How to Convert Traffic into Relationships

Once you have mastered the traffic, which to be honest is half the battle, you need to convert those visitors into customers. Not as easy is most people make out. It stands to reason the more traffic you create the more customers you will get.

That is true to a certain extend but to really convert your visitors into customers you need to first of all build a relationship with them. If you don’t create good relationships with your customers sure you will get a few sales here and there but if you build a solid relationship with them your will certainly convert a higher percentage of them.

So that said… how do we go about building those precious relationships?

Transparency

You need to be transparent in your approach to your visitors, meaning you need to be able to come across as though there is nothing to hide, no hidden fees, or sharing their data, or other trickery like continuous authority after a free trial. Continuous authority is a way of charging customers after a free trial where they have bought something for £0 and had to provide their card details to complete the process. This is common for online memberships and is often only mentioned in the small print. So as an example being transparent would be to let the customers know this in a prominent place on the sales page.

Another example of transparency would be if you had a reputation for bad customer service you could as a company explain to your customers that you are aware of the customer service being substandard but put up plenty of messages about listening to your customers and promising them that you are working on improving the experience for them.

By being upfront with your visitors, they will respect you which in turn will increase your chance of converting them into customers.

Being Responsive to your Visitors & Customers

Building relationships is often achieved with conversation, your visitors will be emailing you, calling you on the phone, posting on your forums, twittering & commenting on your blog, you must respond to ALL of them. It doesn’t matter if they are asking daft questions or coming across idiotic even, make sure you respond to them and most important of all be courteous.

You will be surprised at the outcome; you will build a loyal following of people that are really keen in your product or services. It’s simple stuff, if people are taking the time to talk to your through whatever medium it makes sense to respond to them doesn’t it, why wouldn’t you?

Creating a Conversation

Once you embrace the idea of responding to EVERYONE you would have built a solid foundation and your visitors will start to know, like and trust you and more and more of them will go from a mere browser of you content to a shopper of your products and services.

The next step is to send this relationship process into overdrive by making good use of social media. In an earlier post we talked about Digg & Stumble upon etc but we didn’t really talk about Facebook & Twitter. This is now the time to start using them.

Twitter

Create an account and start tweeting about things related to your business. If you are not sure what to tweet about and need some cool ideas you can:

• Search on TweetMe for relevant stories, see what ones have the highest tweets as these are typically the ones that other Twitterers are enjoying so start tweeting them.
• Social sites such as Digg, have stories on their front page all the time again find relevant one and ReTweet them
• Start reading relevant blogs on a daily basis, comment on them, subscribe to their RSS feed, another way of easily finding stuff to tweet about.
• Google alerts is another idea, set up alerts for your keywords and find the popular stories and guess what ReTweet them!

When you have found enough stories to tweet about, you can spread your tweets out throughout the day… AND NIGHT. Yes you can automate them. Sign up to a service such as Sharefeed so you can schedule you tweets to go out every few hours.

By leveraging Twitter on a daily basis you will quickly build up your brand on the social web, which in turn will create more relationships and in turn more customers.

Facebook

Facebook is the second most popular website on the internet, so it makes good sense to leverage that power doesn’t it?

You can create a Facebook page for your business, add all your basic information and add your company logo.

Then it’s time to start striking up conversations. Ask some questions and add some links that will interest potential fans. You are starting to build a community around your company brand.

Invite all your friends to join your Facebook page and promote it on your website using Facebook’s widget.

Giving Away Free Stuff

One of the best ways to build relationships with your visitors is to give them something for free, a report, some audio, a video for example. By giving away content not only will you get more visitors you will build a lot of trust too. Make sure your free stuff is “top quality” over deliver and create a good impression. People more readily buy from people they know, like and trust.

Emotions are very powerful because they control buying decisions; make sure you are giving a little so that you can build that emotional connection with your visitors

Conclusion

Relationship building doesn’t stop at the point of sale; If you constantly build up trust with your visitors you will almost certainly get repeat business.

So a final reminder of the importance of all this?

1. Don’t lie to your visitors, be transparent
2. Follow up with EVERYONE and respond genuinely
3. Use Facebook & Twitter to increase the exposure of your brand
4. Give “quality” stuff away for free, they won’t love you if you don’t
5. Keep following up with your customers to help get repeat business