3 Important Features You Need On Your Web Site
Website features are what your customers see exactly when they visit your site. Of all these important features, I’m going to describe 3 of them in this article.
1. Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around.
Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.
2. Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website.
Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.
3. Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you.
People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.
Jo Han Mok is the author of the #1 international business bestseller, The E-Code.
He shares his amazing blueprint for creating million dollar internet businesses
at: http://www.InternetMillionaireBlueprints.com
Increasing Online Sales By Increasing Trust
Have you ever received an email that just didn’t sit right with you? Have you ever visited a website that made you wonder who was really behind it?
Or have you been to a website and made a purchase without even really thinking about fraud and transaction problems?
All of these elements stem from one element on your website – trust.
Whether you try to build it or not, you will have a certain amount of trust with every single one of your visitors. Those who don’t know you at all will judge you almost certainly by the way your website looks and “feels” to them.
It is extremely important that you develop trust with these people right away or you will definitely lose the sale, no matter how good the deal is.
Here is an easy way to build trust with those who have never met you before: Add credibility from other 3rd parties who already have trust.
Have you ever seen images of BBB Online, Verisign, or HackerSafe on other websites before (such as Yahoo! Shopping)?
These are called seals and are primarily used to build trust on your website. These three have one thing in common – they come from well known companies who have already built trust with many Internet users.
For example, HackerSafe (which I use in my shopping cart) allows people to see that your website can’t easily be hacked, which means that your customer’s private credit card information will not be stolen. This is a major concern with online shoppers, and could be one of the many reasons you are losing sales.
Over 800 companies have done split testing with and without the HackerSafe seal and have found an average 14% increase in sales. That’s huge!
To demonstrate how big a difference this could make on your sales, imagine right now that you are getting on average $5,000 a month in sales (obviously you may be doing more or less than this, but this is just an example). What if you increased those sales by an average of 14%? That means you would be making an extra $5000 x 14% = $700 per month, or $8400 per year.
Actually, that is not accurate, because all of those new customers that you would be acquiring would go on to purchase other products from you again and again, but we’ll leave the number this low to make our point.
What if the following year saw your business grow to $10,000 per month? Then you would be making an extra $1,400 per month.
Right now my business does on average $50,000 per month in online sales, which means if I could increase my sales by 14% I would see an extra $7,000 per month.
(In fact, I do use HackerSafe and have seen around a 10% increase in sales and opt-ins, not quite as high as the average, but hey, it’s still more sales!)
So where can you use these seals on your website?
Here are just a few areas where these seals can increase your profits:
1. On your squeeze pages.
Since a large portion of the traffic that hits your squeeze page consists of first time prospects, it is important to establish more credibility right away.
2. On your sales pages.
That extra trust seal can help you close a sale that otherwise would never have happened.
3. In your order process.
This is where you need something to tell your customer that they are safe, such as Verisign or HackerSafe.
4. In your advertisements.
If you have print ads, or if you use banner ads, adding in these seals will greatly increase the number of clicks as you will look professional just like websites such as Yahoo! Shopping.
In the end, you can have these seals anywhere on your website and you will see an increase in your trust and therefore in your profits.
Matthew Glanfield helps people start their own online Internet marketing businesses. Get answers to your questions by visiting his blog at http://www.bboinstitute.com
Order Form Secrets to Help You Sell More
When you get to the end of your sales letter, you might be tempted to think that the hard part is over, that the selling is done.
But that’s not the case considering the foundation of your entire letter is the form that comes at the end. If you just throw something together here, you’ll lose the sale you’ve worked so hard to gain.
And just because your order device comes at the end doesn’t mean it’s the last thing your prospect reads. As a matter of fact, it’s often the first. He’s read your headline and is interested in what you have to say. So to see if reading your sales letter is worth his time, he scrolls down to the end to read your offer.
Since he’s reading your order device first, you better be sure to include the essential elements of your sales message:
-The Big Promise: the major benefit your product provides presented in an urgent statement to get the prospect to act now.
-The Benefits: ways your product or service will improve your prospect’s life.
-The Offer: everything your prospect will get in return for giving you money.
-The Guarantee: the reason your prospect has nothing to risk or lose by trying your product.
-Purchase Options: show both the sale price and the regular price to show what a great deal the prospect is getting and how much he is saving by buying now.
-Payment Options: what forms of payment you accept (Paypal, credit cards, phone orders, etc.).
It only takes a few lines to summarize these points in your order device. Just remember to make ordering as easy as possible. One of the most important things to do is ask your prospect to respond right away. Without asking and implying a sense of urgency in the process, the prospect may think he can leave your site and come back some other time and not miss out on anything. And the chances that he will come back are slim to none.
After establishing a sense of urgency, it’s time to ask your prospect to make a buying decision. You reinforce this decision by restating the main benefits and showing the prospect all the ways his life will be better once he commits to purchasing your product.
Once you revisit the emotional aspects of your sales message, you need to once again tap into the rational decision to buy by reintroducing your guarantee and reminding your prospect he is not risking his money. If he doesn’t like what he gets, he can get his money back. To maximize effectiveness, design the order form to be simple, easy-to-read and easy to follow.
Glen Hopkins specializes in teaching struggling entrepreneurs how to turn their small Online businesses into thriving money machines all while working less and earning more. To get more information including Free Reports, Videos and CDs visit: http://www.GlenHopkins.name
Ten Reasons Why You Must Track Lifetime Value
Attracting new customers costs more than retaining customers or bringing a past customer back into your lifecycle. So once you have your customers, you can’t afford to let them leave without doing everything in your power to increase their lifetime with you.
Knowing your average lifetime value does 10 great things for your business:
1. It allows you to determine your customer acquisition cost. By knowing exactly how much each customer is worth to you, you can afford to lose a little on the front end to gain on the back end.
2. You realize that your customers represent a stream of revenue rather than a one-time purchase, so you can develop a marketing plan tailored to those who have shown an interest in buying from you. This prevents you from the endless struggle of having to acquire new customers in order to succeed. Work on keeping your current customers happy while you acquire new customers.
3. You have a better understanding of who to target so your marketing dollars give you a greater return on investment.
4. You can develop a marketing budget aimed at retaining customers and know how much you can spend to remain profitable.
5. You can more accurately figure your return on investment for each marketing campaign.
6. You can determine how profitable each customer is to you, not just averages across the board.
7. Before you spend money on an ad, you can calculate whether or not it will be profitable in the long run even if it does cost a bit in the short term.
8. You can set different budgets as you target different segments.
9. You can track recency, friction and latency so you know when a customer is about to not be a customer anymore. The best times to sell to a customer is when they are buying a lot from you or not buying at all. Create different campaigns for each scenario.
10. This helps you see the true value of a customer even if they are just buying from you for the first time. Don’t think of them as worth just that first $19 sale. As long as you do your job right, they should remain with you and be worth much more than that original sale.
Once you have your lifetime value, you can focus on increasing the lifetime, increasing the amount of money your customers spend on each purchase (it should be getting progressively higher as they move through your “funnel”) and decreasing the latency period.
Decreasing the latency period is important because your most recent customers are the customers who are most valuable to you. The best way to keep your customers recent is to have a variety of products to offer and keep your offers in front of your customers at all times.
So when you drive traffic to your site, you should be doing so with the lifetime value in mind. Each customer who buys from you is worth more to you than the price of that first sale.
But that first sale is critical. If you don’t know how to convert your traffic, your lifetime value won’t be hard to figure out because it will be nonexistent.
Glen Hopkins specializes in teaching struggling entrepreneurs how to turn their small Online businesses into thriving money machines all while working less and earning more. To get more information including Free Reports, Videos and CDs visit: http://www.GlenHopkins.name