Starting a business online is often much easier than starting a business on the High Street. However, there are some challenges that online businesses face that do not come into play with brick and mortar companies.
The main one: boosting online sales and optimising your website.
The typical website has a conversion rate of 2.35% – this means that just over two web visitors out of 100 actually go on to become customers. That’s a pretty leaky sales funnel.
The bottom line is simple: to become profitable online, you have to find ways to drive traffic and then convert those visitors into customers. Having a website that’s primed for sales is a no-brainer.
Here are a few proven ways that will boost your website sales significantly.
Keep your home page simple
The key to a home page is focus. To keep customers focused, keep it simple – less is more.
Research shows that offering fewer products with more detailed descriptions will yield more significant results.
Curate your top products into an attractive product gallery and use emotive language to help drive sales. Change the products you feature to follow seasonality and sales data, and ensure your homepage copy is short, snappy and direct.
For service-based businesses, have a super clear offer or actionable insight splashed across your homepage. Don’t be tempted to include everything you do or describe your company in great detail. A simple graphic or hero image can help you convey a message in a super succinct way.
Share your value proposition
A value proposition is a few sentences that endorse the unique worth of what you sell. A good value proposition answers three questions:
- How does your product/service solve your customers’ problems?
- What precise benefits do your products/services deliver to customers?
- Why should customers buy from you instead of your competitors?
Answer these questions in one or two sentences and make the answers clear on your home page. Bullet points, call-out boxes, galleries – be creative with how you present these to people.
Immediately showing your customers what you offer them will hook them as soon as they arrive on your website. Answer people’s questions before they even have time to ask them!
Live Chat
With a simple home page, there is a chance that customers will have questions. Luckily, chatbots can take care of answering most questions your customers have.
By installing a live chat option on your page and then using a chatbot application to deal with simple customer queries, you can boost sales by 45%.
Why?
Simple: when customers get their questions answered immediately, they are more likely to buy.
There are so many easy live-chat systems out there that can be literally plugged into your website in seconds. They are massively reassuring and easy to implement.
Run PPC and PPM campaigns
Paid advertising is a great way to get more eyes on your website, and it’s a super scalable (affordable) marketing model.
Pay-per-click and pay-per-impression campaigns work exactly as their names suggest. With a PPC campaign, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad (the ad will send traffic to the link that you provide in the ad). With PPM campaigns, you pay every time your ad is placed on the results page – whether it is clicked or not.
Google has a Keyword Tool to show what frequent searches relate to your category. Start with a reasonable amount and split test ads by running different ads simultaneously to see which is most effective.
This option is perfect for local businesses looking for clients in their area, but any website can benefit from running ad campaigns.
Just make sure that your website/landing page matches your ads. A specific offer or deal is always a good way to get people through the door, but you then have to work hard to convert them. A lot of businesses go for a stripped back version of their website for their landing page – something that keeps customers super focused on making a purchase.