You may be growing your online business or be in the process of bringing your successful offline business online and noticed that getting a visitor to visit your site once or even buy something from you a single time is not necessarily an efficient or effective way to ramp up your profits online.
What you really want is to have return customers, you want people to have a regular reason to return to your site so you can either expose them more to your sales pages, products and services or to get them to buy more if they have become a customer.
We have worked with many clients to help them improve their website response AND help them to develop longer term relationships with their online customers so they continue to see increased sales after the first visit.
Think about it, you go through great effort to get the initial click to your website that may result in a single sale, wouldn’t it be terrific to continue to have that prospect visit your site again and again and buy more and more from you all with no extra effort?
The Key To Leveraged Profits – More Sales
The difference between highly successful online websites selling everything from ebooks and digital information products to in-house products and services is repeat traffic and repeat sales.
So how do you go about getting people to visit regularly and buy more of your stuff?
1.Making Your Website Sticky
Building some stickiness into your site – what I mean is a reason to return to your site on a regular basis such as a discussion forum, weekly Q&A/FAQ, weekly or bi-weekly webinar or interview with an expert in your field (this can work well on building and onstruction type niches), a tip of the week, case studies, a blog with a focus on participation, etc… The idea is to give people a reason to visit you each week – you can then extend that to your email campaign where you market that week’s offering or update
2.Refining Your Sales Funnel
Having a solid sales funnel that moves people from your “sticky” pages to your various products and services. The idea here is to catch attention and intrigue your visitor to the degree that they will click through to your money pages (sales page, e-commerce store, etc…) Some effective ways of doing this are:
- front-end offers
- contests
- giveaway’s
- special of the month
- new announcements or services
The idea is, of course, to give your visitors a reason to come back and regularly visit your site. Once again, assuming you are capturing their contact information (building an email list), you can announce these updates and specials directly to your email list as well for extra effectiveness.
3.ShoppingCart/Checkout Profit Improvements
We shouldn’t talk about getting people BACK to your website and buying from you again without considering what you can do right at the shopping cart and checkout process to capture additional sales through…
- Upsells which present your buyer (on the way to the Checkout page through intermediate sales offer, at Checkout or just after checkout) with a special to upgrade their purchase to a more expensive offer often presented as a one-time or limited time offer with a substantial discount or limited availability. These upsell offers can often increase your sales by 50-75% alone – everyone should be looking at what they can do to offer their customer an upsell.
- Cross-Sell…cross selling typically happens following checkout, when shoppingcarts are abandoned (some decides not to buy at that time) or following the sale in an email campaign offering another related product that exists “across” from the product or service he or she considered buying that day. Cross selling opportunities can often be a joint venture partnership with someone else in your industry who markets similar (but not necessarily the same) product as you where you can earn a percentage or work the same deal with them on their checkout expanding your coverage of your market.
Using these 3 techniques you can create more traffic, more repeat visits, additional loyalty and higher profits for your new website.
Have a question, leave us a comment and we’ll do our best to help you out.
