Your online presence is a vital part of any sales strategy. But is your website the sales powerhouse it should be?
Replicating the effectiveness of the face-to-face sales process online — and getting customers to go from clicking to buying — can be difficult. The good news is that there are a few simple tricks and tweaks that can improve your site’s revenue-generating capabilities. Here are five tips that can help turn a business website into a sales machine:
1. Build an effective shopping cart.
Some small businesses use services such as PayPal for making and receiving online payments. But building a full-featured shopping cart directly into your website might be a better option. Shopping carts allow for more customization and the potential to provide more product information.
Ginger Domain offers an all-in-one shopping-cart tool that starts at affordable price and handles checkout and payment processing. We offer more than 100 customizable online store templates that are smartphone and tablet-friendly. You also can showcase product options, add photos and make product comparisons.
2. Recommend related products.
Even if you can’t interact face-to-face with web customers, you still can demonstrate old-fashioned salesmanship. An online store can include a “recommendation engine” that suggests complementary products, upgrades and additional services. For example, if a customer puts a grill in his online shopping cart, he can be prompted to also consider buying tongs and a spatula.
3. Optimize your site for search engines.
A website can’t sell if it can’t be found. So, you might consider trying some free tools offered by Google that can help your site show up more prominently in online searches. To use them properly, however, you will need both time and expertise.
Another option is an online search optimization service. Ginger Domain offers affordable SEO and SMO services. Our services can help shorten the learning curve for identifying proper keywords and building links that can help pull your site out of the search engine cellar.
4. Start a contest or promotion.
An online contest or promotion can help attract attention in social media channels and lure potential customers to your site. Giving away a high value item can stir up the most attention but frequent, simple contests with smaller perks can also be effective.
5. Develop a shipping strategy.
When it comes to e-commerce, free or steeply discounted shipping is quickly becoming the standard. But to compete with big online retailers, you’ll need to ship strategically. Instead of opting for either costly or completely free shipping, you might consider something in between. You could make only ground shipping free and set a minimum purchase amount to qualify.
Shipping companies often offer tools that make analyzing shipping options easy. UPS, for example, provides a set of free shipping tools, including UPS , that can be built into existing accounting tools. FedEx also offers a suite of tracking and logistics tools.