Tweet

Improve Your Websites Results

Written by: Keith Thirgood

Article Overview: Your website should be built around the goal of getting the sale. You don't do this with hyperbole, or hard-sell techniques, but by leading your prospect through the emotion and logic of the sales process. First, chart out a path from where your prospect enters your website, through all of the steps required to sell your product/service. Begin with showing the benefits your prospect will gain.

Improve Your Websites Results

One of my mentors, Tom Stoyan, Canada's Sales Coach, says that "selling is helping a prospect reach a buying decision." Looking at your website in this light will help you build a selling website.

Your website should be built around the goal of getting the sale. You don't do this with hyperbole, or hard-sell techniques, but by leading your prospect through the emotion and logic of the sales process.

First, chart out a path from where your prospect enters your website, through all of the steps required to sell your product/service. Begin with showing the benefits your prospect will gain.

Benefits, not features. Benefits relate to the buyer, not the seller. And they relate to a specific buyer, not some generalised buyer. For example: A manufacturer of airbags might try to sell them buying telling a driver, "Our passenger-side airbags are made of the latest, space age materials." This is a feature, not a benefit. They might also say, "Our airbags inflate in 1/1000 of a second." This is still a feature, not a benefit. If they then said, "Your passenger will walk away from a head-on collision", that is a benefit.

But that's not the whole story. That's a benefit for a driver. However, it's not a benefit for an automaker. A benefit the airbag manufacturer delivers to the automaker might be, "Our airbags are 25% less expensive and can be installed in 50% less time that our competition's airbags." For the automaker, that's a benefit. Benefits relate to specific target markets.

After you give your prospects the benefits, you endorse them with testimonials. Then you raise potential objections, which you knock down with facts, reinforced with testimonials. You repeat this pattern until all objections and benefits have been handled.

In the "sales area" of your site, don't have any hyperlinks or other distracting side trips your prospect can take. While articles, case studies, demonstrations and the like are vital, make sure that they can easily find their way back to the point where they left the sales cycle to go on the side trip.

If you're doing direct sales, on every page, have a direct link to the order page. If you're gathering leads, have an easy to see contact link on every page. You can never predict when someone has seen enough and is ready to buy. Do this on every page, even your homepage.

With online sales, on the order page, don't collect information you don't need for the sale. The more information you insist upon, the fewer people will go through with the sale. If your product requires 'real world' shipping, design your site so that before your visitors begin filling their shopping baskets, they are asked for their province/state. This way your shopping cart software can keep a running total of shipping costs as well as order total.

For anyone selling services, your prospects will rarely buy them without further discussion. However, your site should still follow the same routine up until the 'sales page' (i.e. lead-generating page). Here, instead of a catalogue and shopping cart, you gather a minimal of appropriate information to begin the sales dialogue. Each service has its own informational need. Keep in mind that you want to keep it simple at this stage.

If you listen to a group of website designers and developers you will notice a sound coming from them that sounds suspiciously like a mantra. "Content is king. Content is king."

If you believe what they pitch, all you need to do to succeed is to find a way to make your website "sticky". The idea is that your visitors will not be able to resist coming back, over and over, until they buy.

It's a great theory. But a little observation combined with a little knowledge of human behaviour puts the lie to their nice little theory. Look at your own behaviour. How many websites have you bookmarked in your browser? I have over 500.

Of these, how many do you remember why you bookmarked them? I know with my own, I'm lucky if I can remember 50% of them. And of the sites I do remember, I only regularly visit 5 or 10 sites. That's 5 or 10 sites out of 500. Those other sites were all "sticky" too. What happened to them?

Real life is what happened. Your target market doesn't have the time to revisit all of the sites that interest them. So what happens to the "sticky" site you've invested so much time making so? It gets forgotten by all those people who should be your clients.

There's a simple way to remedy the situation. Capture your visitors' e-mail address so that you can keep up a regular dialogue with them.

Now you have two questions: How do I capture my visitors' addresses, and what do I send them?

The answer to the first is found via the answer to the second. Offer them something they'll value, on a continual basis. This article you are reading is an example of one of the most common items you can offer. People are on the web searching for valuable information. If you offer to deliver it to them on a regular basis, many of your visitors will volunteer their contact information.

Newsletters work well for products and services that have depth and dimension to them. I could write on marketing issues for years and not risk running out of things to say. Nor do I put my business at risk by "giving away the store."

The drawback to producing a newsletter is that you must commit time to writing it on a regular basis. This proves to be difficult for many people. Some go to sites that offer free content for newsletters. Others hire professional writers to write or edit their material for them.

The advantage of the content sites is that their product is generally either free or very low cost. The disadvantage is that the content may not fit your market's needs.

The advantage of hiring professionals (Like Capstone: shameless plug) is that their material can be sharply focused on your target's needs. The disadvantage is they cost more.

Newsletters and articles are not the only tools. Some businesses might find contests appropriate. Every month a contest form is e-mailed out to participants with a link back to the server for prospects to register their entry. This sort of contact tool can grow a database rapidly, depending upon the prizes and the target audience.

Periodic "special reports" can be offered. Contact is less frequent than with a newsletter, but the need to keep a regular schedule is diminished.

Another tool may be periodic "industry alert" or "industry news" bulletins. These don't demand the writing skills of newsletter producers, however they do require you to be up-to-date with the latest developments in your industry. (Or your target market's industry.) An e-mail alert can be simply formatted and consist of mostly bullet points, interspersed with comments.

Or for certain industries and businesses, people will sign up simply to receive notice of your latest special. I receive e-mail announcements from about 15 different companies whom I've given permission to send me their sale announcements. (But don't abuse your prospects using this privilege. You'd better send them *real* sales announcements, not just sales material.)

One of the beauties of regular e-mail contact is that it all can be automated! Through the appropriate use of autoresponders and listservers, your effort is reduced to just creating the e-mail that's to be sent. Maintenance is handled by the software.

You can set these systems up yourself, although it's often easier and more successful to have professionals (shameless plug #2) do this. There are some services out there, offering free listservers and autoresponders, but you pay for them by allowing other peoples' advertisements on your e-mail. For a professional business, this is not a very good option.

Some ISPs provide listservers and autoresponders as part of their basic business service. (Our own ISP provides these for free.) Most other ISPs charge extra for these items, or don't carry them at all and expect you to buy your own.

Keeping in regular touch with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of your prospects is good marketing in my books. If you want to make your web presence more effective, there are few things you can do that will return so much on such a small investment.

Related Articles
  Carefully Choose to Whom You Link To
  Article Marketing: Your Secret Weapon for Increasing Search Engine
  SEO - The Trend For Present World
  Improve Search Results with Article Marketing
  How to feature onGoogle’s first page

Article Tags: passenger side airbags, prospect



Related Forum Posts
Re: What I Enjoyed Reading This Week - Oct 14 - I really enjoyed the Improve your vision with an app article in the New Scientist. I don't wear glasses and think a lot of people cripple their vision by wearing specs from an early age instead of exercising their eyes... Nice to see someone has developed an ap that will help.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - Hi Evan, Thank you! I have been upgrading my websites to Wordpress and more actively adding content to them. The only exception is the one decliner, Japanese-Mahjong.com which I hope to upgrade and revive early next year... New Alexa ranking objectives: Japanese-Games-Shop: 350,000 Free-Wordpress-Websites: 120,000
Re: Re-Branding and Re-tooling - Dear coopadventures.com Sounds like you are on the right track. Websites and advertising go hand in hand. A great website can be built in 20 min. It can be like a great restaurant in the desert with no roads leading to it. A website must get traffic to turn a profit.
Re: Reduce Bounce Rate - Website bounce rate matters most today. You can decrease by providing 1. Good Web Layout And Design 2. Relevant and unique content 3. Content clear and proper navigation 4. Improve website loading speed 5. Add relevant images 6. Analysis of keywords 7. Minimize pages 8. optimize your target keywords 9. Good quality of links 10. Take People Where They Want to Go
Run a major competition - You beat me to the punch LoveInventions! I was just on my way to post this! The idea is simple: run a competition for a major prize to get people posting. In this case Darren put up a $729 Nikon DSLR up for grabs as the top prize. The winner was selected randomly and each post you wrote gave you another chance to win. [quote:1nc4sv0r]The Goal - the aim of the exercise was simple. To sign up new members to my forum and increase page views. My hope was to have a bumper month but also get new members signed up to have an ongoing impact on overall activity going forward.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Traffic - Over the full month traffic was increased 66.7%.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: New Members - Recruiting new members to the forum was another goal of the competition. We’d had an influx in January of 1803 new sign ups as a result of a previous smaller competition but since had been around the 1200 per month. April however saw a boost in numbers by an extra 2823 members.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Activity - Another bonus related to increased traffic is the increases in user activity on the forum. Here’s the increase in new ‘threads’ to the forum (up from the 1500’s to just over 4000 for the month). And here is the increase in new posts (up from 1400 per month to over 43000 for the month).[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r] The Downside So far it’s sounding fairly rosy isn’t it. Increases in traffic, members, activity and even earning are all good. However there was two downsides. 1. Moderation Workload - I have an amazing team of moderators to DPS but the month of April was the hardest that they’ve ever worked. I totally underestimated the extra load upon them in setting up this competition. It has made me reconsider how I run future competitions. 2. Impact upon Quality of Reader Interaction - over all the increased activity of the site brought in some wonderful new members who are interacting on the site with genuine interaction. However a small number of new members were just there for the competition - even though I made it clear that spammy entries wouldn’t win. This impacted moderators workloads but also the overall morale on the site a little. I think we managed to contain it but again - next time I run a competition it’ll not be based upon post numbers but rather some sort of quality level of interaction.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] What do you guys think? Is it worth testing out? Considering we already give out over $1,000 in month prizes, what would be the ultimate prize that we award at the end of the competition?


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

••••••>SEO Tip Of The Day: HTML Validation

The five pillars of internet marketing strategy

Basic Operating Question (BOQ) for Empowerment

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.