7 Steps to Designing Websites That Convert Sales Quickly

Free! Marketing Tips News.

Got a question?

1. Begin With The End In Mind

Sales-conversion is all about understanding the end-goal to your online business. You need to determine the purpose of your website and then map out a process to help achieve it. It’s not as complicated as you may think! If you start with what you want your website to do, then it’s easier to come up with ideas on how best to achieve the goal. Even if you don’t write down a list of tasks or goals, you can quickly see what areas you need to focus on to improve.

For example, if you want to sell computers online, then it makes sense to focus your marketing efforts on selling to a specific type of computer customer. Let’s choose a gamer as a persona, perhaps someone young in the workforce, with some disposable income. You now have a clear user in mind and a goal, but that still means you need to figure out how to convert these visitors into buyers online once you get them to your sales offer pages.

You may also need to do the same for other devices and other products like peripherals or accessories. Chances are there’s another device or product you want your site visitors to buy that goes along with the main one you are hoping they will purchase. Cross-selling and smart scripts that offer suggestions for other products, with prompts like “customers who purchased X also bought these items” often helps close a bigger sale.

2. Who Are Your Ideal Customers? What Do They Want?

Knowing the types of visitor you’re trying to attract is the first step to designing and building a sales converting web presence. The best way to do this is to look at what you know about them already and understand what makes them tick. You can look at your analytics, and also perform additional market research to get into their heads better. And you should look at everyone else who is attracting these customers in your niche.

For instance, let’s say you want a sales-converting website for your small business that sells unique and beautiful hair products for women. Right now, it’s just an online store with a few products, with little traffic. You’ve already catalogued your visitors through Google Analytics, and found out that they’re mostly women in the age group of 30-50, but you know nothing about them other than their age and gender. How can you come up with a sales-converting website to convert this audience into paying clients?

The best way is by putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes.

Imagine you are them, looking for a hair conditioning product that is environmentally conscious. You have no idea whether the product is 100% natural, or if it contains any chemicals. This is the type of information that will be important to your buyers, (but you don’t know how important it will be to them yet). In order to answer this question, you need to find out more about your her.

You see, there are many things that can make a customer choose one brand over another, such as product quality and packaging. Or whether it is good for the environment or not. And of course, price. But some consumers are happy to pay more for a product if it has other qualities they care about, or it is something that is difficult to find. Brand loyalty has been created by offering something unique, with a personal connection to the user, that they feel is something that “they own.”

Knowing the mindset of your customers is very important for a website’s ability to make the sale or achieve a subscription or new membership. Do they have a passion for a particular cause or charity? Do they like to shop at certain times of the day, such as late at night for example? Are your buyers time-constrained, or are they willing to wait for a limited edition product? One of the most important things to keep in mind is their budget. Is your pricing competitive? If it is not, you better have a good reason for that. And it better be something that is compelling to your visitors.

3. What Problems Do They Have And How Can You Solve Them?

You’ve now identified the type of visitor that is visiting your website, and also you’ve figured out their demographics, but the next question is how are you going to meet their needs and what other problems can you solve?

How do you know if there are any problems they have that you can solve?

There are two ways:

The first is by looking at other websites in your niche and compiling a list of things they have that you don’t. You should look for things like free shipping or a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If there are any other problems that stand out in your mind, then this could be an opportunity to try something new on your own site. Perhaps something it missing on other competitor’s websites and you can take advantage of that by filling the void on your website?

Free shipping helps your visitors think of your price as the max limit of what they will pay and takes the guess work out of understanding their total payment cost. There are no surprises, and no “add more items to your cart for free shipping” to worry about.

A 100% satisfaction guarantee helps a shopper to know they have nothing to lose by purchasing your product. And you can also use this to convince them that their fears are unfounded, and it gives you a fighting chance to to get them on board as a customer if they have any doubts at all.

4. Craft Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Your website is going to be a success if you are able to continually market and sell the product or service you offer. Marketing means copy writing! But don’t just use many of the same words and phrases everywhere on your website, because it will sound repetitive and dull. The most successful websites are those that offer something unique that your visitors will not find elsewhere, and use good descriptions to market better. Need a good copywriter and marketing strategy? We know a good digital marketing agency that can help you with that.

The way you can do this is by using a unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP is a single sentence or short paragraph that describes what makes you unique, and why your visitors should choose you over someone else in your niche. This one sentence or paragraph should explain why people should put their trust and their information into your website to buy from you. It needs to offer them some clear benefit(s) or clearly identify the problem it solves. Take this Deathwish Coffee example. They offer a money back guarantee if they aren’t the boldest, strongest coffee you’ve ever had, claiming to be the World’s Strongest Coffee. This may not appeal to everyone, but to a hardcore crew of strong coffee drinkers, this USP is very appealing. 

Another great example of a USP is the following, taken from the website of a software company specializing in online invoicing:

“Billing simplified for the better” is a USP that can be used in virtually any type of service industry, or even by those that sell physical products (if your product has something to do with billing). The idea here is that customers do not want to have to worry about the finer details of invoicing and payments. They want something that makes this process completely seamless, easy to use, quicker – in short – better.

5. Create a Compelling Offer For Your Ideal Prospects

When you are trying to sell anything on the internet, you need to consider and figure out what makes your product or service more attractive to those who are looking for it.

The most common question that we hear as digital marketing people is “How can I increase our sales?” The answer is not to focus on the numbers, but on creating something that appeals to your audience’s wants and needs. Either something remarkable, or hard to find, or something of value to your customer. A way to help do this is by creating copy or product descriptions that make what you’re selling more desirable – a must have for the visitor. As an example, if you’re selling a e-book on how to create iPhone apps, you might say:

“This e-book may be useful for you if…”

But, instead, consider trying:

“Create amazing, and profitable iPhone apps. This book will show you how in just 7 days!”

In this case, the prospect is not only presented with explicit information about the product or service, but also with an additional benefit: learning in X amount of time, and turning a profit on an amazing creation. That sounds exciting!

Sometimes it’s about providing an alternate, to the reality of a mundane life. Screw it – Let’s Ride, offers such an antidote to the pain and suffering and humiliation of working 9 to 5, in an office, or any other job, or for anything that life throws at you that you want to escape from. It’s a core shaking statement to some people, that offers them freedom, and escape.

6. Create an Effective Call-to-Action (CTA)

As we’ve mentioned before, one of the most effective ways to get the visitor to take action is by creating a call-to-action. What is a call-to-action? It’s a word or phrase that tells the visitor what needs to be done next. It leads the customer down a desired path – toward a sale. You might have seen them before, such as:

“Sign up today.”

“Learn more.”

“Start now.”

“Contact us today.”

They’re everywhere and are very effective because they tell visitors what exact next step they need to take after reading your copy. They are usually pretty simple, quick to read, and motivating an action that you want the visitor to take next. A good example of this comes from our own website, you may have noticed this on our homepage:

In the graphic above, you’ll notice a red button with text on it that says “Get a Free Web Design Quote”. This is what we want people to do when they visit the homepage of our website. And a lot of people click it, and send in some information so we can start to contact them and entice them with our services. You’ll notice many call to action buttons and links on our website, usually near the bottom of a page, or after an article. Here’s another example of a good CTA. The photo of the tattooed bartender shows what it will look like in your email signature file. And all his social accounts are there too. Email signatures are a pain, so this makes it look attractive and easy to set up, with the CTA button “learn more”, being more enticing than “buy now.”

They are quite effective, in building leads and helping us guide visitors to the next steps in becoming a customer. In most cases, there is some introductory copy before the CTA button, that greatly aids in the effectiveness of the CTA.

7: Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)

If you want your website to be visible in search engines, and appear topmost in their search results pages, then there are a few things that need to be implemented. First off, you’ll need to think about how people find your website. If they find it on Google, Bing and Yahoo search, then you’ll want to make sure that all of the keywords are in the title tags and meta description tags.

Title tags and meta descriptions help search engines identify your website’s content and how it matches the search terms people input into the search engines search field.

In addition to that, you want to make sure that you have well-written, easily accessible content on your website that will be considered relevant to what people are looking for, by search engines. Make sure that all of the information you write is relevant to the keywords that are in your title tags and meta descriptions. This helps bring more traffic to your website. It will have dramatic effects on your overall traffic, and of course more traffic equals more sales or signups, if you’ve been implementing some of the suggestions above. Having a good backlink profile also helps as well. Good backlinks are just other websites which link to yours, that have a good domain authority rating, and are relative (content or subject matter) to your website.

A few other websites to check out online for this that can help with your SEO are:

Ahrefs.com – Domain Authority and Links Report

Moz.com – Organic Rankings, Links Report, Keyword Difficulty, etc…

Google Keyword tool  – Keyword Planning Tool from Google

+ Bonus Pro-tip!  A/B Test your sales funnels and keep the winners.

A/B testing is a great way to get a quick feel for what works and what doesn’t. You can see just how much traffic your pages are getting, while you are actually using such things as Analytics. It’s fun to see things improve!

Some people have no idea what makes their website succeed or fail. And many people will go for the “quick fix”, which usually turns out to be the wrong thing.

Maybe you think you have an idea how to improve things and you implement it without really knowing? A lot of times the most expensive way to get that fast surge of traffic can turn out to be a pretty bad long term solution. It’s not sustainable, and a better way would be to do a series of side by side A/B tests to see which page layouts, or which offers or which call to action works better to convert to sales. You put two similar pages up against each other, run it for a few dozen or a few hundred hits, and can quickly decide which one was better at converting. Than take that winner, and repeat the process by tweaking some other aspect, perhaps a better product description, or having more photos, or having less text. Keep refining and take the winner on to the next level. As your page’s quality increases so will your conversions or sales.

To wrap it up, all the steps for success I have outlined and covered in this article can be used by just about anyone, without any special skill or talent (ok – maybe you’ll need some help from your web developer for a few things but all the tools are readily available for anyone to use, and can be easily learned). While it’s possible that your website might not succeed, chances are very good that you can make money online through your conversion-optimized website. And by doing things right from the beginning, you’ve already put yourself ahead of the game, and prepared your website for success for converting the most visitors to loyal customers or subscribers.

It is always a great idea to study and learn about other successful websites and stay up to date with what your competitors are doing. Make use of the resources available to you, such as Google’s Keyword Tool and their organic traffic insights in Google Analytics, to learn what brings you the best traffic, and to develop an even more effective sales funnel to propel your sales or signups to the top.

If this seems too much, Hypno can help you with all of this of course! Get in touch with us today. Talk with one of our website designers about how we can help you with your website conversion dreams and turn it into a reality.

I hope this helps you with your future web design projects and any other projects that you’re working on right now. If you found this helpful, please share it with your friends and colleagues! If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.