Sean Ellis, a founder of the growth hacking
community, and a legend in Silicon Valley has to say the following about
getting more customers to buy from you, **_“Conversion rate equals desire minus_**
**_resistance.”_**
Most of us are focused on increasing the
desire for our products through effective sales and marketing. While of course,
we should all be doing as much sales and marketing as we can afford to do and
doing it as effectively as possible, it's very important that we don't overlook
the role that resistance plays.
We also have to minimize resistance
specifically plays in increasing the number of sales at your business.
Data proves time and again that businesses
lose many sales and many customers every day due to resistance in their sales
process, or friction in their sales process.
Here are the six things that you can do to
remove that friction, and increase the sales from the existing traffic that
you're getting to your website or your business.
1\. Provide Complete information
First is to make sure that you're providing
complete information for your buyers.
Once you have gone through the effort of
marketing and getting a prospective buyer to your website, the last thing that
you want to do is to have them leave because they feel like there's incomplete
information to allow them to make a purchase.
Once a customer is gone, it's much, much more
difficult and expensive to get them back.
Make sure that you provide complete
information in the form of frequently asked questions, guarantee details, warranty
information, things like that so that they feel comfortable making a purchase
there on the spot.
2\. Simple Payment
Number two is to make payment simple.
We've all experienced going to a website that
has a poorly designed checkout process. Particularly if you're on a mobile
device, it can be an absolute killer.
If a business is checkout process has too many
steps or the forms are difficult to fill out for whatever reason. Make sure to
thoroughly test your payment checkout process in both desktop and mobile
environments to make sure that it's efficient and simple for people to make
payment.
3\. Keep customer information
Number three is to store
customer information.
While not all customers will want you to store
their information, many customers will elect to do so to make the checkout
process more efficient and easier for future purchases. This of course also
gets them coming back to buy more often if they know the checkout is going to
be simple.
This is one of Amazon's great secrets to
success, they have all of your information already and make it very easy to
press one button to make your next purchase.
While you don't necessarily have to make it as
easy as Amazon, that should be your goal. You should do everything you can to
simplify the process by allowing them to store information and quickly recall
that information for future purchases.
4\. Offer subscriptions
Next is to offer subscriptions.
Many products are what's known as consumable,
meaning that they will be consumed by the customer, and after a number of uses
or a period of time, the product will need to be replaced.
If you have a product that's consumable, make
sure that you offer it on subscriptions so that customers don't even have to
return to your site to make an additional purchase, they can just count on it
being delivered on a set schedule.
5\. Offer multiple options and price points
Next is to offer multiple options and price
points.
Giving your customers multiple product options
in terms of configuration of the actual product features and benefits and at
multiple price points will increase the number of buyers that you get from a
given amount of traffic.
It's been demonstrated time and again that
multiple options that have clear reason for being clear differentiation from
one offer to the next at clearly different price points will increase the
number of buyers that you have.
Some customers are more attracted to premium
offers and previous premium price points, while others will look for less
features if they can save money.
Create both and you can win both customers.
6\. Free shipping and handling
Include shipping and handling.
It's been shown time and again study after
study that if you include shipping and handling you will increase conversions.
People don't want to pay what seems like an
additional price for their products immediately after having just decided upon
purchasing. If you can include shipping costs in the price of the product, you
will increase conversion rate.
7\. Be Accessible
Even though more and more businesses are
selling from their websites, it doesn't mean that they need to be inaccessible
to our customers.
Tools like Drift
allow you to offer real-time interaction
to your customers as they're on your checkout page or in your shopping cart
trying to make decisions.
This gives them the opportunity to contact you
and ask questions, and if you're available at the time that they do, gives you
the opportunity to provide whatever information or influences necessary to
close the sale.
That's seven ways to make it easier for
customers to buy from you.
Implement them, and remove friction in your
purchasing process and see sales rise even without any additional traffic to
your site.