Benefits and Outcomes
Online sales are not that much different than in-person sales. When you speak to someone about your products, you discuss the qualities of the product: soft, stylish, durable, strong, easy, etc. This exchange forms a connection with your buyers. An aggressive sales approach doesn’t work in person, so why would it work online?
When presenting your products, you need to focus on the benefits that they bring to your buyers. Talk about the positive outcomes created by using the products and define the ways that your products meet their objectives.
Key Elements of Success
- Create an attractive buying atmosphere. The design and presentation of your online store define your brand for your online visitors. Make sure that you create the right look, use words that make the most sense to promote your brand promise. Remember, their experience will reflect upon your brand.
- Easy navigation. Face it, there is a lot of information that you need to get out to your potential clients through your product website. Overloading them with too much information will make the decision process harder. The more choices you offer to them, the less likely a quick decision will be made. Organizing the information that they need in small bites, and clearly presenting ways for them to find out more information about various styles, features, colors, and sizes, gives your visitors time to focus on the information at hand, and a way to dig deeper when desired. Presenting this information free of clutter way will provide better results than placing too much information on a single page.
- Provide tips and next steps. Each page needs to place focus on a limited amount of information. Identify what the visitor needs to know to make an educated decision and provide that information as tips through pop-up boxes to ensure that all the information needed to make an informed decision about purchasing your products is at hand for the visitors. Providing clear next steps to learning more about various aspects of the products is important to keeping your visitor engaged.
- Establish trust. Your visitors need to feel they are in the right place. Everything about the website needs to look professional and convey a sense of trustworthiness. Using the correct technology to make sure your customers feel comfortable moving forward in the steps to make a purchase is critical to making money online.
- Security. Use a secure internet connection, via SSL.
- Shopping cart. Provide an easy to use shopping cart experience.
- Payment. Offer various payment options.
- Privacy Policy. Make sure your privacy policy and terms of service are clearly linked from your website.
- Customer Service. Provide a phone number and/or email address to your customer service department.
- Return and Satisfaction Policies. Make sure your visitors know how to resolve any issues that may arise after making the purchase.
Online product sales is so much more than just placing product images onto a page, listing product features and a price. The experience you create must match the customers’ expectations of your brand, on and offline. The way you present the information must be easy to navigate, intuitive, and it must provide concise details about your products.