Getting customers on the Web is tough. With millions upon millions of users and, most likely, a great deal of other sites offering the same or similar services or products, it’s difficult to make a sale without offering an incentive to buy from you instead of the competition. Taking into account the fact that a vast majority of your traffic will never even turn into a sale, regardless of what you do to persuade them, chances are generating sales will keep you awake at night trying to figure out the next gimmick.
Forget the gimmicks, you don’t need them. Word of mouth and browse-in visits will generate sales on their own, just as they always have. The trick is satisfying those customers enough that they’ll come back again and again – a task that isn’t half as daunting as it sounds.
The absolute most important thing to consider is your customers’ comfort. There will always be the skeptics who are weary of the possibility of fraud over the Internet, but that isn’t the kind of comfort we’re talking about. Your site has to feel “natural;” the last thing you want a potential customer to do while deciding whether or not to buy is think about how to get where they want to go. Clear navigation is vital to making the first sale and will help to ensure that the first-time customer becomes a repeat customer.
Making repeat visits easier than the first visit will also help convince people to come back. If they have fewer steps between browsing and buying on repeat visits, they will be more inclined to stay at your store rather than go elsewhere and have to fill out all of their personal information again. Store this information on your system or, for those less inclined to have their credit card information floating around cyberspace, in a cookie on their system.
Keeping your customers updated on new deals or new additions to your site will make them more inclined to return, too. Having an optional e-mail list to contact customers about the latest changes can be a big help for getting them to come back again.
Finally, provide detailed information about the products you are selling. If a customer can do most of their research without even having to leave your site, you’ll probably have a lifetime customer. No one wants to search for hours to find information about a product, but a frighteningly small number of sites give their customer more than a picture, a price and a product name. Offering things like manufacturer contact information and benefits of the product all on one page will speed the process of purchasing the item, adding to the customer’s level of comfort.
New customers provide a great deal of sales for a business, but making those customers repeat customers is the key to getting the leg up on your competition. Satisfied customers who come back again and again even provide the added benefit of telling their friends about your site, generating more new customers to convert. Go to the next level and find ways you can make your site more comfortable and user friendly, and you won’t need to pace your bedroom at 3 a.m. trying to figure out the next gimmick.
*Originally published at LangDesign.com
Rebecca Lang is founder of Lang Design, Inc. an Internet web design and development with an emphasis on marketing website business. Serving businesses nationwide, we are located in Wilmington, Delaware, just south of the Philadelphia Metro area.
