How to make more sales using the Internet! (Part 1)
The end goal of every business is to make a profit. Your business survival relies on how well your sales team is performing. And when you combine result oriented sales team with innovative technology, achieving sales growth doesn't seem so difficult.
We have deviated the article into two separate parts. Part one includes tips on how to generate potential clients and cultivate them into actual customers. In part 2 we have focused on how to generate more sales and increase profits.
The first step?
Increase The Number Of Qualified Visitors Coming To Your Website
Traffic, traffic, traffic. Everyone knows that you need to attract visitors to your site to be successful on the Internet. The more the merrier. Or so is everybody saying.
Look:
It's great if you can gain thousands of visitors. But here's the thing, you’re not just looking for any traffic. The important part is to attract the right people. Big numbers may look like you perform wonderfully and make us all feel like superheroes, but it's just not enough. If your visitors don't care what you are offering them, you have low conversion rates, and can't gain new customers, then it's time to ask yourself What I'm doing wrong?
Here’s how you can focus on attracting the right traffic:
First, identify who your potential clients are and build buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional, detailed descriptions of your target customer. It includes everything from demographic information like age, location, and income to job history, interests, and reasons to buy your product.
Once you have created your buyer personas you can understand your customers better. You can create better content, ensure your ads and campaigns are properly target and deliver the right messages. Make sure that prospective buyers received the sales pitches that are most persuasive to them.
Here are some resources on how to build buyer personas:
- The Complete Guide to Developing and Using Buyer Personas (Single Grain)
- Buyer Persona Generator (Hubspot)
Now that you have created your buyer personas it’s time to put your efforts in to attract those who have the potential to become customers instead of everybody using The Internet.
There are tons of articles and books on generating more traffic, so I will just highlight the most important methods - Paid Advertising, Blogging and Social Media, Email Campaigns, SEO, Guest Blogging, and so on.
Optimize To Capture Loads Of Leads
Now that you have visitors on your website it's time to convert them into leads.
In a nutshell, a lead is a potential sales contact: an individual or an organization that expresses an interest in your products or services. To be classified as lead, you need to collect a minimum of information about a visitor - an email address, a phone number, or other contact info. Once convert as lead you know they are interested in your products/services and you need to nurture them further.
Here is a quick overview of some of the highly effective and simple strategies you can use to generate more qualified leads.
Provide Best in class User Experience
We need to understand that most often a visitor's first interaction with our company is via its website. Nearly half of the global population is using the internet and 81% of shoppers search online before buying.
What does this mean for you?
The probability of potential buyers first interact with your company's website is pretty big. So you must ensure that the user experience would be worthwhile.
A good web design can be a very important asset to you. Make sure that your website is clear and leads visitors from what’s most important to secondary items. You can accomplish this with white spaces, typography, and selected images. It's important for a website to easily navigate. It needs to follow a logical and consistent path.
High-quality content can attract and hold a lot of visitors to your website well beyond its publish date. Effective content is content that solves problems for potential leads, consists of in-depth analysis, and the language is comprehensive.
Try to include images, videos, and infographics to increase share counts and engagement. Also, create a newsletter subscribe form to capture more email addresses on your website.
In my experience, the best thing to do is to hire a professional web designer or company. Their job is to know the latest trends, best practices, understand the full impact of design on users.
Use landing pages to generate new sales leads
Landing pages are used to convert visitors into leads for one single conversion goal. They’re focused on specific topics and with one call to action.
A landing page is not your homepage. It appears as standalone pages on your site and the goal is to limit the options a visitor to your landing page has and direct them to a clear objective. Landing pages have their navigation and other distractions removed.
A landing page can be built for a particular marketing campaign and you want your visitors to sign in for a free trial; you are launching a new product and ask about visitor email addresses; you are providing your users with the opportunity to download your ebook and so on.
Unbounce's The Smart Marketer’s Landing Page Conversion Course is an excellent start for getting more insights on how to build a successful landing page and generate new sales leads.
You can also watch The Landing Page Sessions with Unbounce's Co-Founder Oli Gardner, demonstrating how to increase your landing page conversion rates.
Building Sign-up Form That Convert
You’ve optimized your design, CTAs (call to actions), content, etc. So far, so good. Now it's time to pay attention to our sign-up forms. In reality, a sign-up form is an impartial part of your lead generation strategy.
Your contact form should be simple. You want visitors to ease into your product, right? Then remove the unnecessary barriers to sign-up.
- Don't ask visitors to leave credit card information just to try your demo or free trial.
- Reduce the number of fields on your sign-up form.
- Your sign-up button has to be with a clear call to action. Make it large and clearly visible.
- If possible, put in place social media login.
- Optimize the design for mobile. Make sure your visitors have a better experience.
- And more
Ensure that you have tested several forms. There are many things that you can improve and the best approach is to A/B test your sign-up forms and see which one makes the most conversions.
Focus On Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is part of the company's marketing strategy. It's a process that focuses on establishing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel. Done right, lead nurturing can help you build a strong brand and product preferences in your products among leads before they have actively purchased a product or service.
There are many ways to nurture leads nowadays, and often marketers treat the whole process like some other marketing effort. Lead nurturing is not just to send out a regular newsletter and random emails with promotions and discounts, or call prospects every few weeks.
You see, lead nurturing is:
- Send targeted emails:
- Personal follow-up emails
- Personal emails from sales rep
- Email related case studies
- Personal emails offering a product demo
- Send information that is relevant to a problem
- Share valuable content
- Ask for a call with your sales reps
With the help of the Internet, we can build strong and lasting relationships with potential buyers across multiple channels. Lead nurturing has become a major part of a modern marketing mix. When you execute the process successfully, you will definitely triumph in making lots of new clients.
We are not done yet, keep reading: Part 2: How to make more sales in our business using the internet!