How to sell more online
Online sales reach new heights every year and for small business owners it is a great opportunity to grab a piece of the pie. The key is called the trust of customers - which you can learn all about in this guide.
Online marketing can be an achilles heel that you must master - to create a trust. This guide tells you how to sell more online and how to build an online shop that gets visitors to trust you, and that causes them to act.
1. Go for graphics and photos
Photos are appreciated by the visitors since they can not take on or feel the products when they shop online. Also, be sure that all texts are spelled correctly, and that visitors are not disturbed by advertisements or windows that opened for no reason. A simple page sells almost always better than one that is flashy and dificult to navigate. Your visitors must understand the website easily.
2. Stay in touch
Most successful online merchants maintain contact with customers and visitors through blogs, newsletters, remarketing and SMS. Make sure your newsletter is informative, personal and add value for the customer. By having constant contact with potential customers you increases the chance of more sales, and if you're really smart, you give your loyal customers special offers that nobody else gets.
3. Safe and fast delivery
Safe and fast delivery is important if you want to retain customers and your reputation. If there would be delays, you should alert the customer of this.
4. Offer different payment methods
The more payment options you offer, the more options the customer have to pay, simple! Invoice and credit card payment are the most common, have as many as you are able to manage. To get customers to feel secure, you should have icons for secure payment methods. Select as common payment solutions as possible. With icons from well-known brands in your store, you create confidence despite the visitor never heard of you before.
5. Answer questions
On the internet there are no staff - create a page of frequently asked questions and answers about your e-commerce and your products. If it is too difficult to describe the product in brief, you can link to the appropriate pages on the web. If possible - also have a phone number where customers with questions can call.
6. Get the visitor to take action
Create a sense of the urgency to act. This can be solved by having limited time offers, a limited number of products or bonus when buying right now.
7. Be Unique
Internet is flooded with stores that look more or less the same. Emphasize your competitive advantage on the site, whether it be price, delivery, service or anything else. Highlight what customers get from you that it can not get anywhere else!
8. Get Confidence
A trustworthy store loads quickly, is easy to grasp, focuses on customer value and do not contain some cool features that are only in the way.
9. Limit choices
A really good store also tries to limit choices for the visitor. The fewer things the visitor sees the easier it is to make a decision. Make sure it is simple to buy and minimize the number of pages to the check-out button. For every extra step you lose buyers. More on how to increase conversion rate by optimizing check out.
10. Upselling
Visitors are often interested in more products or services in the same area. Link to similar products to the one that the visitor clicked on. Even when the purchase is completed, you can create additional sales by offering a special deal on the confirmation page or e-mail orders.
11. Be personal
Make sure you have pictures of the staff and clear contact details. It gives confidence. Always reply to emails and phone - preferably within 24 hours. If customers see that there are real people behind the store, and that they can easily contact you, they feel safer.
12. Promote your e-commerce
E-commerce sites requires trust from customers and you will get a real boost in your e-commerce shop if customers recognize your brand. Is your marketing budget tight, be active in social media, blogs and so on. A personal blog is also good marketing for creating awareness and trust.
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Learn how to calculate ROI on SEO vs PPC
I want to preface this by declaring that this post isn't to explain the pros and cons of SEO vs. PPC as a method to generate visitors to your website. If you are interested in that you can read it here. In this post I want to highlight how you an use PPC to estimate the value of your organic search strategy.
What's the economic value of your own SEO strategy?
To generate visitors to your website thru Google and other search engines is a long process. I you have invested in SEO before you know that it takes time to get the results and rankings. In some cases it is better to aim for 'long tail' search phrases that has lower search volume, but lower competition and it gives you a better quality of the visitors in terms of conversion. For some customers it can be more beneficial than targeting the short tail search phrases.
No matter if you decide to hire an SEO agency or try to get the results with your in-house SEO expert, resources are spent, either time or money. Since it is taking several months before the SEO results show, you should always calculate the ROI of the investment.
The website is often the best leads generating source for the company. The website is often the first impression potential customers get from your business. To measure the leads generated from the website together with the conversion rate is a must for any company. But there is also another way to measure how much a visitor can cost.
Do not confuse the value of a visitor with the cost of a new customer.SEO vs. PPC
SEO (Search Engine Opitimization) is the training of raising your homepage in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). There are numerous of various SEO strategies that you can use to raise in the search rankings. Our strategy is to have a well organized website with the right content, presented in the right way, in combination with a strong and diverse backlink structure to get better positions in Google and other search engines.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click, Sponsored Links, Adwords) is the way of working with online ads and paying for each click or visitor that comes to your website. The algorithm of an ad is quite similar to the one that Google uses for their organic search results.
By generating traffic your homepage via organic search traffic (SEO) is free in that sense that you don't pay for every visitor, but you have to spend time or money on an SEO consutant to get there.
PPC is only driving traffic for the earch phrases you have paid for, but SEO traffic gives you huge growth over time. You will rank and get traffic for more than just your targeted search phrases, like secondary and long tail keywords that gives you more specific traffic to your specific page. If you invest in a 6 months SEO campaign you can benefit from the work for a long time, depending on how aggressive your competitors are. But with PPC, once you stop paying for the ads, you don't get any traffic.
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Finally a few words of advice on how to run a successful online business
For a business there is a huge market to go for online. If you have an idea and want to start an online business or if you just started and want to have some great tips. These are our tips in how to make your business successfully online!
- Allow customers to provide feedback, ask for feedback in ex. social media.
- Spend as little money initially as possible and be cost effective. Also think in long-term and expect that it will take time.
- Extreme willingness to change. After running for 3-4 months and it does not work, you have to be willing to change. Why isn’t visitors buying? Why isn’t the customer comming back? Why don’t they buy more? What products do they buy and why? Keep in mind that there won’t be as you wanted in 98 percent of cases.
- There are no sacred cows, persistence is the biggest mistake of a classic entrepreneur who is passionate about his basic idea.
- Be clear about your goals. Are you going to conquer the world, or do you want to fulfill your dreams? If you want to conquer the world it usually means that you have to bring in other talented people. Is it high risk and little money, you need to share ownership and your influence. Are you taking in too much money, you have no influence at all, but you have a greater opportunity to conquer the world. Face it.
- Discuss different scenarios before they happen and make plans for how they should be treated. How long can you cope without your salary? How will the money be invested? Be very careful to control situations before they occur in order to avoid conflicts.
- Humor is the single most important tip for success in any form of business. Do not take everything so damn seriously! Don’t work with people without self-distance.
- Build up your team with people who have the same values but different skills.
- Always be open to employees, customers and potential investors. Unless your employees know the conditions they will underperform.
- Create your site for the customer and what you sell, not for what you think is neat.
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