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Convert Website Visitors into Sales

Posted in Ecommerce

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Convert Website Prospects into Sales

Converting Website Prospects into Sales

Using your Website to Improve Conversion Rates

How do social media and marketing integrate into persuading website prospects into customers? If you are a business owner, this article will help you to learn what tips and tools will help you to save time, increase conversions and guide website visitors to your most desirable action.

Twitter iPhone App to Help Business Owners

Keep a close eye on your Twitter page. For most business owners, this can be a time consuming action. A time-saving tip is to use TweetBot, a Twitter App that will change your way of thinking about Twitter Apps. It allows you to do everything you ordinarily do with other Twitter Apps, but the unique feature about this App is that it allows you to filter out tweets (noise). By filtering through tweets, you can filter out RT (re-tweets), "via", and other custom filters to "do not display" so that you can focus on the tweets that really matter in your Twitter stream such as people that are complaining, people that are trying to ask a question or even those people that just want to say "hey". The App costs less than ten dollars. You can download it from the iPhone App store.

Closing the Sale through Persuasion and Psychology

Word choices and choosing the right kind of words can guide people down a certain path. The difference between the almost-right word and the right word are a large matter, when it comes to marketing that can make sales versus repel sales.

Three words repel people from closing a sale include these words:

  • lecture
  • teach
  • learn
  • acronyms
  • hard-to-understand words

People have a short attention span online, so if you use the above words, you can actually de-rail a sale and cause the visitor to leave your website, never to return. Instead, use words like "share insight". This is only part of the story, there are words that can turn random visitors into sales.

How to Find the Words that are Right for your Audience

Mine customer support requests, mine customer comments, and mine customer tweets. Encourage people to reply to your blog posts and ask them to describe their problems and questions that you can help by addressing or answering. There is no one word that is right for everyone, but you need to go through your customer data to find a trend and discover which words are positive for your business.

Examples of words that encourage people to buy:

  • share
  • discover

Psychology and Social Media Marketing

There are always new tools that are a big hit and up-and-coming. What these tools all have in common is that people need to use them. The connection is that no matter what you doing, if the tools change, people do not change. So if you understand the people that are visiting your website, you can mix-and-match tools to match your audience.

In the end, people are people are people. Your customers are not different than my customers. They essentially have the same needs and similar interests. As a business owner, it is advantageous to your business to learn about the people that visit your website or blog. Find out what your customers want; find out their needs and desires and provide those answer to them.

Content Strategy

Most people think that blogging and content marketing is about being in people's faces and in-boxes all the time. Some bloggers create as much content as possible which is great for search engines, but if your goal with your articles is to implement your advise and those people get results from your advise, you build loyalty. If you update your website or blog multiple times every week, you can not really expect people to implement your strategies every week because people are just too busy. So, by limiting your posts to only the articles that you feel are of the absolute highest quality, you create content that is memorable. When you create content, refrain from creating list posts such as "Top 10 Tips". Bloggers usually write articles using "tips" and because this is such a common blogging strategy, it can become ineffective. A better strategy that we have discovered is to provide one single action or one single tip and then walk your website visitors through implementing that one, single tip. The reader will often get excited and follow through with your advise in order to achieve the goal of your article.

Podcast Strategies

Release at least one podcast episode per month. Bring new talent into the world of your industry by interviewing people for your podcasts that are unconventional in your industry. Get those people to divulge research from studies, then break them down into tips for your readers. Bring in new blood and introduce your listeners to new names.

How Should Marketers Look at and Learn from their Competitors?

Why should someone study their competition in the first place? There is a fine line between copying your competition and innovating from your competition. See what is working for your competition and figure out how you can either make it better or make it irrelevant. If you see your competition is buying ads on Facebook, for example, don't copy those ads, but rather figure out if you should do the same or realize that you might want to buy ads on LinkedIn instead. Figure out what they are doing and make it better.

Many blog owners are realizing video content can propel their business. Some videos are under-produced, however, and although the content may be good, the video might be overlooked because of poor-production. You can do the same with your great content, but instead of making the same under-produced videos, consider hiring an accomplished producer and generate videos that are professionally produced, which will make your videos stand out from your competition and possibly go viral.

Internet Marketing Space and Bloggers

Podcasts are a marketing strategy of online businesses which are generating high-level leads. Look outside the window, innovate and inspire to growth. Production value of videos and podcasts are a smart investment that set your site apart from your competitors.

Email Marketing Lists

Getting permission to communicate with people is important to growing your business. First of all, getting a person to change from a passive observer into a person that receives your email marketing is important. Convert traffic into subscribers by including opt-in pages or pop-in forms on many locations within your website to encourage people to sign up for your email marketing list.

Promote your Website or Blog instead of Social Media Pages

Always promote your website rather than your Facebook page or Twitter page. The ultimate destination should always be your website instead of your social media pages.

Toot your Own Horn

Provide an heir or creditability to visitors by providing logos of which sites that are quoting your content or linking to your content. These are signals that symbolize credibility. Subscriber numbers are another example of tooting your own horn and building credibility to your website.

What your Audience Remembers and Shares

Your audience will remember your videos more than they will your text blog content. "Click-to-Tweet" quotes are important because regular share images on your website are so common people get blind to them and often overlook to them. Instead of having simple tweet button, find a significant quote from your blog posts from the article or video and put it in a "call out box" with a link that says "click to tweet". When people click that link, it opens out their Twtitter page with that quote re-populated and provides a link back to your site. People like to tweet posts and this will increase visibility to your website or blog.

It is not very hard to use Twitter tweet buttons. If you go to any search engine, and click "twitter tweet buttons" you can pre-populate any text into a tweet with a single URL so that when people click on it, the link will show up in Twitter. This makes it easy for people to tweet your content. The keyword is "easy" and by making it convenient, you can increase visibility to your website, and convert prospects into sales.

Get more conversions: How to close the online sale

Posted in Ecommerce

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Ecommerce closing sales

Ecommerce and Closing the On-Line Sale

Website Hosting Ecommerce

You have worked hard making your web site attractive. Your shopping cart is setup and your products are displaying with catchy images. It took a long time to get here. To the point of sale (POS). The visitor has browsed, added several items to her shopping cart and is ready to make a purchase. Are you ready to capture that sale? Does your site instill confidence and deliver benefits visitors won’t find at the local mall? No?

Well, here’s an eye-opener for you. A large percentage of web users use their computers to:

  • comparison shop for the lowest prices
  • learn more about product features and benefits
  • locate the local brick-and-mortar stores
  • read product reviews from journals and buyers
  • make buying decisions – plural. Web users decide what to purchase and where to purchase – two critical decisions that affect your site’s commercial success.

If you’re wondering why you’re seeing great traffic analytics to your web site but not converting as many sales as you anticipate, part of the problem might be your closing strategies.

How can you keep visitors from using your site for information, and then later make their purchase from a real-world store? Well, after all, a real world purchase is faster with instant gratification. The shopper can feel the product in their hands, ask questions, and decide for real if they want to own the product.

So what can you do to close more sales?

You need to close the deal. Your ecommerce store is a serious investment, both of your time and your money. You NEED to close more deals... after all, you need to make a living and your counting on your business income and, if your only given the chance, you know you can make your clients happy.

The allure of on-line shopping

To close the deal and and make a sale, consider the reasons why people use the web for browsing (instead of shopping). You can turn each of those reasons into a sales closing strategy, if you consider the buying process on your site in the mind of the buyer. Think like an online shopper. Test your shopping cart and really see what it is your online visitors see. What is it that can be changed? What can you do to improve the buying process? What can you do to close more sales? Because, after all, it is important.

Okay, let's assume that your visitors use your site to gather information and that once they have collected the information that they need, they jump in the car and go to the local brick-and-mortar store to make the purchase. Don't forget that you are asking the potential buyer to make a few sacrifices such as:

  • Purchase from an unknown vendor
  • Wait three to five business days before receiving their purchase in the mail
  • Risk the additional hassle of returning the items, if they don't work out.

Buying on line can be a hassle, unless your ecommerce web site is positioned so that the shopping experience is defined well, and there is not one single doubt left in the mind of your potential shopper.

Strategies to close more online sales:

  1. Make it more convenient. Make the deal more attractive to your visitors. Outline the deal on your web site so that the visitor wants to click "Add to cart" in order to save time, hassle of battling the traffic at the local mall, and miss the crowds. Make life easier for your online shoppers. Buying from your online store should be convenient, a time-saver which results in the buyer becoming more productive with their time.
  2. Offer shipping options. Overnight delivery is an option that might just close the deal for you. Many shoppers need the items–fast! Offer overnight delivery for those emergency items that absolutely, positively must be there in the morning. This scenario is especially true of companies who sell to other businesses where room for error is non-existent. People will gladly pay extra to get their new item the next day. They won't think twice about paying an extra $20 to get their laptop tomorrow rather than by the end of the week. Keep in mind, however, that some buyers are more cost conscious so, always offer either free or low-cost shipping. Free shipping on orders over a certain amount is useful in getting the buyer to add one more item in their cart.
  3. Offer personalized service. Many companies have outsourced this responsibility, but the companies that handle this in-house have the opportunity to "Wow" their shoppers. If your company must outsource this task, make sure your phone representatives know your products, policies and company's terms and conditions. If they don't, it will cost you time and money in lost sales. You, the business site owner, will need to prepare scripts for the representatives who answer telephones or emails for hundreds of different companies to provide customer services. So, whenever possible, be sure that all products are immediately accessible to the representative with product specifications for callers with questions. Your representatives should always be set up to take the order and close the deal. They should always offer to process the order as part of their script. Think it through... if a potential buyer has taken the time and trouble to call your company, you are very near to closing the deal. A salesperson has not actually been asked to be a sales person unless the customer says "No Thanks" and, in that case, the sales person should be well-trained in the strategy of changing the caller's mind and closing the deal.
  4. Offer guarantees. Guarantees are real trust builders. There are many different types of guarantees that you can offer: product guarantees, shipping guarantees, satisfaction guarantees. And don’t hide these benefits in the fine print. Display your guarantees in a very visible location on both your web site and the back-end shopping cart.
  5. Keep your checkout process simple and re-assure your customer along the way. Your buyers, most notably your repeat buyers with whom you already have a relationship, should be able to make a purchase with a click or two. At every single step of the checkout process: (1) assure your buyer that he/she is on the right page and that everything is in order to this point; (2) provide a visible "back" button; (3) give buyers the means of which to change items and quantities without having to back out of the check-out and start over; (4) assure buyers that they are on a secure site in both your site text and through the use of trust-building logos from the BBB, Authorize.net, McAfee and other security-focused companies.
  6. Provide an immediate email invoice with order number. These invoices are generated automatically by reputable shopping carts and then sent to the buyer’s in box. Detail all order information, including anticipated ship and arrival dates and be sure to provide a telephone contact, in case the buyer has any questions.
  7. Offer additional incentives. Why? Because more than any other single factor, these incentives differentiate your company from the Wal-Mart across town. Wal-Mart may have their greeters at the main entrance, but your company can deliver a lot more in terms of personalized service and convenience.
  • Gift certificates - This is the easiest way to send a gift, especially if your buyer doesn't know what to purchase. A gift certificate is always appreciated by the recipient.
  • Personalized greeting cards - If the purchase is a gift, the option of sending a personalized note is a great strategy that can help close the deal. Many on-line shoppers, especially around the holidays, want to send along a personalized note with the gift.
  • Gift wrapping - Offer unique gift wrapping options that are personalized for the recipient: grandparents and parents, kids, the corporate world, and others. A smart selling feature is to display the different wrapping options on the page during the check-out sequence. Remember, a well-designed image is worth a thousand words.
  • Personal shoppers - A lot of men are not sure when it comes to things like jewelry and other gifts. Many buyers could use some help.
  • Email reminders - Email reminders are excellent tools for online companies to increase sales. Buyers who tend to forget birthdays, anniversaries and holidays will appreciate the personalized email you send two weeks before the big day. And where are these buyers going to make their online purchases? From the nice web site that reminded them that now was the time to buy the gift for that special someone.
  • Host your online store with a green hosting provider. Your buyers will appreciate the fact that your web site is powered by green energy. Many online shoppers look for "Powered by Green Hosting" banners on a web site and will leave a web site if they can't find one. Choose a green hosting provider that specializes in providing web hosting powered by Wind Energy.

These are the special services that differentiate your web site apart from the local chain stores. You may not be able to compete on price, but personalized services make your business different from all the rest, and many times, are the reasons buyers will wait a day or two and purchase from an unknown web site that is obviously focused on customer service.

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