A website is important to every single business, but what’s the point of a website if it’s not converting a website visitor into a paying customer? We’re tackling three main reasons why your potential clients maybe aren’t turning into actual clients after visiting your website. Find out what those reasons are and how to fix them.

Why Your Website Visitors Aren’t Turning into Paying Clients

If you’re running a business in 2019 and don’t have a website, then what year are you really in? I think it’s safe to say that most of us do have a website if we’re running an online business. But the main objective of a website is to turn visitors into paying clients, and if your website is not converting, then what’s the point of your website?

What Converting Means

onverting is really just a fancy term meaning your ability to get people to achieve your end goal. So, for websites, that might be different. It might be getting them to fill out a contact form, getting their email in exchange for a download, whatever the main goal of your website is, that we want to be converting as many visitors as possible into clients, into whatever the main goal of your website is.

They Simply Don’t Get It

Now, there are three main reasons why potential clients don’t turn into actual clients, and so we’re going to dive into the first one, and then get an overview on how to fix it. Now, the first one is they just simply don’t get it. They don’t understand what it is that you’re offering. This can be happening for several different reasons, but they all mean that you aren’t conveying what it is that you offer very well. Maybe you’re using a lot of industry-related jargon, and the visitor just isn’t familiar with those terms, and you’re possibly using clever taglines in just an unusual way to describe your product or your service.

I’m just going to give it to you straight: No one is going to use your product or your service if they don’t understand it. You have about five to 10 seconds to capture your reader’s attention from the moment that they land on your website. If they have to think and use their brains in any way to figure out what you’re offering, then they’re going to check out and leave, and they’ll never be seen again.

The FiX

So, how do we go about fixing this? First, we need to identify what it is that visitors don’t understand. Why are they leaving? Now, you can get a couple people within your target market who don’t know what you sell or offer to check out your website. Go into a Facebook group, maybe, and ask them, “Hey, can somebody check out my website and give me your take on it? Like, do you understand what it is that I’m offering?”

Usually I tell people before the fold of the website, which means before anybody scrolls down, they should be able to tell what it is that you do, and so we want to be putting that out there plain and simple. Like, if you are a wedding photographer, then that needs to say “wedding photographer” very plain and simple. Don’t use terms like “capturer of love stories.” Nobody’s going to understand what that means at first glance.

They Don’t Want It

Now, the second reason that they may not be converting into paying clients is they don’t want it. If somebody understands what your product does, or what service you perform, doesn’t necessarily mean that they want it. Your product or service needs to solve a problem for your ideal client. Whatever your ideal client struggles with, you need to be the solution or offer the solution. However, if it solves a problem, then it needs to be the solution that people are willing to do. For example, let’s say that your product helps brides plan their entire wedding within 48 hours. That sounds crazy, right? But the solution is to stay up for 48 hours straight. Most people are not going to be willing to do that. It’s a great problem to solve, but a terrible solution to solving the problem.

The Fix

So, what do we do to fix this? Unfortunately, when this happens, we need to go back to the drawing board and think about the following questions. “What problem does my product or service solve?” And then, “What makes me stand out from the competition? What makes my business or solution different?” I love using this example, because Netflix is a great example of this. Back in earlier quote-unquote “Netflix times,” you rented DVDs online, and then Netflix would snail-mail them to your house. I remember my sister would get DVDs all the time, mailed to us in our mailbox. Now, their main competitor was Blockbuster Video. The problem that Netflix solved was not having to drive to the store to rent a movie, and then drive it all the way back to drop it off. It solved the problem of convenience in a practical way. So that’s just something to keep in mind, is having the solution to a problem in a way that people are going to be willing to do and pay for it.

They Don’t Need It Enough

Now, number three, the third reason why people may not be converting from visitors into paying clients is because they don’t need it enough. They don’t need it enough to pay what you’re asking for what you’re offering. They don’t think that your product or your service is worth what you’re asking for, basically. Imagine this: I have a new email marketing service. It’s amazing. I make sure that all of your emails go out on time, I triple your click-through rate, and I cut the time in half that it takes to send out email campaigns. The only downside is that you have to manually enter all of your existing contacts from one service to this new one. Maybe you only have five or 20 contacts and you’re like, “Well, that’s not a big deal, I’ll do it.” But imagine if you have an email list of 1,000 or 5,000, or even more than that. Would you be willing to do it? Heck no. I wouldn’t. That would be a major pain. It would take hours to manually enter everybody’s information, and time has value.

The Fix

Your potential client’s time has value too, and their effort has value. Once your product or service takes up too much of their time or effort, it’s just not going to be worth it anymore. So how do we fix this? You need to start user beta testing, get people’s thoughts about your service or your product. For me, what I do after I finish up with a client is I send them a client questionnaire. It basically says, “What did we do amazing at? What really stood out about the experience? And then, what do we need to fix?” Because we want to make it better for other people coming up.

So that may be a good way for you to get a sense, is follow up with past clients. Find out what was special about your service, like ask them why they decided to go with you, and then ask them what they really enjoyed about the service, what they enjoyed about the experience, because that’s going to be what stands out to other people. And then lastly, ask them, what do you need to fix? Like, what was the least favorite part of the service? So asking those three questions to your past clients can really help you solve some of these problems, and then market those on your website, because that’s what turns your potential clients into actual paying clients.

Hopefully this helps you identify which one of the main problems you’re having that’s causing people to close out of your website and not turn into potential clients. Now, I do want to take a second to thank you for tuning in this week. There is a Facebook insiders group for this podcast. Inside the Facebook group, I’ll be taking you into in-depth tutorials based on the episodes that we’re covering, and it’s just your place to plan out your brand and understand how to create a high-converting website so that you can achieve all of your business goals in the new year.