Do you struggle to sell enough to warrant
time and resources required to sell your goods through your website? Are you spending more money on your website than you earn from it? Is your website simply a contact point with a shopping cart that no-one buys anything from? Join queue because you are far from alone.
In quest to resolve why this happens, we went out of our way to find out what makes people buy directly from certain websites and not from others. There is a huge gulf between relatively successful websites and those that are failures. According to our research, successful websites convert 1% to 4% of their total visitors per month into direct paying customers, who buy products online with a credit card. The unsuccessful websites have similar designs and functionality in that they look good and accept online payments, yet they convert no or just about no visitors into direct customers.
What is difference?
This is what we have been striving to find out for last year, and when it hit us what major difference was, we were kicking ourselves! The phrase “not seeing wood for trees” was one particularly relevant for us as online marketing experts. We were so blinded by what we were doing and so focused on measuring things that effect conversion, that most obvious and simple fact eluded us for some time. But we got there in end!
Trust is difference
It’s that simple. If you look at companies that currently sell products or services online, and compare them to each other way we did, you will find that successful ones are those people trust. The ones that sell products and services successfully tend to be brands of huge companies that have gone online and sold their products, such as Dell, or companies that have become an online brand, such as Amazon. Now before you despair, you do not have to be a huge branded company to be trusted online, but you do need to earn trust of your prospect base.
Understanding
Once we understood this, we became more scientific about way we did our research. We found that successful companies applied one of three kinds of strategy, depending on company’s profile: branded companies, companies selling to an existing customer base, and most interestingly, non-branded companies.
1) Branded companies
Branded companies are ones we all know about – ones you see on adverts on your TV, see plastered on banners all over Internet, or hear advertised on radio. They might have offices in a city near you! Basically, companies sell something offline and use web to complement sales. In rare cases, such as Amazon, they have grown from huge investment, or partnerships with real bricks and mortar companies, and over years have developed into their own brand.
Can you still remember day when people thought Amazon would never catch on? They stuck with it and formed trust through large-scale web advertising campaigns and by offering their prospects an obviously good deal. Initially, this was by offering books for sale at considerably cheaper prices than high ones at bricks and mortar stores. Then, because their service was of a very high standard (fast delivery, good returns policy, good refund policy, high quality merchandise) people realized that there was no reason not to trust them. Now ask most people about online books and they think Amazon before anything else.
In most cases, sales sequence of branded company goes something like this:
- The prospects know who they’re dealing with.
- The prospects trust branded product or service, having heard about, seen or dealt with company before.
- The company doing selling backs up its sales with good customer service.
If your company is branded, or you’re responsible for a website sales strategy of a branded company, then there is no reason to doubt that online sales will complement offline sales, provided three criteria mentioned above are met. We found that branded companies that failed to do well online were ones that had a bad website that was not customer focused, and that didn’t optimize their sites continuously through good measurement and experimentation.
2) Companies acquiring new business from old customers
Companies doing this kind of online selling are selling products successfully to an existing customer base. The reasons vary. Sometimes seller offers products for less because of reduced costs in selling online. Sometimes it is easier to find a specific product online due to an efficient website. Whatever reason sales usually come from existing customers. For instance, companies with foreign customers found it more efficient to serve customers from abroad with e-commerce. Wholesalers found a good channel to sell in bulk over web and could automate processes so it became very easy for their customers to do more business with them. The selling companies capitalize on medium by offering incentives to their loyal customers via email, clearing old stock for instance, or by discounting to test reaction to new products. This kind of selling method is usually heavily supported by more traditional offline methods and sales process online complements offline methods.
