Training your website to be your best salesperson will always be worthwhile task for your business. Whether your company operates solely online or whether your site is an extra arm of your company, you should be seeking improvements wherever you can. Finding out what works and what doesn’t can be a process of trial and error. Still, you should seek to make improvements bit by bit. Let’s take a closer look at some of the main enhancements that have worked wonders for other sites in the past.
Offer a Limited Quantity of Products or Services on Your Homepage
A visitor’s first impression of your website is through your homepage. So, rather than overwhelming visitors with information, you may want to position your best-selling product on your homepage, which makes it easier for customers to see what you are offering. If you try to display all your products using a ‘scattergun’ approach, you may put customers off. A popular approach is to have a rolling banner across the screen that displays a number of their favorite products.
Nail Your Headline
People tend to be quite ruthless with their time, so if you don’t grab their attention at the earliest possible opportunity, they are more likely to move on and look elsewhere. You should be looking to highlight a problem facing your target audience and ways in which your product can solve this problem for them, right in the headline. Simply describing the product isn’t going to be enough – you need to relate it back to people’s day-to-day lives. Presenting the product, the problem it solves and its other benefits is tough at first, but it is worth experimenting with until you get it right.
Add Credibility to Your Copy
Once you’ve grabbed your potential customer’s attention, you then need to reel them in with engaging copy about the product. Showcashing customer testimonials is a great way to do this. Many web users are skeptical about believing the company’s own boasts about their products. However, they are more likely to listen to what genuine people have to say. A customer testimonial is always going to be more effective if it uses real-life examples of how the product or service has benefited the customer’s life.
As well as information about the item, you should also be looking to fill in more detail about your own credentials, experience and any background information that will make customers feel comfortable buying from you.
Instill Urgency to Compel Customers to Buy Now
If people don’t sense urgency to make a purchase from you, they are likely to not buy right away. Even if they intend to buy at a later date, they could easily forget and you will be left without the sales you need to keep your business running. One of the most effective techniques to instill this sense of urgency is to offer incentives. You could offer a limited-time discount compelling them to buy now or the opportunity to get a valuable free gift. Otherwise, you could only offer a limited number of products so people really feel that need to grab one for themselves.
Add High-Quality Images to Boost Visual Appeal
Next to your copy, images play a big role in whether or not people take the plunge and buy your product. First of all, you want to make your product look as good as possible before it is photographed, so take a look at our custom packaging for different options. People like to see the product from different angles. It’s a good idea to have pictures taken by a professional product photographer who knows how to do a good job. Choosing where to place the photos on your website can be a difficult decision, so you should experiment with different positions and see where they work best.
Think About ‘Scanners’
Rather than reading about your product in detail, some people prefer to scan over your site, reading over certain words and phrases that instantly capture their attention. To help people out with this, try using bold, italics and highlighting to emphasize key benefits. Of course, this is a technique that you should use sparingly. Don’t use paragraphs that are overly long as people are likely to be put off by huge chunks of text. Add clever, eye-catching sub-headings to emphasize key messages. Finally, bullet point lists are a great way to convey information in a way that gets noticed instantly.
Tune-Up Your Follow-Up Process
Once you’ve made the sale, you may want to translate this into future sales. This is why it is so important to get the email address of your customers so you can send follow-up information. When people buy a product from your site, you should send an auto-generated email thanking them for their purchase and letting them know about other products that may interest them. Once you have people on your mailing list, you can send relevant offers and information that encourages them to return to you time and time again.
Tinkering with your website until you find the right formula is an ongoing process. These are just a few ways that you can boost your web sales. Once you’ve made a change, no matter how small, it is important that you test to see how it’s working and how your customers are responding.
