To Make More Online Sales, Focus on Visitor Intent

When you manage an e-commerce site – whether it’s a clothing boutique, a vape shop or a hobby store – developing and refining the site is a challenge that never really ends. It’s easy to succumb to the temptation to focus your design efforts on creating what you envision as the ultimate e-commerce experience, but what you should really be doing is focusing on your website’s position in the customer journey.

People find your site in different ways and with different intentions in mind. By successfully inferring a visitor’s intent based on how that person found your site and the page he or she lands on – and giving that person the perfect offer at the perfect time – you can turn your site into an absolute e-commerce powerhouse even if your raw traffic numbers aren’t yet where you would like them to be.

Here’s how.

Start With Your Content

The first thing that you should consider when trying to determine visitor intent is the content being viewed. Essentially, your website has two types of content: commercial and non-commercial. Product pages, for example, are commercial, while blog posts are usually informational in nature. Visitors viewing commercial content are much more likely to be ready to buy products immediately or in the near future.

Consider the Traffic Source

When choosing the type of offer that you should present to people viewing a given page on your site, the next thing that you should consider is how people typically find that page. You can determine that by viewing the traffic data for individual pages in your analytics tool of choice.

Your five most common website visit scenarios will probably be as follows.

• People will find your site through Google’s organic search and will land on commercial content.
• People will find your site through Google’s organic search and will land on non- commercial content.
• People will find your site by clicking through advertisements on platforms like Google AdWords.
• People will find your site by viewing your content on social media.
• People will find your site through links on other websites.

By studying your analytics data, you can determine the most likely way in which a person viewing a given page found your website. If the visitor found your site through Google’s organic search results, you can also determine the most likely search keywords used.

Make the Right Offer

So, what do you do with all of the information you’ve gathered? For every page on your site, you’ve now collected:

• The type of content on that page (commercial or non-commercial)
• The traffic source through which people usually find that page
• The search keywords usually used to find that page (if Google’s organic search is the typical traffic source)

Your goal is to piece that information together and determine the most likely intent behind the user’s visit. Using customer intent as your guide, you want to come up with an offer that’s likely to appeal to the visitor. You want to place that offer front and center and ensure that the visitor engages with that offer before leaving the site.

When you’re trying to choose the perfect offer to present on a given page, it’s important to remember one thing. As much as you might like everyone who visits your website to purchase a product before leaving, a person viewing an informational page probably doesn’t have commercial intent.

If you’re going to present a commercial offer on an informational page, it should be something unexpected that piques the visitor’s interest. Alternatively, make an offer that isn’t commercial in nature. If you can capture a visitor’s email address, you can send commercial offers to that person later. Running a random product giveaway, for example, is a great way to collect email addresses.

Don’t Distract From the E-Commerce Experience

Remember that there are two parts to any offer: the offer itself and the way it’s presented. Your site’s visual design and user interface, in other words, are just as important as the content. Those aspects of your site are particularly crucial on commercial pages such as product pages.

On the commercial side of your website, you need to do everything possible to avoid distracting users from the commerce experience. As much as you might like to cram your product pages with things like customer reviews, product discovery features and links to relevant blog posts, anything that distracts the user from the product – and from buying that product – only hurts your bottom line. Design your site carefully, remembering that the ultimate goal is always to convince the user to click the “Add to Cart” button. Everything that you do should be with the goal of guiding visitors toward that action.

Implement a Fail Safe

The last thing to remember about choosing the perfect offer to present to visitors on each page of your site is that, regardless of what you do, most first-time visitors are going to leave your site without buying anything; that’s just the way it is in e-commerce. You’re never going to achieve a 100-percent conversion rate.

Given that fact, you might find it worthwhile to implement a fail-safe popup that triggers upon exit intent. The popup displays, in other words, when the user moves the mouse cursor away from the active portion of the window. If you can’t get a sale out of a website visit, you can at least try to capture the visitor’s contact information for later marketing attempts. As we just mentioned, a random product giveaway is a great way to collect email addresses.

If you don’t want to give products away and would rather try to save the sale, it’s also very popular to offer a single-use coupon code – good only for new customers – in an exit intent popup. Sometimes, the offer of a generous discount is enough to close the deal. Remember, though, that offering a coupon code to all new customers will invariably result in decreased revenue from first-time buyers. Make sure that your coupon offer doesn’t decrease your average order values so much that the offer ends up becoming unprofitable.

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