Is Your Website Design The Culprit In Lost Sales?
A business website takes time and money to set up, so it’s really frustrating when it just doesn’t seem to be bringing in the bacon. What most local business owners often overlook are the basic facets that convert traffic into cash. This article takes a look at the most critical sales conversion features your website needs to have.
Specific sales pages and squeeze pages
You’ve worked hard to drive traffic to your website yet you link them to a home page full of general information about your company. Your website should have specific sales pages and squeeze pages where your traffic lands. If you were promoting a free gift in exchange for email address in one of your articles on an article directory, your visitors should land on your squeeze page and nowhere else. If you had a product launch video on YouTube, then your URL link should land viewers directly onto your sales page. In this way you give your prospects no chances of getting distracted by other content.
Sales Copy
Sales copy refers to the way you write your pitch on your sales page that drives people to buy from you. Your traffic needs to be further convinced to take action to buy. Remember it’s not what you say, but how you say it. If you don’t know how to write good sales copy, you can simply learn from the best for free. Read the sales copy for bestselling products and services in magazines, direct mail letters, websites, newspapers, videos etc. What words do they use, how do they lay out their text, what colors do they use, how does the content flow, how many words do they use, what compelling phrases and titles do they employ ? etc. You may also go the route of hiring a copywriter but its best to first educate yourself on what good copywriting looks like so you’ll know if they have done it right
Feedback Area
Always include a feedback area in your website. This is usually located at the bottom of the webpage. Sometimes we need to hear things from other people’s perspective and that feedback area allows visitors to tell you things about your website that probably you never realized. They may alert you to broken links, problems they are having with loading content like videos or with your payment processor, or even give you ideas on how to improve your products and services through their complaints, questions and comments.
Social Media Links
It is often said that web users need to be exposed at least 5 times to a website before they actually buy something, so one way to keep your business on their mind is to add social media toolbar. This toolbar has the icons for the popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Technorati and others. This allows them to join your fanpage or share your web content with others. Also include RSS feed icon that alerts them to new updates on your website. All this allows your business to be remembered by the user and increase the likelihood of them purchasing from you in the future.