Simple and effective methods to increase sales for your online business
I lead conversion work at Rev on our websites, apps, and emails. Conversion improvements have led to a $5,000,000+ increase in incremental self-serve revenue in the past year.
Conversion is a skill that can be learned and honed through practice. To save you some time, here are my underlying principles:
- Proactively answer customer questions
- Focus on customer benefit, not features
- Simplify
Proactively answer top 5 customer questions
People who are shopping will always have questions. For example, when I shop for running shoes I want to know what colors and sizes are available, what other people say about them, and how much they are.
Don’t hide the answers.
Your job is to figure out the major questions and how you can put answers to them on the site without overloading it with information. You find these questions by talking to your customers, answering support calls, reading support emails and tickets, adding live chat to your site, and user testing.
Do not add a 100-question FAQ to your main landing pages. Find the major questions that will have the biggest impact.
Focus on customer benefit, not features
Customers prioritize convenience. They do not care about the time you put into building features or the thousand things your product can do.
For my running shoes, I want something that is great for running. I don’t care that the materials are from Antartica, it was manufactured in Iceland, and the designer is Swedish. If it won’t make me a better runner then I won’t buy it.
Customers came to you for help. It is your responsibility to show them they are making the right decision.
Credit to Samuel Hulick, my favorite user onboarding expert
Simplify
Your visitors came to your website or app to accomplish a task. Don’t get in their way. Make it very easy to understand exactly what step they need to take next and why. I want to select my shoe size and add it to my cart, not sign up for a mailing list.
Many websites add clutter because they want to tell customers everything that they can do. People don’t want that. If you have an avid searcher, they will find the relevant information by reading 10 pages of online reviews. Don’t build for those people.
I have two favorite ways to simplify.
First, cut the number of words in half. Second, cut them in half again. You will think this is impossible. It isn’t. Get help from someone with an outside perspective. Listen to your customers and how they say things.
If you are working on Growth, Product, or have questions, please reach out: Barron.Caster@gmail.com or LinkedIn.
Related reading: Growth Tools 101 and The 3x Conversion Playbook.
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