6 Essential Elements of a Sales-Driven Website
What is a sales-driven website?
Sales-driven websites are those that have high visitor-customer conversion rates. They consider the customer experience carefully and optimize the sales process to guide customers through the buying process towards making a purchase or reaching out to speak with a sales representative. These websites focus on delivering important information that visitors are looking for when making a purchase.
You can create a successful website by considering your customer’s experience, answering the questions they might ask, and using information to build trust in your brand. Providing a seamless and enjoyable experience can help your customers remember your business and come back to complete a purchase after conducting their research.
70-80% of a buying decision is made before a shopper talks with a salesperson or even walks into the store.
Why do I need a sales-driven website?
Websites are available to sell to your customers 24/7, don’t require a large salary, and provide valuable data that can help you make important business and marketing decisions. Converting your website from an electronic brochure into a selling machine can help you attract, nurture, and convert visitors. If your business relies on customers or clients for revenue, it would be a missed opportunity to not have a sales-driven website.
6 essential elements of websites that convert
If you’re looking to increase your sales and generate more leads for your business, here are the essential elements of sales-driven websites:
1. Customer-focused strategy
The primary focus of any sales-driven website is catering to prospective customers and delivering information they require to make purchasing decisions.
The first step in developing a website strategy that focuses on the customer experience is understanding who your customers are and what type of information they require to make a purchase. It can be helpful to create customer personas to further your understanding of your customers and deliver content that resonates with them. If you have more than one customer segment, you can consider creating multiple personas and developing a customer acquisition and website strategy that caters to these individuals and guides them through your sales funnel.
By considering the customer journey carefully and crafting your website to guide website visitors through the buying process, you can increase your web sales and inquiries. Here are some elements to consider when crafting your strategy:
- What problem is the customer looking to solve?
- How does your service or product solve this customer problem?
- What questions might the customer ask when considering a purchase?
- What benefits does your product or service offer the customer?
- What information is required for a customer to take action?
- Which format does your customer prefer to receive information? (i.e. video, graphics, words, etc.)
2. Conversion tools
Once you’ve developed your strategy and have considered the information customers require to move to the next step in the purchasing process, you can consider the tools you can use to help facilitate a conversion. The conversion tool pushes your prospect into the next phase of the sales process, which can involve booking a meeting, registering for a webinar, accessing a promotional tool, such as an ebook or download, or getting a ballpark estimate.
For example, if your prospects are typically most interested in receiving a quote, you can provide a estimator quoting tool for the customer to interact with and submit their email to receive the quote via email. Alternatively, if the next step in the buying process is to book a meeting time with a sales representative, you can provide a search and book calendar tool to add the meeting into the customer’s calendar.
Depending on the service or product and the customer segment for which you’re building the website, you might consider using a number of different conversion tools on your website. Focus on completing the customer journey and ushering them to the next step in the sales process.
3. Helpful content
Website copy is one of the most important influencers of a sales-driven website. You can use your content to tell the story of your organization or offerings, moving your prospects towards making a purchasing decision. Providing insufficient information can cause visitors to look elsewhere for the answers they’re looking for, which can push prospects towards your competitors. You can create helpful content that attracts, nurtures, and converts website visitors into paying customers by providing them with the answers to the questions they’re asking.
Here are the different types of content you can develop to provide customers with valuable insights and information about your offerings:
- Blog posts
- Ebooks
- Videos
- Checklists
- Case studies
- FAQs
- Sales and landing pages
- Product descriptions
4. Intentional calls-to-action
Once a visitor is on your website and interacting with your content, it’s important to guide them to the next step in your sales funnel with intentional calls-to-action (CTAs). You can use your strategy to help guide which CTAs you might include with each set of content. For example, at the end of a blog post on preparing for a home renovation, you might include a CTA for the reader to download a renovation preparation checklist in exchange for their email address. This process helps you capture the emails of those interested in home renovations, which you can then use for future email marketing offers related to renovations.
By integrating intentional CTAs throughout your website and within your content, you can add more prospects to your sales funnels. This allows you to nurture these prospects by sharing relevant content and information to move them along through the buying process. By keeping in touch with strategic sales sequences, you can remain top-of-mind for these prospects and prove your helpfulness and interest in solving their problems.
5. Website analytics
To get the most out of your website and continue to drive sales, it’s important to consider the information from your analytics. You can use the data to help you understand what content or pages are performing well and which might require changes. Consider the time spent on the page, the amount of visitors compared to the CTA submissions, which ads are performing better than others, and which blogs are gathering the most traffic.
Analytics can help you better understand what channels have the highest conversion rates, what content customers are most interested in, and where you might be losing the interest of visitors. If you’re not familiar with analyzing and interpreting data, it might be helpful to engage with someone experienced with website analytics to help you make changes. Consider giving the website enough time to provide valuable insights and review recommendations on a monthly or quarterly basis.
6. Effective marketing
The more effective and strategic sales-driven website can’t convert any prospects if there are no website visitors to convert. To drive new prospects to the website, you can consider the following strategies:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Social media marketing
- Digital and traditional marketing
- Organic growth strategies
Developing a successful marketing strategy involves assessing your customer personas and devising strategies to attract those customers to your website. It can be helpful to develop strategies focused on specific customer segments and create targeted advertisements to attract those prospects and feed them into your sales channel. Using effective marketing and personalized landing pages can help you provide a strategic customized user experience that helps drive sales.