The most radiant golden nugget of truth you can discover when learning to drive online sales is that the customer is always right. It’s old wisdom for sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not still valid. In fact, being customer focused is the single most important way you can increase your sales and profits. Of course, to be successful, you have to learn to apply this concept to each different area of your businesses. Read the post below to find out how.
Product
To drive online sales, you must have a great and innovative product, and it may be that you are a business genius of your time. The next Branson, Gates, or Jobs, but that doesn’t mean that every product idea that your brain farts out is golden. In fact, good products are rarely devised on the first go. They take development, research, and above all a willingness to listen to what customers actually want.
OK, I know Jobs is famous for saying that he designed things that people didn’t even know they wanted yet, but really all that means is that he took the less overt clues. Then developed them into a product that filled a need.
So, do you market research, get reviews, get tests done and see how people really feel about your product. After all, it is those guys that will be putting their hands in their pocket to pay for them. So they definitely need to be your first and last though when coming up with your design.
Website
Websites are important for driving online sales, no shock there, but is super surprising is that so many people in online sales don’t really know why. They get that you have to have a virtual shop front to display your product and give customers a chance to make a purchase. However, they often remain are unaware of all of the other sales driving benefits that a great website brings to the table.
Benefits like extended customer reach allowing clients to purchase anywhere, at any time. As well as the ability to track customer habits with analytics. Something that enables you the seller to customize their experience to improve it.
A good website will also help you establish that trust relationship with your customers, especially if it’s user-friendly, reliable, and attractive. This is why many business looking for online sales, research the best website builder to use for their needs, thoroughly beforehand. Enabling them to achieve an effective and customer friendly site that looks good on the customer-facing side, helps to drive sales, and is also easy to manage on the content management side of things too.
Marketing content
Something else that is going to fall flat on its face, and drive no sales if not totally focused on your customers is your marketing. Regarding content, the focus should not be on what your company is comfortable producing, but what it is that your customers want.
After all the point of marketing content is to get your brand, and product front of the customer is a positive way. That means if your demographic isn’t responding to video, try podcasts, or if they don’t like articles much, go for infographics instead.
Luckily there is such a huge range of content types that you can use. Just make sure that you make it a priority to identify and then create the ones that your customers respond best to. As it is these that will drive the most sales.
Payments
What is a transaction? It’s when you a company sells a product (or service) to a member the public, and they pay you for it. Without the payment, you are just giving stuff away, and while that is a most noble act. It’s not going to make you much of a profit, or stop that little vein on the side of your CEO’s head from popping out in your next sales meeting. That means payment is significant and not just because it’s what you want to receive but also as it can make or break the customer’s decision on whether to go ahead with the purchase or not.
It’s all about choosing the right payment method to offer. Otherwise, you risk them not wanting to make the effort to put in their credit card details. Having to fill in all those annoying forms that have terrible habit flashing up red and saying you have made an error. When you quite clearly haven’t! No one can be bothered with this. So to help drive sale make the payment part of the transaction as easy as possible.
That means offering a payment option that is popular like PayPal, so it’s easy for your customer to click through. Yes, you will always need to have the credit card option as well, but quick-pay is what people will plump for, given a choice, and you can exploit this minimize the time your customers have to reconsider their purchase. So, closing as many sales as possible.
Delivery
People don’t like missing their packages or having to take a day off work to wait in for the delivery men. They also don’t like to have to wait five weeks for something that they want right now. In fact, this is something that can stop them purchasing altogether. Driving them to look for another vendor that can offer the product in a shorter space of time.
That is why it’s vital that you make sure your delivery process is set up to benefit your customers and not just your company. That means offering a date selection service so customers can ensure that they will be in. It also means offering tracking services, so customers can see when to expect their package. As well as being able to change the delivery options by text or email if they are unexpectedly not going to be there to receive it.
Expedited delivery is something that customers just expect now too and for a reasonable price. Thanks, Amazon Prime! So be careful to include all these focused customer elements in your delivery service to drive the most sales of your product.
Returns
They say to err is human and to forgive divine, but as most of your clients are likely to be the former you had better watch out! As they may decide that they erred when making their purchase from you, and want to return it.
This is problematic for online businesses because it can cost money to have the product picked up, checked and re-entered into stock. As well as the admin costs for refund that needs issuing. However, it is worth factoring these things into your prices in the first place, because offering returns, free ones if possible, is actually a great way to drive online sales.
This is because buying things online is a lot different than going into a shop and making a purchase. You are relying on pictures and a description to help you make your choice, without ever having seen the product in real life. That means it could well be the wrong, shape, color, size when it does arrive, and if you can’t return said item you are now the proud owner of something that is totally useless and has cost you money.
This is something that can stop people making online purchases, although by offering free returns, you can remove this block. As customers feel reassured that even if it does turn out to be not quite right, they will not be out of pocket. Something that also helps to drive more online sales.