How to Convert your Website into a Sales Machine?
Did you know that your website is not just a portfolio but an entire sales mission on its own? If this is surprising, you have a lot of learning to do.
Today let’s learn more about how you can make your website a sales machine and not just a portfolio that displays your services. So I’ve been in this field for four years and if you think that a strategic marketer might not understand the complications of a website, here’s something for you: I can design my own website, build it, put all these features, and create the sales mission that I am going to speak about. So, I’ve not started as a strategic marketer myself. I’ve started with a core of building a website, copywriting, designing things on my own, and then walking up the ladder to be where I am today. So, if you think I’m just giving you a rant, that’s not it because I can do it for you. Now, let’s get further to it~
First of all, ‘How do you create a website or what is it that you need to get a website up and happening?’ and also, ‘How do you make it a salesmanship?’
I would recommend going with WordPress because it offers you a wide range of facilities as well as marketing efficient tools and planning which will help you to optimize your website better.
However, if you’re looking to create your websites with absolute features, you can go for a fully coded one and the same thing can also be implemented there. So these techniques aren’t exclusive to only WordPress it’s exclusive to anyone whose building a website.
Identify what your prime needs are when it comes to building a website. Sometimes you might be a personal branding expert when you want to build your audience or you want to sell a course or you want to offer something for free and get your consumers to your email list, and so on. Whereas if you have a tech product you want them to download the application or use the product, have more screen time in your application, and do more of those things. If you’re a service provider, you want them to drop inquiries, buy your product, read more of your blogs, etc.
Depending upon which niche you are in and what exactly is your need when it comes to your website; have a clear idea of why you want people there. Because when you decide on this point, it becomes easier to create a customer journey map- an elaborate tool that will have its video in the progressive time.
However, the Customer Journey Map is how you guide your audience; from knowing about your website and clicking on it to this whole journey of them fulfilling what you want them for which might be downloading an app, filling out an inquiry form, joining your email list, or anything that you had in your goal.
So now that you know exactly how to drive your audience through this and where to drive in, the next thing you got to do is Identify who exactly is your audience and whom are you expecting on your website. Depending upon their age group, personality, etc. there are a lot of things that matter when it comes to how they progress through their website; whether they skim through or read through or just jump to where your products are, etc.
Now that you know who your target audience is and what exactly you want them to do, the next step is to understand: What will bring them in? This is something you might already know; SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) wherein you have different keywords. You analyze keywords based on three metrics — all of them accounting to, ‘How their awareness is’
- emotional queries wherein they have a problem but don’t know the solution to it, so they Google it out; or a
- DIY prompt where they know what they want but they do not want you to provide it, they just want the knowledge, and
- Last is directly asking for help where they either want to consult with you or want you to provide them with the services they need.
When it comes to emotional queries, you need to get them in the FAQ section or you need to drive them through your blogs which tell about a problem and their solutions.
When it comes to DIY, this is more elaborate blogs or YouTube videos, or white papers which will give them an idea about what exactly it is and how they can solve it right on their own.
The third one is where you provide them with consulting packages where you tell them about what you offer. As a service provider, you need to promise them what you will be delivering quantitatively and qualitatively so that you get them handy.
The main aspect here is depending on these three keywords, you direct them to a different page. This way, you need to have a clear distinction about who should be sent to which page because this is where you feed them directly with the answers and you make them retain the mood.
So once you have them on our page now, the next thing is to Retain them and engage them. One of the main ways is to give the right answers to their problems directly because they don’t have a reason to stay if they don’t get their answers.
For example: if they’re on the consulting page, you need to give them prompts that’ll trigger them to take a response. If they’re booking a call, they should either give you their mobile number or be answerable in a few hours because there is a lot of chance that when they’re seeing your website for the first time, they’re also browsing five other websites of your competitors; whoever replies to them first, gets the first seat, unless you’re lucky enough to be delivering quality content as compares to others.
Most of the time anyone with good prompts on their websites is not cracked, they know what they give and they also have what it takes to get a client. So ensure that you have very valid responses and an even shorter response time. The easiest way is to have a chatbot or a trigger or pop-up engagements and so on. The best thing you can do is, show them a contact form that says ‘do you need help?’
Also, don’t display full-page content like most other websites because it annoys the customer. Just show a very small dialogue box that’s enough to garner some attention but not enough to make them feel frustrated with your website.
As the customers go in deeper, they have more retention, they stay on your website for more than 1.5 or 2 minutes, which is a huge period. So if you think you can grab the attention of your audience for 2 minutes or more, it’s an achievement in itself; it may mean that they are interested or that they indulged in the value that you provided.
The deeper they go, the more your responsibility is to show them the other essential sections. Make it a win-win situation for you and your audience.; the main objective is to give them what they need while also providing them with more exploration opportunities of your services.
The next step is to Analyse the patterns of your audience. For help in this, you can install the tool Heat Maps where you can analyze which section of your website is your customer going to spend a lot of time in; is it in the pricing section, or even if it’s one page, which area of that page their cursor goes on again and again, are they reading it line by line or are they stressing out on a specific section. This gives you a better idea of improving and optimizing the content of your website according to the visits by your customers. It increases your conversion rate in the longer run.
When it comes to heat maps I generally go with hotjar because it’s more accessible and the UI is pleasing. You get recorded sessions as well; when a customer is going through your website, how much time are they spending, which page are they spending more time on, which page they click on next, etc. is provided.
There’s something called the Customer Tree, where you identify where they go from the homepage and so on… You’ll have a complete map that’s drawn as a consolidation. We also get independent maps. This way we can trace out our customer’s patterns.
Now that we know what path our customer is choosing, the question that arises is ‘How do I engage them the most on their part?’ One way to do so is to have an organic funnel constructed. If a customer is coming in as a cold lead, like simply identifying your product and freshly getting to know you, how do you turn them to warm and what kind of content do you need to put for the same?
This is usually called the ‘top-of-the-funnel’ content and the ‘middle-of-the-funnel’ content. The ‘top-of-the-funnel’ content is the awareness stage for a customer who just knows you and what you tell them. But the ‘bottom-of-the-funnel’ is a concrete structure that will let them convert more; like placing inquiries, buying your product, etc.
Also, another thing you need to identify is when it comes to placing their inquiries, some customers just go to the last page and they put in their contact details for you to call them and explain about your product whereas some show diligence by doing research and then enter the details. It all depends from customer to customer.
Once you have all these sales funnels and you sort out the content accordingly with the help of software available, everything I am saying is all nominal tools that you just need to add, and how you strategize your content will give you better results.
For example, if you’re having a product page, start with the description of that particular product and then more relevant products, and then at the bottom about the company and then a few clients for whom you have already delivered your service. You can always go a step forward and add in a few testimonials. This is the structure of the product page. The reason why you need to do this is: generally when people see a product, they also need to know if others are even using it or their reviews about the product or company. So when you present it all together, it becomes uniform.
So have more maps on your website, and make it more interactive. Let it be playful so that they spend more time on it. And if you have this full-fledged sales system, you already have pixels integrated right? You can use either Google Pixels or any app you want to use. Personally, I would go by Facebook Pixels, wherein once you have any information about a customer, and even if they leave your website without making any purchase, you can run retargeting ads for them depending on which page or product they browsed through.
For example, if you’re running an e-commerce store, your retargeting ad would be about the last product that the customer has visited on your website.
This ensures that your customer hasn’t forgotten about your product and eventually will come back, and they then make a purchase either through your website by adding it to the cart or directly clicking the ad and making the purchase. Facebook Pixels is just a tool that your developer will be easily able to integrate and if you’re doing it on your own, you will already have a number of videos on YouTube that gives you tutorials for the same. It’s simply a two-minute work.
Now you have an idea about how you get your customers, how to retain them on the website, how to transform them from cold to warm and finally to hot, and even if they don’t buy how you can easily retarget them.
The final thing is How to make them come back? As a service provider, when they drop an inquiry or are reading your blogs, the best way to make that happen is by giving them more value in the form of newsletters, where you tell them to opt into your service forms by sending them regular emails.
So I would recommend doing so bi-weekly or with a 15–17 day gap between the emails. It almost translates into a ritual if it is weekly. Do not provide higher information overload because when it comes to emails and they don’t open them, your open rate decreases, your engagement decreases, and a lot of other things also happen in your analysis. It’s not like they go back to read your newsletters unless you provide extensive value.
In newsletters, there should generally be updates that you’re going to share and the progressive tips they’re going to use. So it’s good to have a normal frequency of 15–17 days between emails so that it’s neither too much nor too scarce.
The main goal is to stay on top of your prospects and the more you send emails, the more healthy retention you get back by reminding them of your brand name again and again.
It will directly optimize the engagement rate and especially your brand recall. The more your customer sees your brand, the more aligned they are with you. So the next time they have a need in your industry, your name instantly pops up in their heads.
When you follow these steps, you will have a comprehensive tool or a sales machine that your website has become now, from attracting an audience, retaining them, guiding them through exactly what they need, dropping in inquiries, and staying there on your website, email list, etc. for you to nurture them to trigger your product purchase or upsells.
So this way when you follow all these pointers, you have a very clear mission that gets you leads and converts and does the hardships for you. Just because it’s a mission, it’s not a one-time job. You need to maintain it consistently by updating your content by doing proper SEO, etc. Keep these updated and your website is going to be able to generate so much traffic and leads for you.
Like in Content Bot, a Marketing Company I run, our clients have a very good engagement rate through their websites because once they have a website ready, it’s not essential that they have social media unless they have specific goals for the same as well. Because their website is providing them with enough leads that will keep them going from one step to another and keep them busy fulfilling their order. It’s not just for Ecom, but every other service provider and consultant should have the same.
I hope you engaged with this blog and liked it, and I hope you took a lot of notes too. So if you have any confusion, doubts, queries, or anything, I am completely open in my LinkedIn DM’s and will be happy to connect with you. So do drop in your feedback since I’ll be really happy to connect.
Until then, Happy Marketing :)
