The Holy Grail of Website Purpose.

Having a website certainly garners interest, and explains to your customer what you do. But does it generate leads or sales?

The whole reason to give such a detailed explanation of the 7 steps in website success, leads up to the sale. After all, why build a business website if it doesn’t make you money? That might sound mercenary, but it’s the truth. Don’t fall short! Whether you’re selling real estate or sunglasses…

1. Make it easy to find…
2. Hard to walk away from…
3. …and easy to buy. That’s it. OK. One more:
4. Create a call to action.

A quick note: You could consider all 7 steps to online success important in generating sales and leads. This page, however, talks specifically about obstacles to purchase if all other 5 previous obstacles have been overcome:

1. Get Noticed
2. Drive Traffic
3. Be Sticky
4. Build Trust
5. Stay in Touch
6. Generate Sales & Leads – which we talk about more below.
7. Build Referrals (no skipping ahead to step 7!)

How do you Generate Sales and Leads?

As stated before, this page deals specifically with the sale, on site. This also means lead generation (picking up the phone can calling you. Let’s look at some tactics.

Closing the sale on site is harder than it first seems. There are many steps of trust and ease that must be performed.

Primary Tactics

• Creative Writing: Value must outweigh cost. When someone is looking at a product or service page, there must be a clear winner between value vs. cost. This can be performed in many ways (as many as you can do).
  • Obvious value or cost benefit of you vs. competitor: this can take the form of a chart or list of qualitites.
  • Detailed explanation of product or service, including multiple images if possible
  • Adjunct articles that help customer make the purchase (“how to choose the right hiking shoe for you.”)
  • Creating incentive through offers: “This Weekend Sale 20% off”, “free return shipping if not satisfied”, and “buy two at 30% off!” are all great ways to close the sale.
  • Calls to action:
• Visual Copy & Layout: Clean to read and purchase. Layout of product or services pages should be standardized, easy to read, with a big PURCHASE or CALL US button prominently displayed. If your customers cannot get to the value of a product, why would they buy?
• RSS: Notifications are a godsend. You can tie RSS to a particular product, and then that product goes on sale, you customer can be alerted via email or RSS aggregator.
• Usability Testing: Watching potential customers in real time is eye-opening. Usability testing is an often overlooked step in website design; if can watch your customers mentally ‘process’ the contents of a product or service, page, you can discover how to sell to them better.

Secondary Tactics

• Website Tracking (Analytics): Know where customers fall off the grid of the purchase process.
• Shopping Cart Abandonment: Is the cart working for your customers? Use website analytics specifically to track where customers fall out of the purchase process once checkout is
• Content Building: If you don’t say why, they’ll never buy. Without content, how can you compare between products? Building great content, the content that customers need to see to make a critical decision like purchasing your product, is imperative. You have to tell your customers why they should buy something. Comparison charts between your product and competitor products are particularly helpful here.
• Email Marketing: Run specials. You can run special incentives within your email marketing campaigns, which drives qualified traffic to your website, directly to the product or service, and can track the effectiveness of the campaign. You can also create multiple campaigns within the same incentive program, and see which sub-campaign ‘pulls’ better (more sales).