Imagine that your business is generating a decent amount of revenue, but you’re also losing a significant amount of sales every day.
How would you know if you’re losing sales?
You might immediately think of abandoned carts.
However, your abandoned cart stats aren’t the only indication of lost revenue.
If you’re ignoring any of the following eleven rules, lost revenue is a certainty.
According to statistics, email marketing has the highest ROI of any form of marketing. Email marketing is also easier to measure than the ROI of design.
If done correctly, you can expect to generate $36 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. That’s huge!If you’re not constantly acquiring new leads through an email list, you’re losing revenue daily.
All of your leads are potential sales and you want to collect as many as possible so you can continue marketing your products or services.
You won’t convert all of your leads on the first day, and that’s okay.
Not all of your leads will be in the same buyer segment.
You don’t have to convert them quickly. The point of having an email list isn’t to convert people with the first email you send out. Email lists allow you to nurture your leads over time.
Since not everyone will be ready to buy when they land on your website, getting them to sign up for your email list gives you the opportunity to nurture them from a state of curiosity into a paying customer. Once they become a paying customer, you can further nurture them through your sales funnel until they do make a purchase.
There’s a rumor floating around that says you shouldn’t email your list too often. Some people believe that sending emails every day or every other day is too much and should be avoided at all costs.
Well, that may be true if you’re a plumber. People probably don’t want to read about plumbing-related issues on a daily basis. However, if you can provide helpful, educational, or interesting content people want to read, you have a duty to email your list frequently.
Staying in touch with your email list is the best way to generate sales and keep your leads. It’s important to realize that when you don’t contact your leads often, they forget about you. When your leads forget about you, they’re more likely to report your emails as spam when they get your next message.
The answer depends on how well your emails are written and the content you’re sending out. For instance, if you want to email your list daily or every few days, your emails must be concise, full of genuine value, and well-written. They should also contain a directive for people to either buy from you or click on a link to learn more about what you have to offer.
While all of your emails should ideally be well-written, persuasive, and full of value, people’s expectations are usually more forgiving when you only send out a weekly or monthly email. Sometimes people don’t mind wordy emails if they’re from a brand they want to hear from. However, keep in mind that you don’t want your email list to simply tolerate your emails – you want them to be excited about getting your emails.
With that said, some people take a more aggressive approach and send out six emails per week. That can be effective, but you need to remember that you’ll have to create those emails and that can be time-consuming. You probably don’t want to outsource your email marketing content because the content needs to be perfectly on par with your brand.
Are you running split tests on your sales pages? If not, you should be doing this constantly. The only way you’ll ever identify the effective elements on your sales pages is if you split test different elements against each other. For example, you might test your ‘buy’ button in two different colors or different typefaces. These small differences can make a huge impact on your results.
Split-testing is how people figured out Baskerville has the power to make text more believable. That’s right, experiments concluded that Baskerville is the world’s most persuasive font.You have more than just buy buttons and a font to test on your sales pages. You can also test your headline, subheadings, body content, positioning, images, layout, line and letter spacing, and even the color of your copy.
If you’ve never run split tests before, it’s not hard. You can get split-testing software to do the hard work for you. For instance, you can use Optimizely, Convert Experiences, SiteSpect, AB Tasty, Google Optimize, Qubit, and there are several other options. There are also plugins available for WordPress.
When you want sales, you can’t be timid. You need to ask for the sale. Not everyone will take out their credit card after you’ve given a great sales presentation. Even when someone wants to buy something, they often need a push.
Some statistics say that 90% of people won’t buy unless you specifically ask for the sale. Don’t be afraid of rejection. Just learn different ways to ask for the sale depending on the situation. If, as a marketing company, you’re marketing a product online, you have an advantage even though you can’t assess each user. The advantage you have is that you can perfect your words and fine-tune your persuasion to get your market to buy.
Here are five tips from Forbes that will get you started. For instance, you have to remember that your solution is the best solution.
This means you can’t be wishy washy with your copy. You have to tell people that you’re the best – and mean every word. You also need to identify your buyer’s personality. You can do this by understanding your market more in-depth.
There will always be people who say no, but don’t let that stop you from asking for the sale. More people will say yes when you start asking.
Retargeting is the best strategy for closing a sale that you just missed. Instead of watching your visitors bounce and walk away forever, retargeting brings them right back to your website. Since not everyone is ready to buy, retargeting is like following up with people who may have been interested, but not committed to making a purchase.
Retargeting will bring your visitors back to your website to have a second look at your content or products. When you use retargeting, you’ll be targeting people who have already interacted with your brand, which means your site will be familiar to them already and you can direct them back to a specific sales page to influence them further.
The key to getting conversions from retargeting is to retarget specific URLs, not your whole domain. If someone was checking out one of your specific pages, you already know what interests them. With retargeting you can use that to your advantage to send them to a new, more convincing sales page and build on what they’ve already seen.
Every day you wait to launch is a day of lost sales. If every entrepreneur waited until they were ready to launch, the tech industry wouldn’t exist. You’ll never be ready to launch. There will always be something you think needs to happen pre-launch.
If you’re not launching your business, ask yourself why. Is it fear? Or are you really not ready? Make a list of everything you feel you need to do before you launch your business and then identify the items that can wait. For instance, if you have a DBA and you’re looking into filing for an LLC, you don’t need to wait. You can run your business under your DBA for now.On another note, you don’t have to have everything figured out first. Although you should have an email capture form on your site when you launch, it’s okay to launch while you’re still working on setting up your email marketing system. Not having an email capture form means you’ll miss leads, but not having a live website means you’ll miss sales. Not launching means missing out on leads and sales. You'll also never go viral.
Yes, search engine optimization (SEO) is critical. However, if you only write content for search engines, your visitors will suffer. Content written only for search engines might rank, but it won’t get you sales. Your website will only be successful when your content is written for your visitors first.
What does visitor content look like? It’s pretty self-explanatory. You want content that catches and holds a user’s attention, provides value of some kind, and is easy to read. It’s really that simple, at least as a general rule.
Remember to create headlines that describe the content that follows. Users tend to scan websites rather than read line-by-line. Most people will be scanning your pages in search of something that tells them your content has the information they want. Usually, this is best accomplished with headlines. Headlines are bold, larger than the body text, and they stand out visually.
A table of contents is designed to help people navigate content quickly and efficiently. If you publish long form content, you need a table of contents (TOC).There are a couple of ways not having a table of contents can make you lose sales. The most obvious way is when your long form content contains sales copy and links to your products or buttons for users to add products to their cart. Not having a table of contents can make people scroll for second and bounce if they can’t see the subheadings for the content throughout your page.
Another way you can lose sales by not having a table of contents is by frustrating users in general. Unorganized content is difficult to sift through, and if all of your content is long, the absence of a TOC will push some people away. Those people may never navigate to your online store or click links to view your products.
On your sales pages, make sure to feature one product at a time so your visitors don’t become indecisive. It’s much easier to persuade someone to buy a single product when you aren’t introducing other things for them to think about.
If your main product comes with bonus products, that’s different. Although, you’ll still want to feature your main product individually as the center of attention throughout your page.
Your CTAs need to be strong, but won’t always be perfect right out the gate. Just as it’s important to split-test your page elements, always work on strengthening your CTAs. In fact, add your CTAs to a list of your most important elements to split test.
Strengthening your CTAs will involve increasing relevance, persuasion, and creating a sense of urgency. If writing calls to action isn’t your area of expertise, just hire a copywriter to create as many variations as possible and start testing them one by one.
This is a basic rule in marketing, yet so many business owners forget. Always give your customers what they want and don’t just give them what you want to give them. You might have a brilliant idea for a product or service, but if your market wants something else, you won’t get many sales.
Let’s face it, in today’s world, your website needs to look beautiful or your visitors will bounce. People judge websites by their looks, and if yours isn’t amazing, your visitors will go to your competitors
Are you struggling to generate sales and you don’t know why? Your website might need an upgrade. With a professionally designed website that fully represents your brand, you’ll have a much easier time generating sales and building trust with your visitors.
If your website needs an aesthetic upgrade or you’d like to build a new site from scratch, get in touch with our design team and let’s talk about your project.
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