These quick wins can dramatically increase your online sales.
I’ve personally seen people double or even triple sales from their website just by applying one or two of these properly.
Let’s get started.
Clutter = confusion. And confusion means lost sales.
Your site should focus on what the customer needs to know. Don’t get in their way, and don’t overwhelm them with endless options. Have a clear sales process in mind and guide them through it.
Make your navigation menus clear and only put in them what’s necessary. Especially for your main menu at the top of the site. A lot of website building software (such as WordPress) either encourages you or automatically adds links for everything to menus. Don’t do it.
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And if your site has one of those big ‘slider’ widgets at the top of your home page, please get rid of it. They were all the rage for a while. But time and time again tests have shown they just confuse customers and hurt your sales. Instead, focus that area on your most important offer/message instead.
Your website should be doing everything it can to answer all the possible questions your customers could have. But if you don’t make it easy for your customers to ask you questions, how will you ever know if you’ve covered things well enough?
And some customers just like to ask a question to be reassured that you are a real business.
So make your contact details easy to find. And encourage questions.
Contact methods will vary depending on your sales process of course. But if phone is your most important method, make your phone number highly visible (more tips here on how to get more phone calls to your business).
As a minimum you should have a contact page with a contact form people can fill in (like this). You may also want to publish an email address, a phone number, Facebook Messenger or Skype details. Maybe even a live chat app so people can instantly chat with you or your sales team without even leaving your website.
A ‘call to action’ (CTA) is any link, image, button or text that moves your customers through the sales process.
It could be a button saying ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Add to cart’. It could be a link saying ‘Start Your Coaching Here’.
I can tell you right now that your website probably doesn’t have enough of them. Or they are not prominent enough.
I’ve seen a lot of web pages describe a product or service, then leave the reader totally hanging without any idea of what to do next. If you don’t tell them what to do – don’t be surprised when they don’t do what you want!
Make your CTA’s big. Make them bold. Make sure there are enough of them. And make sure they are in the right places.
That’s the job of a headline. It’s meant to pull you in to read more.
By headline, I mean the big text that people see at the top of each page. So if your page headline just says ‘Business Coaching’ – that’s pretty boring, right?
Which would you be more interested in:
“Website Audit”
or:-
“Discover how your website can get more traffic, convert better & sell more”
The difference is pretty clear. Don’t just state what the service is. Talk to your customer in your headlines. And tell them what benefit they will get from your product or service.
This can get results very quickly. You can increase your online sales pretty much instantly with better headlines.
Give changes time to run (ideally use A/B testing) before tweaking any further.
P.S. you can order an NZ website audit for your site, where we will dig in and identify problems and improvements you can make to your site for big results. We take the time to manually review your site with our audit reports and are usually able to give value way beyond what they cost.
Have you ever seen your own website on a phone? Does it look OK? Is it easy to navigate? Does it load fast enough? Does it even work at all..?
With around 60% of all website traffic now happening on phones, this is incredibly important.
You need to make sure your site still looks good and is easy to use on mobile. You need to make sure your calls to action are still visible and prominent enough (has your phone number disappeared into a menu?).
Speed is important, but only to a point. Yes, it would be great if your site snapped into view in less than half a second. But it really just needs to be fast enough. A recent study by Google showed that sites have got a lot faster on mobile – but on average they are still painfully slow. The average page takes an incredible 15 seconds to load.
If your pages take longer than 3-5 seconds to be usable then I recommend you get some work done to fix that. If they are taking 15 seconds or longer, this is urgent, because you are losing money right now and it’s only going to get worse as your competitors sites improve.
All of these tips focus on getting more sales without needing more traffic to your website. That’s because it’s much easier to increase your online sales by improving sales conversion than it is to generate more traffic.
Obviously the benefit of that is it will also maximise sales if you then go on to improve traffic to your site.
All of these methods work like crazy, but it depends entirely on how well you apply them. So I recommend applying these changes gradually. Or get in touch with us here if you would help with all this.
I also recommend getting Google Analytics added to your site if you haven’t already. But get it set up properly too, so that it tracks all your key sales and conversion related events (everything from email optins to button clicks to sales queries and actual sales).
It’s important to know your numbers when you make changes like this. Then you can see exactly how well your changes are working.
Get our Website Success Checklist to help identify where your site is getting it right and what you need to improve next.