Dan MoyleWe live online. From “Hey Alexa” to hitting Google for every conversational question to ordering groceries online for delivery, our digital and real-life lives have officially merged.
It’s a bit like Lawnmower Man or Tron. We’re not sure exactly when it happened, but it happened.
And if you’re a business owner or you’re trying to market a brand, you’d better be online.
A new website, whether you’ve never had one or you’re thinking about a website redesign, is critical to helping a modern business grow.
In fact a new website can drive revenue for your business. Even if you’re not an ecommerce brand shipping widgets to buyers, your website should be more than a digital brochure.
Your website needs to be a revenue machine.
Views, leads, subscribers, opportunities and sales should all come from a website. If you’re not tracking sales and adding to your bottom line the website is just a hobby. And probably an expensive hobby.
How can a new website drive revenue for your business? Here are 7 ways your site can generate cash flow.
- Increase lead conversions
- Create better sales conversions
- Build trust through reviews
- Better UX design for simple pages and more sales
- Videos help increase sales
- Incorporate upselling
- Implement conversational marketing
Increased Lead Conversions
Whether it’s a completely new website or a website redesign, optimizing for lead conversions is an important step. If no viewers ever turn into leads, you won’t generate revenue.
By converting those who find your new website into leads, you’re filling your marketing and sales buckets and driving business to the appropriate teams.
Does your homepage have a call to action to do business with your brand? This could be “buy now,” “schedule a consultation,” or “get a demo.” Some way you can help your ideal clients take the final step as soon as they find you will help those ready-to-go customers.
Other conversion opportunities will include:
- Beginning of the journey offers like a free guide
- Join the community
- Sign up for our newsletter with exclusive content and deals
- Contextual calls-to-action for your buyer personas
- Use case stories that speak to your personas
Conversion rate optimization will help your website become a revenue machine. The list above is far from complete, and is meant to get you started. Listen to the conversation below for more tips.
Create Better Sales Conversions
A new website needs to increase your sales conversions. Whether it’s through better, more educational content, or it’s through deeper-in-the-funnel offers, you’ll want to make sure you’re empowering your viewers on their buyer’s journey. Creating a strategy around full-funnel conversions for your new website is critical.
We suggest developing an inbound sales strategy as you’re thinking about a new website.
Inbound sales is a sales strategy and methodology that prioritizes the needs, challenges, goals and interests of individual buyers. Forget focusing on closing the sale as soon as possible. Instead, inbound sales professionals know they need to meet consumers where they are, and then guide them through the decision-making process. It’s less about push, and more about helping.
In short, inbound sales is a personalized, helpful, modern sales methodology that focuses on a prospect's pain points, develops a trusted consultant-user relationship, and turns the traditional sales process into a buyer’s journey.
Build Trust Through Reviews
You may already understand the importance of social proof like reviews and recommendations. You’re probably reaping the rewards of referrals. But if you don’t create a way to promote customer trust on your website, then you’re missing out. Testimonials, images of your staff, and case studies about your products or services can go a long way to convince a visitor to choose you.
On your new website, make sure you’re planning pages with pictures, descriptions of the services you offer and some testimonials from customers. You can link reviews for your business from Google, showing how you are a credible business and can back up your promises.
If you’re interested in creating trust to promote sales, you’ll need to spend time creating marketing materials like case studies, testimonials, and/or sharing product reviews and including them in the plan for your modern website.
Better UX Design for Simple Pages and More Sales
Too many businesses assume they’re better off offering as many products as possible on their homepage to give visitors a range of options. Entrepreneur Magazine, however, suggests that offering fewer products on your page with more text describing a specific topic will actually increase overall sales.
Think about this: If you give a child (heck, even adults!) 100 choices of ice cream flavors, what happens? They freeze up. Give them five choices, and they’ll pick one. Maybe two.
This works in business because it allows your company to focus on a limited number of specific products or services and answer any possible questions visitors may have.
Here’s a real-world example of simple design that’s user-friendly. Storybrand uses colors to draw your eye to the newest offering while giving you essential calls to action and a simple menu.
Videos Help Increase Sales
Research from HubSpot and Mashable separately proves that adding videos to some of your top landing pages can result in an increase in conversions averaging around 80 percent!
Our brains process visual information about 60,000 times faster than text, which means that any visitors to your site absorb information in videos better than they would by reading text. Learning about your product or service will be much more effective through video than text.
Adding video to landing pages and other high traffic, high intent pages can help turn your new website into a revenue machine.
Incorporate Upselling
Whether it’s fast food or a consumer goods store, how often does a salesperson try to upsell you? It’s all around us. They’re supposed to. But does your website do the same?
Even though we see more cross selling on websites, Shopify suggests that upselling is actually 20x more effective than cross selling online. Let your potential clients know that you have more than one offering that could bring them even more value.
Can you upsell on a product page like Dollar Shave Club?
Implement Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing should be a critical step in your new website planning. Whether you’re looking at live chat tools, chatbots or both, conversational is a fantastic (and crucial) way to generate revenue.
They’re also a great way to address any questions visitors to your site may have. Drift says bots are more likely to be used than forms because they generate an immediate response, they’re more natural and they just plain work better. While we’re not suggesting you kill forms and landing pages, we certainly believe that almost every type of business website can benefit from conversational marketing tactics.
Let’s face it, nothing’s better than one-on-one human interaction to provide value, but in most cases, it’s not scalable. We live in an instant gratification world. While a five minute response to a lead via email is great, it seems like ages when it was thought of from a chat point of view. AI and chatbots can leverage this opportunity and bridge this scalability gap to: open the conversation, answer common questions, qualify leads and even set meetings, in a natural way that your prospect will love.
Conversational marketing services will help you strategize and consider all aspects of the customer journey. Make sure this is part of your website planning and strategy sessions.
New website photo by Bram Naus on Unsplash