For business development professionals, conversion rates are an important website metric to track. However, landing sales through your website requires more than a clever call-to-action button—a site needs to be highly engaging and interactive if you want to build up enough trust and awareness for a visitor to convert.
To help you figure out your company’s game plan, we asked a panel of Forbes Business Development Council members to detail some practical ways business development leaders can strategically use site engagement to improve conversion rates. Their best answers are below.
Forbes Business Development Council members discuss the best ways leaders can improve site engagement and conversion.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Provide Adequate Training
Because network marketing companies are structured differently than traditional retail companies, this can be a challenge. It’s up to us to work with our field members to provide training and to ensure their sites are optimized in this way. – Mark “Bouncer” Schiro, Kynect
2. Personalize Your Messages
Today, everyone is an expert consumer. First, be clear on the conversion needed. Be strategic by personalizing the message. Personalization equals conversation, which equals currency. Create a set of landing pages with a similar structure (respect your branding) and have each one of your traffic sources/audience matrix land on a specific one. If you control the source, you control where they land. – David Mahbub, Field Agent
3. Differentiate Between New And Returning Customers
A practical way is to differentiate between new and returning customers. The strategies you set for new and returning customers will be different, so use your site to support this. For returning visitors, promote messages that can help with customer retention and loyalty. For new visitors, direct marketing content can support customer acquisition and is useful to turn them into returning customers. – Sarah Knapp, Spruce Technology
4. Make Small Changes
The most effective changes are typically small alterations that you can make to either your follow-up protocol or your vetting of leads before they are passed to qualified sales executives. Find what the drop-off points are and reach out to those individuals that decided to break off contact to find your answer. It’s usually something small that can be changed easily. – Joel Goldstein, Mr. Checkout Distributors
5. Share Curated Content
Business development leaders can engage prospective customers and increase conversion rates by providing them with highly curated content. Effective content can attract new prospects to your site and help move them through the sales funnel. The right content can pique the interest of a potential customer and help persuade them to make the decision to buy. – Adam Mendler, The Veloz Group
6. Focus On SEO And Localization
With all of the Google rules changing, how your audience finds you changes the urgency of search engine optimization. Make sure you have SEO and localization in place so the person is a hot lead. This sets up your salesperson for success. Use a service to ensure your leads or setup and your conversion rates are high. Salespeople fight over these leads! – Don Markland, 411Locals
7. Enable Live Chat
Make sure your site allows for visitors to chat with your sales team in real time. This way your sales team can jump in and start a conversation or answer questions for a prospective customer when they are directly on your site versus just them filling out a contact form. This is something often overlooked that can make a huge difference in sales and create a great customer experience. – Clinton Senkow, Influencive
8. Use Analytics And Adjust
Pay attention to what the audience is looking at, how long they are staying and where they are going. This allows you to see what is working and what’s not, and tailor your message accordingly. Information is power, so we should be taking the data we have and leveraging it to increase the conversion rates. – Alexis Blue, MCCi
9. Constantly Test
To improve site conversions, sales and marketing need to be working hand in hand to optimize conversion rates through A/B testing and efficacy of the inbound funnel. Sales and marketing leaders should also be sure to optimize while simultaneously ensuring that all site engagement will prompt and support conversations with internal sales teams and make their jobs easier as well. – Scott Douglas Clary, ROI Overload
10. Set Up Automated Actions
Almost every sales leader is now using automated scoring rules, but they’re trusting their team to pay attention to lead scores. It’s imperative to create automated actions, such as emails and task creation for leads that hit a given score. It takes human error and forgetfulness out of the equation. – Stephen M. Lowisz, Qualigence
11. Gamify Your Sales Funnel
Although it can be effective to offer a small discount or some other special offer to website visitors, there’s a more effective method you can use to drive up conversion rates. Gamify your sales funnel by offering a slightly better discount to viewers who spend more time on your site and click multiple links. You’re likely to see easier conversions this way than with the simpler method. – Bryce Welker, Crush The CPA Exam
12. Narrow In On Your Target Audience
True engagement can improve conversion rates if the audience is organic and passionate about the product or service. If the audience is not genuine, conversion rates will be low and not accurately measured because they are misleading. Leaders can be strategic about using site engagement by narrowing in on their target audience and making sure they are reaching the correct demographic. – Karolina Hobson