example of relevant messaging because it aligns with what the shopper is about to do.
In a last-ditch attempt to prevent the customer from leaving, Unison Audio offers an exclusive deal (a free Unison Starter Pack) to clinch the conversion in Facebook Messenger.
Keep in mind that timing is critical when it comes to using a Page Takeover. Since the widget covers the entire screen, you don’t want it to show while someone is browsing products, which would annoy the customer and disturb their experience.
Two key times to show Page Takeover are right when someone lands on your site, or as visitors are leaving your store. For the former, you can promote a coupon or deal; with the latter, you can make one last attempt to get their contact information.
You can promote virtually anything with a Page Takeover, including:
- Relevant offers and coupons
- A sign-up for your Messenger contest list
- Lead magnets like quizzes and contests
- New products
Improving lead generation on your website
The lead generation tools that work best for you will vary depending on your target audience, their needs and goals, and your inbound marketing strategy. Because all customers are unique, there are no hard and fast rules for choosing your business’s best conversion tactics.
This is why it’s essential to test different opt-in tools when learning how to generate leads. Start with one or two from the above list, then use that data to identify what drives conversion.
Once you have a solid idea of what’s working (and what’s not), you can put a strategy in place to convert even more website traffic. Using the seven tactics above, you’ll be well on your way to creating a website that successfully converts and makes your business money!
