Enhancing Engagement and Conversion by Marketing to Prospective Website Leads

In order to increase customer engagement, there are several steps in the conversion chain that furniture retailers must hone in order to pull a website visitor to an in-store sale. Calls to Action (CTAs), interactive experiences, and offers are all examples of steps that can be improved to create more showroom sales. Testing and improving your consumer experiences to increase customer engagement is a continuous process. Unlike before, where you basically had to guess at what changes made a difference on your website, interactive experiences on your website give you the control to experiment with changes that can improve your leading indicators of engagement and ultimately improve your web traffic to sales numbers.

Once you have all of the experiences in place, you’ll want to determine their impact on generating more clicks, more inquiries, and more sales by slowly using simple A/B tests and changing one thing at a time to understand their significance. The driving force behind increasing customer engagement is the goal of getting more people to step up and voluntarily give up personal information in return for receiving something desired from your website. Throughout this post, whenever we say “something desired” take that to mean an incentive that can be anything from an offer to assessment results.

We’ve found there are six elements that you need to focus on to increase website traffic and conversion by turning website visitors into leads for your furniture sales team:

1. UNIQUE PATTERN INTERRUPT

This concept is simple — the more creative you can get on the CTA experience that communicates something desired, the higher your results will be. Do you want something that breaks a visitor out of her normal pattern of browsing and goes, “What’s this?” Then you need to brainstorm ways you can achieve this by tying in your brand and the unique value you offer!

2. CTAS

Your Calls-to-Action are critical to test and measure as they are the catalyst to everything else that follows in generating more inquiries and sales. A few things you should review and look to improve in order to increase consumer engagement are:

• Traffic to Clicks Percentages on Each CTA: As yourself, which CTAs are working and which are not? Adjust accordingly.

• Dynamic Design: Don’t settle for static and plain CTAs! Include animation on your banners, buttons and sidebars.

• Language: Experiment with different ways to communicate the desired offer so that you can test directly on your CTA to see if it leads to more clicks and inquiries.

• Colors: Colors have a huge impact on whether or not a CTA will be noticed. While staying within your brand is important, your website’s purpose is to increase customer engagement. Find CTAs that fit within your brand, but also stand-out and get noticed.

• Options: The ideal website will attract visitors at each stage of the purchasing funnel, whether that’s browsing, researching or buying. 

3. EXPERIENCES

Once you have looked to improve CTAs, the next step is to improve how you get a visitor to complete the steps of converting into an inquiry. A completed experience means that a consumer has exchanged their information with you for something desired. Keep in mind stats like Clicks to Inquiries Percentages when enhancing consumer experiences. This stat lets you know how effective you are at getting someone to complete the experience once they click the CTA.

Where drop-offs occur is another key indicator of the success of your experiences. It will show where your conversion is breaking and allow you to adjust. This can even happen at the beginning of experiences. The load time it takes for experiences to open can have an impact on conversion. If you are losing consumers early after they click a CTA, this is something to review.

Another quick tip? Do NOT try to get a consumer to fill in a bunch of information on just one or two pages! Make sure your experiences are multi-page and broken up into simple and small steps that smoothly flow together. For example, the initial page of the experience should clearly state what the consumer is getting out of the experience and how easy it will be to receive that something desired. The initial page should be compelling enough that visitors want to keep going with the experience.Subsequently, the following pages should feature only one or two questions per page. If you put a bunch of questions in front of a visitor, your drop-off rate will explode!

Other tips for utilizing your website to turn visitors into leads for your sales team include making sure that visitors can answer with just a tap of a button rather than typing something in; the aesthetics of your design and user experiences look and feel professional; and you collect contact info in a way that gives the consumer a choice on how they prefer to be contacted, how frequently, and ensuring that they do not get asked for the same information multiple times.

4. CTAS AND EXPERIENCES FOR ALL STAGES OF THE PURCHASE FUNNEL

By having CTAs and experiences that apply to all types of website traffic and not just those ready to make a purchase, your conversion and engagement will be higher. Try the following on your site:

• Browsing (Promotion)

• Instant-Win Games

• Register-to-Win

• Scratch-Off Offers

• Research (Assessments)

• Buy (Offer/Price Unlock/Appointment/Credit App)

5. DATA ACCURACY AND LANGUAGE INCENTIVE

While this actually falls under the improving the “Experience” section, we thought it was important to call out separately. When a visitor goes to put their contact information into a contact form, they know it will be used for marketing. That’s why you have to make sure you pass the “Should I give my real info or fake info?” test. 

The majority of the time, your something desired should be strong enough to make sure they’re incentivized to give their real information. You should also make it abundantly clear how their information will be used. Don’t plan to sell their data? State that! Transparency is important if you want to increase customer engagement. Inform consumers how you will use their information to email them something desired.

6. MOBILE

We guarantee that over half of your website traffic comes from mobile visitors. That’s why you need to make sure your experiences are mobile friendly to increase customer engagement.After putting so much effort and money into driving traffic to your site and creating great experiences, the last thing you’d want is for the visitor to feel frustrated and turned off. t’s easy to create a mobile friendly site, and it’s an important part of the user design for both CTAs and experiences. A mobile responsive site should be a high priority for you!

As you can see, there are a lot ways to fine-tune your website CTAs, experiences and offers so that you increase customer engagement and enhance your online experience so that consumers will come into the showroom.Be conscious of these different elements that can be tweaked as you work to connect the different steps in the conversion chain in order to convert a website visitor into an in-store sale.