How to increase your online sales

So you’ve built your website and orders/enquiries are piling in right?

Wrong.

The ‘build it and they will come’ approach is one way many entrepreneurs fall flat. Fortunately there are some proven steps that will help you improve the effectiveness of your website.

Have a clear value proposition

So what is a value proposition and why is it important?

Every business is seeking to solve a problem for a customer.

The way you articulate this on your website, in your adverts and even the way you speak is crucial. You should prioritise what is most important to the customer and focus on benefits rather than features.

If free shipping is important to people for example, you need to make sure it forms of your core value proposition.

You should be able to articulate your value proposition in a sentence, for example “Uber – The Smartest Way to Get Around”.

Know your customer

Male? Female? Old? Young?

You may think you don’t know the answer, but it doesn’t take long to begin to understand who your customers are and how they think.

Creating ‘customer personas’ involves building up a picture of your typical customer and using that to inform everything from website and ad copy to the colour schemes and logo you use.

Crucially it also helps you decide where to advertise to get your brand in front of these people.

Clean user friendly design

Over 50% of web traffic is now on mobile so you must build for desktop and mobile.

Clean design and user experience will payback hand over fist. If people can easily understand what you sell, what you stand for and how to buy from you you are into a winner.

A clean, fresh website is crucial for this. And it no longer costs tens of thousands of pounds to build a high grade website – so no excuses.

Full funnel marketing

So many people focus on getting in front of new customers, and this is crucial. However what is also important is maintaining contact and marketing to existing and lapsed customers.

This is full funnel marketing and is a crucial approach to building a sustainable and efficient business.

Target active and passive customers

There are 2 types of target customer.

Those who are actively looking for a solution (active targets).

And those who fit the profile of someone with the problem but are not currently looking for a solution (passive targets).

It always makes sense to start with targeting of the active segment (using Google AdWords for example), because they have already decided they want to buy. But this pool or opportunity tends to be small and highly competitive.

Make sure you also have a strategy to target passive segments. Facebook and display advertising are great for this.

Remarket to engaged visitors

When people visit your website, they are either interested and stick around, or they are not and they ‘bounce off’ your site. Those that stick around but don’t buy are your ‘engaged users’.

These are the people you should target with remarketing adverts.

After all, they know who you are and have shown an interest. This is one of the most underused forms of digital advertising.

Be a growth hacker

Cookie cutter approaches to marketing rarely work simply because every business is so different. In order to succeed you need to be prepared to fail.

Think outside of the box, test new ideas, fail fast and move on.

This is the way growth hackers think and it’s a great way to quickly zero in on what works best. It’s often not what you would think!

Know your competition

You can learn a lot from your competition and so should watch them closely. There are a range of tools and techniques you can use to understand how they run their marketing.

You should learn from their mistakes and mimic their successes. But don’t watch them too closely or you may end up following them rather than outpacing them.