Stage 2: Turning Visitors into Enquirers
Episode #3 of the course How to influence your customers to buy more by Chloë Thomas
Welcome to the third lesson of this course. Having taken you through Stage 1, it’s now time to move on to Stage 2.
Stage 2 is all about getting visitors to your website to sign up for your email marketing.
You may be wondering why I’m advising you to go for the email sign-up before you try and get the customer to buy. That’s a good question.
The reason I like to work on getting the email sign-up is two-fold:
1. It’s a lot easier to get a visitor to agree to give you their email address than it is to get them to agree to give you money. Usually the conversion rate to sign up is 5-8% of visitors—that’s far greater than most people achieve in conversion rate to order.
2. Once you have the email address, it gives you a really powerful way to improve your relationship with them to the point they are ready to buy for the first time.
It’s easier, and it helps you get the eventual purchase, so let’s get those email sign-ups!
You may also be wondering, “What if a customer wants to buy straight away without signing up first?” Well, that’s awesome—we’ll take that all day long! If a customer wants to leapfrog the Enquirer Customer Relationship Level and jump straight from Visitor to First Time Buyer, we are not going to stand in their way. But many aren’t ready, and that’s why we make sure we’re set up to get the email address.
What you must get right in Stage 2
These are the key things to get right for success in Stage 2:
Use a pop-up
I know not everyone likes them, but they are super effective at getting email sign-ups. Project Repat (one of my podcast guests) optimized their pop-up to get 8% of site visitors to sign up (listen here).
There are lots of great pop-up add-ons for your website, but whichever one you pick, make sure it has this functionality:
• Integration with your email marketing software for immediate welcome email follow-ups
• Different points of deployment (e.g., exit popup, scroll-triggered pop-up, etc)
• Ability to control who sees the pop-up (e.g., if someone signed up yesterday, you don’t want them to have to deal with the pop-up again today)
Find the right incentive to get your customers to sign up
Warning: by incentive, I DO NOT mean offer.
Your incentive might just be “Sign up to be the first to hear about our products and offers.” And I highly recommend you start with a message like this one to set a performance benchmark for your email sign-up gathering.
Of course, then you might test an offer—free P&P or 10% off. But remember that any offer costs you money, so it’s important to know if that cost is worth it; does 10% off drive sufficient uplift to be worth it?
Not strictly a topic for Stage 2, but Miso Tasty (one of my podcast guests) uses an offer to help encourage the first purchase very successfully (listen here).
Key messages for customers at the “Visitors” Level
Everything you do in Stage 2 is about proving that your business is trustworthy enough to deserve to be trusted with the customers’ email address.
Whatever messages and branding they saw in Stage 1 (that got them to visit in the first place) needs to be repeated when they arrive on the website.
You should also have customer testimonials on the landing pages—other people saying you’re great.
And of course, ask for their email address!
In Stage 3 tomorrow, we’re going to look at how to make having the email address work for you by turning our Enquirers (and some of our Visitors) into First Time Buyers.
Yes, tomorrow we’ll be looking at how to get those orders, drive those sales, and create some revenue.
Catch up tomorrow,
Chloë
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