Make More Sales Online | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast

Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast

One of the things I see quite often when I work with EBiz owners is the fact that most EBiz owners don’t think hard enough about the distinction between the physical world and the online world when creating web site pages. There are several important things to realize here when you want to make more sales (which is ALWAYS!).

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Chis Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast, where the only thing we DON'T know is how to do it WRONG!

One of the things I see quite often when I work with EBiz owners is the fact that most EBiz owners don’t think hard enough about the distinction between the physical world and the online world when creating web site pages. There are several important things to realize here when you want to make more sales (which is ALWAYS!).

1. YOU CAN’T TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

There’s a process to traditional physical sales that’s worked very well since the first caveman sold a hunting rock to his buddy in exchange for a chunk of meat.

A really good salesperson in the physical world understands that process and does it very well. That means that salesperson makes good money in sales.

The process they use to make more sales basically goes like this:

– You show someone a product. – You ask them questions about what they desire from the product and then speak to those desires and how the product fulfills them. – You talk price and close the sale.

That conversation is critical in good physical-world sales. If I go to Sam Ash Music in Orlando and ask a salesperson to see a specific guitar, any good salesperson is going to try to find out what I want from the product. He or she might ask me if I’m going to use the guitar for practice, for fun, to play on stage, to record with, etc. What kind of pickups do I like? What kind of tone am I looking for? What gauge strings do I like to use?

My answers to these questions allow the salesperson to either point out that the features I want already exist on that guitar or can be added to that guitar, or point out that I might want to check out a different guitar.

During that process, the salesperson is GUIDING ME THROUGH THE SALE.

If he or she does a good really job of controlling that process and guiding me through the sale, I’m most likely going to buy the product. That salesperson is always going to make more sales than one who doesn't know how to do that.

Online, though, there’s something very important that’s missing from this time-tested process. You can’t talk to your customer about what they desire from the product. You can’t physically guide them through the sale with questions and answers.

So what do you do to make more sales?

2. VISUAL MARKETING WORKS ONE-WAY

When you think about it, the entire marketing process online is VISUAL. From your product pictures to your written site content, your articles, blogs, public forum participation, social marketing, video content…everything you do is ONE-WAY, from you to your customer, and it’s all VISUAL.

Just like it’s easy to mistake someone’s tone in an email when you can’t see their expressions and body language in person, it’s easy to visually confuse people on your site and in your marketing.

In the many years I’ve spent teaching Ecommerce business owners how to fix sites that don’t work, I can’t even attempt to count the number of times I’ve seen web sites that are so visually confusing that I feel like I’m looking at them through a psychotic kaleidoscope.

Most web site owners (and yes, eBay sellers too) try to make more sales by cramming so much STUFF onto a single page that it simply descends into visual chaos right from the top of the page. It’s not the site owners’ fault, because that’s what EBiz owners see everybody ELSE doing.

However, when you understand that literally more than 97% of the Ebiz sites online never provide a full time income for their owners, it’s easy to see that this is one of the reasons.

‘Busy’ pages don’t work well visually. They’re too confusing. Online shoppers move very quickly as a rule, and a busy, confusing page turns off an online shopper faster than their cat peeing on their keyboard.

We’ve already established that this is one-way visual marketing. You can’t stand over your customers’ shoulders and direct their attention through that confusion for them. Your pages need to do the visual directing all by themselves! They can only do that if they are clean, clear, intuitive, AND focused on one thing at a time. That's the only way those pages are going to make more sales.

Visual marketing is a PROCESS. In that process, EACH PAGE of your site needs to accomplish the following things for your customer:

– Professionalism – Legitimacy – Engagement – Action – Closure

You have 3 to 7 seconds to move someone’s eyes to a single focal point on any given page. That’s because people are at their peak level of interest and attention for anywhere from 3 to 7 seconds after they first hit a new piece of media (your web page).

After that first 3 to 7 seconds, their interest and attention begin to drop off, and you’ve lost that Magic Moment when you had your one BEST chance to capture their interest. That’s one reason that confusing web pages lead to miserable sales; it takes way too much time to wade through the confusion.

Other reasons are that confusing pages are hard to follow, don’t speak well of your Brand, and are just too much work for the typical fast-moving online shopper.

3. UNDERSTANDING THE VISUAL MARKETING PROCESS

If you want to make more sales in your online business, you need an understanding of the Visual Sales Process.

So how do you establish a visual process that leads your customer to a sale instead of chasing them away? Let’s explore that process again, with some added notes.

– Professionalism:

Your customers MUST feel that they are dealing with a professional company. Professionalism is immediately established (or not!) by the top left corner of any given page in your site. That’s where they Site Name, Tagline and Logo belong, as we talked about )in a previous post). That’s your “Identity Package”. That’s what your customer will notice first, and first impressions are everything.

Make sure you learn how to put together a truly great Identity Package.

– Legitimacy:

Your customers must immediately feel that you’re a legitimate company. This is a function of how easy it is for them to contact you directly. It’s best established by a toll-free Customer Service phone number at the top right of every page on your site. It’s actually very inexpensive (about $20 a month) and it’s will definitely help you make more sales.

– Engagement:

You have to create a SINGLE focal point on each page of your web site that contains the ONE THING that your customer needs to do on that page in order to further the sale.

This is why you can’t jumble up a nasty mess of multiple product buy buttons, “free shipping” tags, coupons, ads, flashy graphics splattered all over the page, and all the rest of that garbage. When you do that, you create MULTIPLE focal points for your customers’ eyes, and they get lost, confused, and then they leave. You can't make more sales when your customers leave your site.

Engaging a customer’s eyes means catching their attention with something that moves their eyes toward your focal point. You can do this really well by placing an image of a person USING your product near the upper middle portion of your page, above and usually slightly to the left of the focal point. That person in the image should be LOOKING TOWARD your focal point; your customers will follow the eyes of the person in the image.

– Action:

This is what happens when you successfully establish Professionalism, Legitimacy and Engagement. At this point, your customer has landed on the focal point of your page, and takes an ACTION.

On a Home Page, the focal point is usually images that clearly represent your categories. On a Category Page, the focal point is a group of clean, clear product images (NOT prices and buy buttons!) that represent the products in that Category. On a Product Page, the focal point is the product image itself, the description, and the Buy button.

If your page’s visual sales process quickly and effectively moves your customer to your focal point, your customer will click on it.

Get a customer to click on a Category image on your home page, and it’s much more likely they’ll click on a Product image in the Category, and then MUCH more likely they’ll buy the product once they hit the Product page. That is, if you effectively move their eyes through the visual sales process on each of those pages.

– Closure:

This is what happens when your customer buys the product and completes the sale.

Always keep in mind that most of your customers will land somewhere in the MIDDLE of your site, not on your Home Page. That’s just one more reason that EVERY page must be clean, clear and be built with an effective visual sales process!

I've been doing this for 25 years, and I'll teach YOU how to do it. Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at ChrisMalta.com!