How to Instantly Increase Your Online Sales

First Things First, Get In the Right Mindset

Don’t spend your time and effort trying to get your potential customers to understand everything about your business. Instead, spend the time making sure you understand your potential customers.

Sounds bit strange, we know. What we mean is, the key to all marketing is relating to your customers. Marketing is just showing your target audiences that you understand the problems they have and that your service is the solution they need. 

You need to show your customers the exact values they’ll receive from you, and in turn they’ll want what you already offer. Help your customers instantly understand ‘what’s in it for them’, and why they should believe that you’re the answer they’re looking for.

Here’s come examples we’ve come up with: 

I don’t need ‘plumbing services’. I need someone to fix my leaking tap or cold shower.

I don’t need ’20 years of car repair and maintenance’, I need my buckled wheel changed.

I don’t need ‘Architectural drawings using the latest techniques’. I just need help drawing my new home extension.

This perspective may seem obviously important, but it’s the key that we should always refer back to, to check if we’re meeting the needs of our audiences.

Your Customer Benefits Are Clearly Noted On Your Website

What can this business do for me? 

That’s what your website visitors are thinking the second they enter your website and begin processing information about all of your services. 

 Customer attention spans are short, you need to immediately grab their attention with exactly the benefits they’re looking for.

Some generic examples of benefits you might offer could be: 

• Less than 5 minutes
• Free Trial 
• Affordable Pricing
• Free Delivery

• Money-back guarantee
• Next-day delivery
• Free Shipping
• Custom Tailored Service

But, you do want to try and be specific to the problems your business solves where possible.

So, if you were a plumbing company you could advertise something like: 

• Get Your Leak Fixed in 1 Hour or Less
• New Shower Units Installed Quick, Easy and for Affordable Prices
• We Fix Most Blocked Drains in Less Than 30 Minutes
• From Leaks to Blockages to New Installations: Affordable, Friendly and Easy

Your Headline is Value-Focused and Engaging

Much like your clearly-displayed benefits, you need to immediately grab attention with what the visitor values. Quickly and efficiently communicate the value of whatever you offer, so that visitors ‘get it’ right away, otherwise they might lose interest and continue scrolling through social media, or worse, through a list of your competitors.

It might be cost-focused, such as:

• Your Ideal Garden is Closer. Grab 30% Off Your Next Garden Tool Purchase

• Limited Offer: Your Case of Handpicked Wines 10% Off and Free Shipping

• Save Up to X on Your New Car – Get the Best Offers from Dealers

It could also be more benefit-focused, for example:

• Get Clear, Soft Skin in 3 Days with ABC Cream

• Knock 10+ Seconds Off Your Mile With Our Running Training Program

• 54 Recipes for a Healthier but Tasty Diet: Reach Your Transformation Goals

We know these examples are all made up, and some maybe a little far-fetched, but the point here is to consider why potential customers should care about your business, and tell them this right away. If you don’t, you risk losing them entirely, if not just for now.

Your Page Contains Proof, Testimonials, and Accreditations

Most of us have heard of companies faking reviews on popular websites. This does happen, and do need to be aware of it. However, if you have authentic reviews, oftentimes most people can spot they’re genuine.

So show them off! If you’re offering the best burger in your town and that one guy writes a rave review, share it with the world. A lot of people decide to make purchases or work with other businesses primarily due to trust-related factors, such as referrals.

Having consistently good reviews online, that people can verify on their own too (not just cherry-picking the best ones for your website), is a huge bonus.

So if you can integrate them into your page you should do it. If you don’t have many (or any), ask satisfied customers to leave an honest review.

Likewise, if you have industry or other relevant accreditations, add the badges or logos to your site. Many companies are required to have certain credentials, and can get more to show their expertise. Potential customers are looking for these all the time, to make sure whoever they purchase from meets standards.

If you’re not meeting standards, then that’s definitely something to work on before this!

Where Do I Sign Up?

If your offer, headline, benefits and social proof factors are all nicely put together, your target market should be much more inclined to take some kind of specified action.

 Whether it’s leaving their contact details for a follow up, or clicking through to a checkout, you should make that process so easy they can’t resist.

 Too often, people have tiny little text links, or buttons that don’t stand out, or buttons with dull and generic text.

Keep your calls to action easy, distinctive, and specific so that people who are interested in your products stay interested through the conversion process. 

Make your conversion buttons big (within reason), make sure they stand out (e.g has contrasting colors to their background), and make sure the text is actionable or personable.

So instead of ‘Submit’ or ‘Send Message’ or ‘Visit Checkout’, try ‘Claim Your 20% Discount’ or ‘Learn More About Your Workout Guide’ or ‘I Want Cheap Wine’, respectively.

 Even if they may seem a little ‘in your face’ or lame, this simple differentiation between you and other websites out there makes the whole process much more engaging and inviting to your website’s visitors.

Your Landing Page Messaging Has Continuity

Whether people are finding you through Google Ads or Facebook, or even from Flyers or Print Advertising, your landing page headline and benefits need to tie in very closely to wherever they came from that made them land here.

The offer, the benefits, even the product or service all need to match.

You’d be surprised how many companies create a great looking advertising campaign, only for visitors to end up on the website that is half-broken on mobile and the page is a generic page such as a ‘Services’ page or an eCommerce shop product index.

As an example, if you’re advertising the latest technologies of your hair dryers that dry hair in two seconds, make sure visitors land on a page that showcases that, and primarily that.

Sure, let people have a look around other pages if they choose, but the focus should be there.

On the contrary, make sure your advertising campaign makes sense for the people you are reaching. 

Make Sure You’ve Got the Tech Right

If you’re not technologically-minded, that’s totally fine, but there’s still a lot you can do to avoid technological errors on your website.

One of the main things to keep in mind when improving a website is oversized images. Don’t upload raw camera photos at huge sizes. Most images don’t need to be bigger than 1500 pixels squared these days on the web.

If your company requires your images to be extremely large you might try an image compressor such as tinypng.com – we would even advise you to use this for all images. 

Do a search for Google PageSpeed and plug your page in to see other suggestions on how to optimize your website. If using WordPress, there are plugins you can use to decrease load times.

Mobile is Key Today

As of January 2023, 60.9% of all website traffic comes from people using mobile devices. 

Back in Q1 2015, this figure sat at less than one-third (31.16%). In other words, mobile device internet traffic increased by 75% since 2015. So if your site loads with tiny text, or is super-slow on mobile networks, you should definitely work on your website’s support for mobile users. 

Most commonly-used template-built websites in 2023 come mobile-ready. If you don’t have a mobile ready website, don’t fear! There are a ton of great resources out there to help you get moving. 

Here’s a few resources we love to help get you started formatting your website for mobile!  

• How to Optimize Your Site for Mobile 
• Building Mobile Optimized Layouts with CSS and HTML

We’re all guilty of it, if we can’t scroll, swipe and zoom as we normally do on our mobile apps as we can on your website, we’ve quit and gone to the next thing.

Like we said at the start, there’s plenty of free steps you can take to start increasing your digital sales today. But for more resources on lead generation, sales analysis, and database services, visit our home page at www.bill-moss.com