Sean Ellis, a founder of the growth hacking community, and a legend in Silicon Valley has to say the following about getting more customers to buy from you, “Conversion rate equals desire minus resistance.”
Most of us are focused on increasing the desire for our products through effective sales and marketing. While of course, we should all be doing as many sales and marketing as we can afford to do and doing it as effectively as possible, it’s very important that we don’t overlook the role that resistance plays.
We also have to minimize resistance specifically plays in increasing the number of sales at your business.
Data proves time and again that businesses lose many sales and many customers every day due to resistance in their sales process, or friction in their sales process.
Here are the seven things that you can do to remove that friction, and increase the sales from the existing traffic that you’re getting to your website or your business.
1. Provide Complete information
First is to make sure that you’re providing complete information for your buyers.
Once you have gone through the effort of marketing and getting a prospective buyer to your website, the last thing that you want to do is to have them leave because they feel like there’s incomplete information to allow them to make a purchase.
Once a customer is gone, it’s much, much more difficult and expensive to get them back.
Make sure that you provide complete information in the form of frequently asked questions, guarantee details, warranty information, things like that so that they feel comfortable making a purchase there on the spot.
2. Simple Payment
Number two is to make payment simple.
We’ve all experienced going to a website that has a poorly designed checkout process. Particularly if you’re on a mobile device, it can be an absolute killer.
If a business is checkout process has too many steps or the forms are difficult to fill out for whatever reason. Make sure to thoroughly test your payment checkout process in both desktop and mobile environments to make sure that it’s efficient and simple for people to make payment.
3. Keep customer information
Number three is to store customer information.
While not all customers will want you to store their information, many customers will elect to do so to make the checkout process more efficient and easier for future purchases. This of course also gets them coming back to buy more often if they know the checkout is going to be simple.
This is one of Amazon’s great secrets to success, they have all of your information already and make it very easy to press one button to make your next purchase.
While you don’t necessarily have to make it as easy as Amazon, that should be your goal. You should do everything you can to simplify the process by allowing them to store information and quickly recall that information for future purchases.
4. Offer subscriptions
Next is to offer subscriptions.
Many products are what are known as consumable, meaning that they will be consumed by the customer, and after a number of uses or a period of time, the product will need to be replaced.
If you have a product that’s consumable, make sure that you offer it on subscriptions so that customers don’t even have to return to your site to make an additional purchase, they can just count on it being delivered on a set schedule.
5. Offer multiple options and price points
Next is to offer multiple options and price points.
Giving your customers multiple product options in terms of the configuration of the actual product features and benefits and at multiple price points will increase the number of buyers that you get from a given amount of traffic.
It’s been demonstrated time and again that multiple options that have a clear reason for being clear differentiation from one offer to the next at clearly different price points will increase the number of buyers that you have.
Some customers are more attracted to premium offers and previous premium price points, while others will look for fewer features if they can save money.
Create both and you can win both customers.
6. Free shipping and handling
Include shipping and handling.
It’s been shown time and again study after study that if you include shipping and handling you will increase conversions.
People don’t want to pay what seems like an additional price for their products immediately after having just decided upon purchasing. If you can include shipping costs in the price of the product, you will increase the conversion rate.
7. Be Accessible
Even though more and more businesses are selling from their websites, it doesn’t mean that they need to be inaccessible to our customers.
Tools like Drift allow you to offer real-time interaction to your customers as they’re on your checkout page or in your shopping cart trying to make decisions.
This gives them the opportunity to contact you and ask questions, and if you’re available at the time that they do, gives you the opportunity to provide whatever information or influences necessary to close the sale.
That’s seven ways to make it easier for customers to buy from you.
Implement them, and remove friction in your purchasing process and see sales rise even without any additional traffic to your site.
