10 Proven Ways To Convert New Visitors To Loyal Customers (Includes Examples)

With surging customer acquisition costs, it’s more important than ever to turn new website visitors into paying customers. Moreso, nurturing these customers to create loyal customers.

However, this isn’t an easy task. Building true brand loyalty takes time, and starts with being able to convert new visitors into customers.

To help you do that, we’ve broken the process down into two big ideas: turning your visitors into customers, and turning your customers into loyal customers.

What’s in it, you will learn:

Part 1: Turning Your Visitors Into Customers

• Target the Right Audience
• Build a Personal Connection with Live Chat (How?)
• Encourage Purchases with Introductory Offers
• Give Visitors Peace of Mind with Social Proof
• Optimize your Landing Pages
• Leverage the power of A/B Testing
• Track your visitors’ mouse movements

Part 1: Turning your visitors into customers

Before you turn your visitors into loyal members of your brand community, you need to convince them to become a customer! We’ve come up with the 4 best ways to help you do that.

1. Target the right audience

While this might seem like a no-brainer, it’s something people forget all the time. It doesn’t matter how good your product is if the demographic you’re targeting isn’t buying it. This business strategy makes it very hard for you to convert leads into customers.

A great way to target the right audience is by creating buyer personas for your ideal customers. By putting yourself in their shoes you’re able to critically evaluate who they are, what motivates them, and how they’ll interact with your brand. These personas will then help you make strategic choices about how you target customers.

When customers feel like you know who they are, they’re more likely to want to do business with you. Taking the time to define who your audience is and how they want to interact with your brand will go a long way towards making customers feel like more than just another number — a feeling that will have a much bigger impact on their decision to shop with you than a generic Facebook ad.

2. Build a personal connection with live chat

Live chat is a revolutionary e-commerce tool being used more and more effectively. In the past, your customers’ understanding of your brand would be limited to whatever your product descriptions and FAQ section could offer them. This would lead to frustration and confusion amongst your visitors, ultimately leading to lost sales. Now, you can address customer concerns and your products in real-time, saving you from losing the sale due to lack of information.

With live chat, visitors can now converse with an actual representative from your company and receive personalized answers to their concerns.

Having live chat also helps to build a personal connection with your customers. That’s because it gives them the chance to talk with someone who actually works at your company who can provide recommendations and answers tailored to that specific customer. This humanizes your brand and allows shoppers to put a face and a personality to your corporation, making your store feel more accessible, desirable, and personable. These emotions will inspire customers to browse a little bit longer and ultimately make their first purchase.

If you’re interested in trying out live chat on your website, I recommend checking out Zendesk, Intercom or Tawk.

3. Encourage purchases with introductory offers

An awesome way for you to spur new visitors into action is to give them an introductory offer. If they’re new to your site, you want to make the best first impression, and a limited time offer to receive a discount on their first order is a great way to accomplish that. With more value upfront, they’re more likely to make a purchase and consider your store in the future.

You can also build introductory offers into longer-term business strategies like rewards programs. Instead of simply offering a discount off their order, give them welcome points for signing up for your program. That way you can give the customer enough points that they can immediately redeem for a discount when they checkout.

You can see this strategy at work with Klova’s Sleep Squad program. Klova offers their customers 50 Klova Coins simply for signing. This acts as a great incentive for visitors to sign up for their rewards program in order to take advantage of discounts and earn more coins!

This type of incentive is another great way to build relationships, which plays into your long-term loyalty strategy. By the time the customer decides to complete their first purchase, they already feel a connection to your brand because it feels like you’ve been generous with them.

If you’re interested in building rewards and introductory offers into your longer-term strategy, I’d highly recommend looking at Smile.io as a way to strengthen your customer experience.

4. Give visitors peace of mind with social proof

People don’t want to be sold to. You can tell visitors how great your product is, but the fact is they won’t believe you unless you can prove it. A great way to counteract this is by including user-generated content on your website. This type of social proof allows visitors to quickly verify from other buyers that what you say is true.

According to Nielsen, 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know, making customer reviews the perfect way to set your customers’ minds at ease. Intelligent Blends’ reviews allow you to quickly determine if a specific blend of coffee is right for you. If you liked a strong cup of coffee, these reviews would convince you that this blend is an excellent choice for you because of all the enthusiastic reviews about its strong, amazing taste.

There are a ton of review add ons for your e-commerce store out there but two of my favourites are Yotpo and Stamped, both of whom offer innovative ways for you to approach social proof.

5. Track your visitors’ mouse movements

This might sound weird in the first place but yes, this works! Tracking your visitors’ mouse and cursor movements can help you figure out what they find interesting on your platform.

Using this data, you can estimate which parts of your website are interesting and which lack exciting elements. Heatmaps show you click activity. Optimizing a website based on click data can help you move your visitors towards a conversion.

Another interesting thing that can be done to push users’ to stick around is to build custom exit popups. This can easily be done using Hello Bar.

Offer them an incentive and they’ll have a reason to stay!

6. Optimize your landing pages 

Landing Pages are designed to convince visitors to make a purchase. Good and Healthy landing pages have some common elements. These are:

• Intuitive design
• Catchy headlines
• Clear Call-to-Action

There are several tools available out there that help you to optimize your landing pages. Optimizely is one such tool that can help you design Landing Pages that actually lead to conversions.

7. Leverage the power of A/B testing

A/B testing is an exercise that can turn your website visitors into customers. While conducting an A/B test, most marketers make the mistake of changing multiple variables. This is wrong!

You just have to change a single variable and push that variation with the same landing page. Keep it running until you have enough data to support which one is working. This becomes crucial to know what your audience prefers.

Part 2: Taking your customers, and turning them loyal

Once you’ve converted your visitors into customers, your next task is to make sure they’re satisfied with their purchase and have a reason to keep coming back for more. While there’s a number of ways to retain your customers, I’m going to focus on 5 of the best ways.

8. Use a rewards program to encourage loyalty

This might seem obvious but if you’re looking to build customer loyalty, rewards programs are the best way to do so. That’s because they ensure your customers are satisfied that your brand provided real value with every purchase.

Rewards programs also allow you to introduce an element of gamification to your business strategy. Giving your customers increased status that reflects how valuable they are to your store motivates loyal customers to keep making purchases to protect their high status. It also prompts new customers to seek that same status, encouraging them to make their first purchase to unlock the same benefits.

Camera Ready Cosmetics’ theCrew does an awesome job of creating a tiered VIP experience built on this gamification principle. Members can see the increased benefits as they move through the tiers on a dedicated program page, and are motivated to reach higher levels in order to reap the more attractive rewards. These rewards ultimately act as powerful switching costs that keep their customers from shopping with a competitor in the future.

9. Create awesome content to keep people coming back

Your brand is more than just the products you sell, and content is a huge part of that. Sharing original content provides additional value to your customer experience that turns your brand into more than just a product. By building something like a blog or a gallery page, you’re able to transition from simply being a marketplace to being a community.

A company who has done this extremely well is Evy’s Tree. Through their blog and social accounts they’ve done an amazing job of captivating their audience on multiple fronts, building a loyal and engaged fanbase.

By sharing this type of exciting content, you create more opportunities to engage with your customers and, as a result, earn their loyalty. As they start to trust you as a source of information they will engage with your brand on a more regular basis, making you an influence as opposed to simply another brand.

10. Build a social media presence

Social media can be an awesome place to interact with your customers and create original content to support your brand.

Increasing your social media presence will allow you to showcase new products, inform them of limited time offers, and engage with customers who love your product. When you build your social media presence you humanize your brand, and customers are able to stay more informed about everything that your brand has to offer them.

Inkbox does an excellent job of this with their Instagram profile. With a mixture of branded content and user generated content, they’re able to showcase customers who love their product. And when a company reposts your photo, especially with a large following like Inkbox, it’s an incredibly positive experience for you as a customer.

When customers are able to contribute to your online presence, it increases their personal connection to your brand. This in turn, grows their attachment to your company which makes them a more loyal customer.

Make a note of aforementioned tips and skyrocket your conversions like a pro.

Happy Marketing!

Bonus Read –  4 Brilliant E-Commerce Strategies To Convert First-Time Visitors Into Buyers