How Do Websites Increase Sales?

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- If you're a small business and you need to generate more leads and sales from your website, then in this video I'm gonna show you a process that you can use to do exactly that. (dramatic music) Any visitor to your website needs to go through a very specific process in order to become a lead or sale. So, in this video, we're gonna outline what that process is and I'm gonna show you tips on how to optimise each stage. So the first stage obviously is to get traffic to your website. Nothing happens without people being on your website. So, we're gonna look at some different ways to get traffic. Once that traffic is on your site, those visitors need to convert into leads or sales. This is known as conversion rate optimisation. Is the process of increasing the number of visitors that turn into those leads or sales. If you're a company that sells services for example, your website is probably a lead generation tool. So, in that case your equation is website with traffic, then you're converting that traffic into a lead and then your sales team is following up with that person and turning them into a sale. So in this video we're gonna look at traffic, we're gonna look at conversion and we're also gonna look at what you can do to increase the number of those leads that you're turning into sales as well. So, starting with traffic theme, because everything begins with a visitor landing on your website. If you need to increase sales, then you can increase you traffic. And there are a hundreds of different ways to get more traffic to your site. but broadly, all traffic sources fall into two categories; either is paid traffic. So for example, Google Ad traffic, or LinkedIn ads, or Facebook ads, or YouTube ads where you're actually paying for somebody to click on one of your ads, and come to your website. That's paid traffic. Or is organic traffic. An organic traffic if traffic that you don't directly pay for, but you pay with your energy to make your website visible in these areas. For example, getting your website ranked on Google. Now getting your site ranked in Google's organic listings doesn't directly cost money, you're not spending money to get there. But what you have to do is put in a huge amount of time and energy to show Google that your site is an authority. And you might be paying an agency like Exposure Ninja to do that. So you're not paying for the direct result, but you're paying for the work that goes into getting that organic result. In a similar way, organic social media visibility. So if you've got a large following on Facebook, or Instagram, or LinkedIn or Twitter, you've paid with energy, or you've paid an agency to build that following for you. So when you're getting traffic from Facebook to your website, if you've got a large following, you're not paying per click, but you've paid with all the time that you've invested to get that profile to that stage where it has that audience. So those are the main two sources of traffic. Now if you need sales quickly, then paid traffic is the best way to do this, because unlike with organic channels, you don't have to build up visibility over time. Soon as you turn on the ads, you're gonna be getting traffic through to your website. Now within paid traffic, we have two different types of advertising. We can do intent advertising, or we do interruption advertising. The most relevant type for your business will depend on what you sell and who you sell to. So let's say for example, that your business sell something to people that know they need that thing. Now, if that's the case, your visitors are typically going to be on Google. Let's say for example, that you sell video microphones. If I search Google for video microphones, or a Rode VideoMic, which is the name of this product, that shows that I have intent to purchase or intent to you know, look at these products. So if you're selling something that people know they need, for example, you're a locksmith, somebody knows that they need a locksmith, so they're going on to Google and they're typing in locksmith, Nottingham or whatever, then Google and search engines are really good advertising channel for you. If you're selling something instead, that is more of an interruption or impulse purchase, let's say for example, clothing. Now, I might know that I need a new jumper. But also at the same time, if I'm just looking through Facebook and I see a nice jumper, I'm like, "oh, that looks all right." Click it and buy it. I'm unlikely to buy something like that from an impulse. I might because that's a very specific thing to do a very specific job. Whereas a new phone case or like makeup remover, not me personally, most of the time, or something that's more of an impulse purchase would typically be a stronger interruption advertising target. So interruption advertising is through things like Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, where you're interrupting people as they're looking at whatever social network they're on. And you show them something with the goal of getting that impulse purchase and getting them through to buy. So you can imagine that if you're a locksmith, Google is gonna be much better for you because people are gonna be typing in locks with Nottingham. Then Facebook, 'cause if I'm locked out of my house, the last thing I'm doing is going on Facebook and just hoping, praying to the gods of Facebook, old Zach up there. Last thing I'm doing is scrolling through, hoping that I just see an ad for a locksmith. That's not gonna happen. So understand, first of all, whether your intent based advertising or interruption based advertising is gonna work best for you. And lots of businesses will have a bit of both, but they'll be predominantly one or the other. Now, organic traffic, on the other hand is a slower burn. So you've got to build visibility, whether it's on Google or whether it's on social media, this takes time, it takes energy and it takes money if you're paying an agency to do it. But the results, long term, can be much, much more significant than paid traffic sources. For example, all of our most successful clients, without fail, have a very large component of their traffic coming from organic search, for example, because that traffic is very well qualified, it has high commercial intent, and it tends to convert better. So organic search is something that you've gotta put some time into getting that visibility. But once you have that visibility, it can be the most profitable traffic, not least because you're not paying for every single click like you will be with paid advertising. So the first thing to do, if you need more sales through your website, look at how much traffic you're getting, and to make sure that you're picking up qualified traffic, either from PPC, from paid advertising or through organic sources. Step two in the process is to look at how many of your visitors your website is converting into leads or sales. This is known as conversion rate optimization. So there are a few different ways that you can convert more of your visitors into leads or sales. And we're gonna look at some eCommerce examples. First, although all your lead generation business's out there, you can learn a tonne of lessons from these examples too, because all of us are selling to humans. So you can see on this example, on the MandM Direct side, they've got this little box in the bottom right hand corner, which just pops up and asks for people's emails in order for some offers. So what they're really looking to do here is capture that traffic that maybe isn't ready to purchase now, or it's just browsing around the site, get them on the email list, and then once they're on the email list, they compound them relentlessly with emails to make them buy. Great way of capturing more leads through the site and not just making your site a pure eCommerce site. And you can see here on the Vue Cinema site, how they're using a sense of urgency. So by having a little countdown clock up at the top of the page ticking down for when people's tickets are gonna be rereleased out of their baskets. They're encouraging people to take action now by giving them a deadline. We see this on hotel sites as well, for example, where you see four rooms left at this price and you think, "Oh my god." Well, there's four rooms left at this price until they released more inventory. But whatever, it makes us buy because there's a sense of urgency. On the Iceland site here, you've got this purchasing sensor, free next day delivery when you spend 35 pounds online. So this serves two purposes. Firstly, it increases conversion rates because nobody likes paying for delivery, we've been conditioned repeatedly that delivery should be free and fast anyway, so any paid delivery feels like a punishment. We'd rather pay for products than delivery. The second thing that it does is increase average order value, because what happens is when you've got 25 pounds worth of products in your basket, and you say, "All right, if I spend another 10 pounds, "I get free delivery, "well, I might be paying five pounds "for delivery at the moment. "So really that 10 pounds worth of products "only cost me five pounds," then you increase your basket value to get over that threshold. So this can be a great way to increase average order value on your site. What you need to do is work out what your average order value is, and then set your free delivery threshold just slightly above that, to encourage people to add that one more thing to that basket. In this example, the Superdrug site offers 100% Happiness Money Back Guarantee. So this is a really key principle that applies to eCommerce sites and lead generation sites. And that is that you want to remove as much of the perceived risk in your audience's mind as possible. So in the case of eCommerce businesses, people can be a little bit cautious about buying things online, if for example, they're unable to try them on first, or they've not tried out that thing before or they're worried about making a mistake. For example, you'll notice how ASOS and companies like that have used their returns policy as really a USP of their business. They make requesting a return really, really straightforward and easy. And that lowers the perceived risk in the shoppers mind, because when they're browsing on the ASOS site, they can add a whole bunch of different products to their basket, not being too concerned about whether they're right or not, because they'll try them on and they'll send them back if they don't need them. So as long as that returns percentage is built into your business, it can be a great way to encourage people to shop with you knowing that if it all goes wrong, they can send that thing back anyway, in another example, that applies just as much to lead generation businesses as eCommerce, we'll see here on the Real Foods site, how they show customer testimonials really prominently. And in this case, they using Trustpilot, which I happen to think is one of the world's biggest scams on the (mumbles). Anyway, people still trust Trustpilot, so that's awesome. And you can see just by adding these reviews, or adding a little average star rating, again, you're removing the perceived risk from people, because they're thinking, "Okay, what other people have made this decision, "and they're happy with that decision." So therefore, there's that social proof element there. Now, if you're a lead generation business, you can use these exact same principles for your site. So for example, having some kind of newsletter pop-up, if you position that newsletter effectively, by offering a free downloadable guide or free consultation, something higher value than just newsletter because that has zero potential value, can be a great way of building an email list of people who maybe aren't ready to do business with you, aren't ready to actually make an inquiry yet, but might be interested at some point in the future. These trust signals and showing the star ratings apply just as much to eCommerce businesses as lead generation businesses. So if you need more sales now, then consider adding wherever you asking people to trust you like by your contact forms, consider putting a reason for people to trust you, like an average star rating. So when we're asking for their trust, we're giving them a reason to trust us, at the same time. If you're a service company, you can tap into urgency or scarcity. So we worked on a dating agency site, and we wanted to increase the number of leads that this dating agency was getting. They were actually getting zero leads from their website, so it wasn't too hard. And what we did is we actually made a takeaway sale. So we said this dating agency is so exclusive, you're probably not gonna be accepted, but if you wanna have a go, then feel free, you can apply here. And the conversion rate went from zero percent to 12%. Now, we didn't actually change anything about the offering, they already had this kind of application process, we just kind of reposition a bit, and use that as a takeaway sales, imply urgency and scarcity. And the conversion rate increased, because now people you know, everyone wants to be a member of the club that no one except them. Now maybe your site's getting a lot of traffic already, and you have a lot of these conversion elements already in play. What can you do if people just still on converting? Well, the first thing that you can do is look at simplifying your sales journey. So if you're an eCommerce business, this will be things like making sure that you have a one page Checkout, or you have condensed your Checkout into as few steps as possible, making sure you're not forcing people to sign up for something before they can checkout. So making it as fast and easy for people to put their credit card information into your website as possible. You might also look at adding different payment options, things like Apple Pay, Google pay, Amazon pay, or PayPal, where people don't actually have to have their credit card detail to hand in order to buy from you, they can just tap the side of their phone or scan their thumbprint and they can make that purchase that way. Remember, we're trying to remove friction, we're trying to allow people to go down this, or call it a slippery slope down into your business. We wanna make that slope as slippery as possible and as compelling as possible, and forcing them to jump through hoops like, go and find their credit card and type in the number onto your page. Real pain, no one's got time for that these days. So offer additional payment options. If you're a lead generation business, the sales process and simplifying it is about giving people a very clear, very logical next step to take on your website. So for example, on the Exposure Ninja website, where we're looking to generate leads for our digital marketing agency, we run a free website and marketing review where you fill in your details and you request the free review from us. And we'll create this video which shows you how to improve the number of leads and sales to your website, and then we'll offer you our services if we think that's relevant. So by doing that, by offering something that valuable, free of charge, we increase the number of people that are requesting that from us. If we just said, "Contact us if you need some digital marketing," we generate very, very few leads. But by offering this sorts of offerings, we can push our conversion rate much higher and generate many more leads for the same amounts of traffic. So think about what can you offer to your website visitors that's really good compelling, and it's gonna get them excited about giving their details to you. Compelling of any of these, but I have to be honest, one thing that you might wanna do is revisit your product and pricing strategy. We often send websites to review where the owner has actually implemented a lot of the conversion optimization stuff that driving traffic to the site, and it's not converting and the question is, what technically are we doing wrong? Well, we look at all the technical stuff and say, "Actually, you're not doing too much wrong. "The main problem is that your pricing is way too high "for the quality of product that you're offering, "and you've got absolutely no brand recognition "in the market, so why would anybody buy from you?" And however good your digital marketing is you can't disobey the golden rules of business. And that is the price that you charge needs to reflect the value that you're providing to the customer. So if you're, for example, a luxury startup, well, you're not gonna be able to charge Gucci prices until you have a Gucci brand, right? And that takes a lot of time and energy to build. I had a DM on Instagram from someone last night who they've created this store. And they're saying, "Why aren't we making sales?" And I looked on the site and their products were exactly the same price as competitors. But the competitor's much better known, and actually these products can be available from loads of other stores that you would have heard of. Stores like Amazon. So why would anybody buy from this site that's just selling me two products, at me to prices, but without the brand recognition. It makes no sense. So either you have to be cheaper, you have to have lower margins, because you're selling the same but you don't have as high perceived value because no one's ever heard of your business. Or you need to find some other way to add value to the customer, for example, putting them in a subscription club, which means that they get this product recurring because it's like a consumable products, which makes it really easy for them. So now you have a reason to stand out, and you have the ability to stand up in that market and say, "Right, we deserve to be here, "this is what we're all about." So consider if you're driving traffic, you're not getting conversions, and there's nothing technically wrong with that process. It might be a case that you need to look at your products and pricing strategy. If in doubt, request a free review from Exposure Ninja, at exposureninja.com/review, and we'll take a look for you and be very honest. If you're an eCommerce site, one really quick wins to increase your conversion rate is to use better products imagery. And here we are on the Best Made Co. website. I'm a big fan of the site, love their products imagery and descriptions. Have a look at the quality of the imagery here that they're using to sell an axe. This is an eCommerce master class and it needs to be because this is potentially a $348 axe. So, I can see the handle and nice detail, I can see the head, I can see more handle, I can see the axe head sheath that's covered, I can see lots of different handle styles. I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of what this x looks like, all in really high resolution product photos as well. We can see the engraving, we can see the logo being applied. This is a really high quality products inventory. When we're selling our products online, we've really got to try to replicate the in person buying experience as much as we can. So if I was in a store looking at this axe, I'd be picking it up, turning it around, looking, feeling all the textures. That's quite an immersive experience. So on a website, we need to try and replicate that experience as much as possible. Every day, with some sites to review where people have got an expensive product, a high quality product, and there's one grainy little image and they're expecting people to buy based on that. Look at how much work they're going into to sell these axes. Then we've got a lot of story about it, we've even got a video showing the axe in its box, so you know exactly what you're getting and exactly how it works. This is a really good model to you. And it's all about giving people as much of an immersive experience as possible on the product pages. If you're selling a jacket, for example, don't just show the jacket on someone, because that only gives them one dimension. Show it on someone, show it from the side, show it on a hanger, show the details, show what's inside the lining, show the stitching, show the pockets, all of the things that someone would be looking at if they were holding that product in front of them. If we can replicate that experience on the website, we stand a much better chance of converting that visitor. And my final tip for converting visitors is to make sure that your messaging is consistent across your site. So your brand's tone of voice is the words and the style of the writing that you use. Lots of people make the mistake of thinking that their website needs to be this corporate speak, very traditional, formal event. Well actually people buy from people and even super serious solicitors and accountants and real professional people like that do appreciate a fun, and interesting brand, if that's relevant for you. Now, obviously, if you're selling some kinda safety products, you don't wanna be joking and having memes all over the place. But having a personality and making sure that that personality comes across on the website is a great way to stand out. And I really would encourage you to consider being a little bit more yourself on your website, rather than just going for this boring, corporate, generic speak that everybody else seems to be using. Alright, so you generated a lead, and now if you're a service business, you've got to then follow up with that lead in order to turn them into a sale. So also, this isn't the sales training video, there are a couple of things that we've noticed from working with our most successful clients in this area, that you can do to increase the likelihood of that lead turning into a sale. The first key is speed, you've gotta get in contact with that lead as quickly as possible, because you can imagine that that person might have put their email and their phone number into five or 10 different sites for people offering what you offer. So you need to be the first on that phone or in that email inbox to reach out to them. If you've got people filling in your forms overnight, it's a good idea to just send an automated emails to them saying, "Thank you. "We'll pick this up during our opening hours," just so that they know the thing has worked. What we're trying to do is get them to tick off that task in their head. Along the same sort of lines, having a live chat on your website can be a great way to engage people that just have a quick question and might end up becoming leads if you can service them through the live chat. We also love a service called LiveCall, you can find it a livecall.io. So it's almost like the website is calling the prospect and it's super cool. So for a lot of our lead generation clients, we run LiveCall and we've seen it do as much as double conversion rates, because it's just a really fast way for people to get a call and there's something lazy about people where they don't even click the phone number. They'd rather just click a little button and have someone call them back at their own convenience. So check out livecall.io. It's a nice quick way to get some more leads from the site. So I hope you found this video useful. Don't forget to click the like button below and click subscribe in the little bell icon to be notified when we post more videos. And if you want some help with your local visibility, then you can go to exposureninja.com and request a free digital marketing review. What will happen in this review is we'll put together a 15 minute video, showing you how to improve your local visibility and get more leads and sales from local clients. It's completely free service, there's no obligation to use our digital marketing services although of course if we think that we can help, we will let you know and it's genuinely awesome. So go to exposureninja.com/review to request your free review video today. Until the next one, see you soon.