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 website pages, there are several important things to realize. When you want to make more sales, which is always number one, you can't talk to your customers.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

There's a process to traditional physical sales that's been critical 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 sales person makes good money in sales.

The process 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. Then you talk price and close the sale.

That conversation is critical in good physical world sales. If I go to a music store and I 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 gage strings do I like to use?

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

During that process, the salesperson is guiding me through the sale. If he or she does a really good job of controlling that process, 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 in real time.

Online, the entire marketing process is "visual", from your product pictures to your written site content, your articles, blogs, your social marketing and more.

Everything you do is a "one way street", from you to your customers, 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 answering people's questions about their websites, I can't even count the number of times that I've seen websites that are so visually confusing, that I feel like I'm looking at them through a psychotic kaleidoscope.

Most website owners try to make more sales by cramming so much stuff onto a single page that it simply descends into visual chaos right from the start.

It's not the site owner's fault, because that's what they see everybody "else" doing.

Only about 3% of the ECommerce sites online ever make any money. There are many reasons for that, and one of them is visual confusion on their pages.

Online shoppers move very quickly, as a rule, and busy, confusing pages turn off an online shopper faster than their cat peeing on their keyboard.

We've already established that online marketing is a one way street. You can't stand over your customers shoulders and direct their attention through that confusion. Your pages need to do that "themselves".

They can only do that if they're clean, clear, simple, intuitive, and focused on one thing at a time. That's the only way your site pages are going to make sales.

Each page of your site needs to accomplish the following things. Professionalism, legitimacy, engagement, action and closure.

You have three to seven seconds to move someone's eyes to a point on any given page where they can take an ACTION. That's because in that time frame, people are at their "peak" level of interest and attention.

After that first three to seven seconds, their interest and attention begins 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 that confusion.

So how do you establish a visual process that leads your customer to a sale instead of chasing them away?

First, Professionalism. Your customers must feel that they're dealing with a professional company. Professionalism is immediately established by the top left corner of any given page in your site. That's where a "well thought out" site name, tagline and logo belong.

That's called your "identity package". That's what your customer will notice first, and first impressions are everything.

Second, 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 of your site. It's actually very inexpensive, and it'll definitely help you create more sales engagement by creating a feeling of legitimacy.

Third, focal points. You have to create a single focal point on each page of your website that contains the one thing your customer needs to do on that page in order to further the sale. That focal point will almost always be the product, or a "small" set of products they can choose from.

This is why you can't jumble up a nasty mess of multiple products, buy buttons, free shipping notices, 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 confused and leave your site. You can't make sales when your customers leave your site.

Fourth, engagement. 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 that focal point.

That person in the image should be looking "toward" your focal point. Your customers eyes will follow the eyes of the person in the image.

Fifth, action. This is what happens when you successfully establish professionalism, legitimacy and engagement. At this point, your customers eyes are on the focal point of your page, and that customer takes an "action". That means they click to the next step in the sale.

If your page is a properly built visual sales process, it quickly and effectively moves your customer to that next step in the sale.

Get a customer to quickly click on a category image in 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.

Keep in mind that most of your customers will usually land somewhere in the "middle" of your site, not just in your home page. That's just one more reason that "every" page must be clean, clear and built with an effective visual sales process.

I've been doing this for over 30 years. I'll teach you how to do it if you want me to.

Check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chrismalta.com

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.