Do you <b>struggle</b> to sell enough to warrant the time and
resources required <b>to sell your goods</b> through your
website? Are you spending more money on your website than you
earn from it? Is your website simply a contact point with a
shopping cart that <b>no-one buys</b> anything from?
Join the queue because you are far from alone.
In
the quest to resolve why this happens, we went out of our way to
find out what makes people buy directly from certain websites
and not from others. There is a huge gulf between relatively
successful websites and those that are failures. According to
our research, the successful websites convert 1% to 4% of their
total visitors per month into direct paying customers, who buy
products online with a credit card. The unsuccessful websites
have similar designs and functionality in that they look good
and accept online payments, yet they convert no or just about no
visitors into direct customers.
<b>What is the
difference?</b>
This is what we have been striving to
find out for the last year, and when it hit us what the major
difference was, we were kicking ourselves! The phrase “not
seeing the wood for the trees” was one particularly relevant for
us as online marketing experts. We were so blinded by what we
were doing and so focused on measuring things that effect
conversion, that the most obvious and simple fact eluded us for
some time. But we got there in the end!
<b>Trust is the
difference</b>
It’s that simple. If you look at
companies that currently sell products or services online, and
compare them to each other the way we did, you will find that
the <b>successful ones are those people trust</b>. The ones that
sell products and services successfully tend to be brands of
huge companies that have gone online and sold their products,
such as Dell, or companies that have become an online brand,
such as Amazon. Now before you despair, you <b>do not have to be
a huge branded company</b> to be trusted online, but you do need
to earn the trust of your prospect base.
<b>Understanding</b>
Once we understood this, we
became more scientific about the way we did our research. We
found that the successful companies applied one of three kinds
of strategy, depending on the company’s profile: branded
companies, companies selling to an existing customer base, and
most interestingly, non-branded companies.
<b>1)
Branded companies</b>
Branded companies are the ones we
all know about – the ones you see on the adverts on your TV, see
plastered on banners all over the Internet, or hear advertised
on the radio. They might have offices in a city near you!
Basically, the companies sell something offline and use the web
to complement sales. In rare cases, such as Amazon, they have
grown from huge investment, or partnerships with real bricks and
mortar companies, and over the years have developed into their
own brand.
Can you still remember the day when people
thought Amazon would never catch on? They stuck with it and
formed trust through large-scale web advertising campaigns and
by offering their prospects an obviously good deal. Initially,
this was by offering books for sale at considerably cheaper
prices than the high ones at the bricks and mortar stores. Then,
because their service was of a very high standard (fast
delivery, good returns policy, good refund policy, high quality
merchandise) people realized that there was no reason not to
trust them. Now ask most people about online books and they
think Amazon before anything else.
In most cases, the
sales sequence of the branded company goes something like this:
- The prospects know who they’re dealing with.
- The prospects trust the branded product or service, having
heard about, seen or dealt with the company before.
-
The company doing the selling backs up its sales with good
customer service.
If your company is branded, or you’re
responsible for a website sales strategy of a branded company,
then there is no reason to doubt that online sales will
complement offline sales, provided the three criteria mentioned
above are met. We found that the branded companies that failed
to do well online were the ones that had a bad website that was
not customer focused, and that didn’t optimize their sites
continuously through good measurement and experimentation.
<b>2) Companies acquiring new business from old
customers</b>
Companies doing this kind of online
selling are selling products successfully to an existing
customer base. The reasons vary. Sometimes the seller offers the
products for less because of reduced costs in selling online.
Sometimes it is easier to find a specific product online due to
an efficient website. Whatever the reason the sales usually come
from existing customers. For instance, companies with foreign
customers found it more efficient to serve customers from abroad
with e-commerce. Wholesalers found a good channel to sell in
bulk over the web and could automate processes so it became very
easy for their customers to do more business with them. The
selling companies capitalize on the medium by offering
incentives to their loyal customers via email, clearing old
stock for instance, or by discounting to test the reaction to
new products. This kind of selling method is usually heavily
supported by more traditional offline methods and the sales
process online complements the offline methods.
The
sales sequence is similar to that of the branded companies:
- The prospects know whom they’re dealing with.
-
The prospects trust the selling company, having dealt with them
before at least once via traditional offline methods.
-
The prospects are being offered some incentive to buy online.
- The company doing the selling backs up its sales with
good customer service.
If you’re responsible for the
online sales of this kind of company, and if you match your
strategy to the requirements above, then an effective online
sales strategy should be highly feasible. The companies that
failed were the ones who didn’t give their prospects any good
reason to shop online or simply had poor websites. Most
companies of this type used the web as another channel to help
with customer retention and loyalty. The ones that did it best
were the ones that were most successful.
<b>3)
Non-Branded companies</b>
Companies who do not have
known brands and are not trusted at all can achieve sales
conversions at the same levels as branded companies. We found
that by building levels of trust in the prospect base via
education and then selling the product or service to the
educated, and therefore trusting, prospect base, the same level
of conversion overall can be achieved. The successful companies
give away samples of their product or valuable information, in
turn getting web visitors to give the company their email
addresses and permission to continue the dialog. This allows
companies to continue to educate their prospects.
The
selling sequence is completely different from the first two:
- Cold prospect (arriving as a web visitor) will not
immediately buy because he doesn’t know with whom he is dealing.
- Prospect is educated by the company through online
content, email, articles, resources and free products.
- Prospect begins to know the company and his appreciation
of the company grows.
- Prospect becomes a customer as
he realizes the value of the proposition and trusts the company.
- The company backs up its sales with good customer
service, thus encouraging viral marketing and good word of
mouth.
This is the where most errors of judgment have
been made when building effective sales channels through online
means. Businesses have been copying what the big companies have
done, thinking that merely by having a website which does the
same as a brand name website, a similar level of sales
conversion will be attained. Worse still, they have simply gone
out and made poster sites with shopping carts with no thought as
to why a web visitor would buy from them. Where companies tend
to fail even using the correct sales sequence is in not
providing valuable enough information as education, thus
damaging their reputations before they have even built them up.
So, if your responsibility is to develop the online sales
strategy of a non-branded, unknown company, then our research
shows that the above strategy, while work intensive, does work.
<b>Summary</b>
One simple fact remains true no
matter what kind of sales and marketing strategy is used. <b>If
the buyer doesn’t trust the seller, then the sale will not
happen.</b> It’s been said that a prospective buyer doesn’t
become a customer until he’s seen the brand seven or eight
times. While I don’t have a statistic to prove it, I am 100%
sure this is why McDonald’s and Coca Cola have less work to do
on their websites to get good sales conversion rates. By
mentioning those brand names in this article, I have helped them
with their marketing. You have a burger and a can of coke
pictured in your head right now. If you’re a non-branded
company, you have a great deal more work to do to earn yourself
that consumer trust. But then who said sales and marketing was
easy? Non-branded companies have more work to get customers
offline, so why should it be any different online?
About the author:
Steve Jackson is Editor of The Conversion Chronicles, a
respected writer and author of the e-book Learn Before You Spend
- 6 Ways to measure web traffic costing $30. You can get a free
copy by subscribing to http://www.conversionchronicles.com
