If you’re like most online merchants, you’ve got an SEO program and PPC campaigns running, maybe some banner ads and perhaps even some affiliate marketing. And you’ve been tweaking and tuning this for months, quarters, and years. And still you’ve got a 3% conversion rate. Maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower.

There are many ways to increase your site traffic, and even to bring people back. And a whole industry around cart abandonment (the act of trying to bring back a customer who has decided not to purchase, and trying to get them to change their mind somehow). But at the end of the day, 97% of  site traffic leaves without converting.

Seems to many that having spent an enormous amount of time and energy and money driving the traffic to your site, making the most of the current state of technology ability to understand your visitors behavior in real time is a good investment. There’s a growing set of practices around understanding your visitors better, and converting them to customers, leads, or fans/followers.

If your conversion rate is an average of 2.4%, raising that to 2.7% is actually a 12.5% increase in conversions. Getting a little more detailed, lets say your 2.4% average conversion rate is made up of several different channels. Some have a high number of conversions, but at a lower revenue per conversion. Some have a low number of conversions, but a higher cart size. If you can determine the behavior of the low volume / large cart customers, you can positively impact their likelihood to purchase real time on your site by saying things to the right people at the right time. Similarly, if you could use behavioral targeting to focus specific messages on the lower revenue / higher volume customers, say by incentivizing them to increase their cart size at checkout next time they visit, then good things will happen.

There are lots of tools in your toolbox. Like building a store on main street, the first things you need are big, heavy tools: trucks to bring materials, saws and 2x4s and hammers, etc. No store, no customers. Same in e-commerce: you need a store, and you need to drive traffic to it. The big tools here are your cart platform, SEO, PPC. But once that’s done, and you’ve got traffic coming, you don’t use the hammer on them to get them to purchase. You engage them, interact with them, say and do things with them that are relevant to where they are in their decision process. For example, if you splash a discount across all products to all customers, you are leading with price and not with value. But the third time somebody visits your product page in two days, they are making a choice and are going to buy from somebody; closing the deal becomes important.

So rather than just keep hammering people through the front door and saying the same things to all visitors, perhaps do a little listening to what they are telling you in their behavioral clues. Then present them with content that is relevant. And take back some of your marketing budget.