There is a ton of articles that will explain to you how to increase your online sales, but we’ve found that most of these articles focus on customer acquisition techniques such as improving your SEO, using Google Ads, Facebook ads, marketing emails, etc…
These are very good methods but before trying to get new customers who are completely new to your business will require a lot more energy to convert.
A better approach is to simply sell more & provide more value to your current customers and potential leads.
One of the key elements to that is simply improving the customer experience and your value proposition.
Here are 6 tips that we use at Payge.io to make our customer's payment pages the best in the market with the highest conversion rate.
Tip 1. Personalised content
In 2018 Epsilon (The leader in outcome-based marketing owned by Publicis Groupe) released a study indicating that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides a personalised experience.
Other statistics show that:
- 71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal.
- 70% of millennials are frustrated with brands sending irrelevant emails.
- 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalised.
How to put this in practice?
Here is a few actionable ideas that could be relevant depending on your business:
- Write a personalised letter
- Record your voice with a personalised message
- Record a personalised video showcasing your work
- Adapt your services to your client
- Give a specific example on how your product will impact your customers
- Help your customer project themselves, by creating a personalised creative for them
At Payge.io we make sure our customers are able to personalise their payment page to the maximum, they can create their own from ground up or personalise a template by adding their business branding / logo, texts, video recording, images or attach files.
Tip 2. Add upsells and cross-sells
Upselling is a sales technique that consist of selling a better, larger or more premium version of a product.
Example of upselling: Mcdonald’s selling you a bigger menu.
On the other hand cross-sells is the process of selling an additional product that the customer might not have thought of buying in the first place.
Example of cross-selling: Mcdonald’s offers you fries with your burger.
Your customers are not always aware of your services / options but they might be interested in them.
Some statistics:
- Upselling increases revenue by 10-30% on average.
- 70-95% of revenue comes from upsells and renewals on average (for companies who offer them).
- Upsells are 68% more affordable than acquiring a new customer.
How to put this in practice?
Simply offer products to customer who are willing to spend more.
Technically this translate to adding a reference to the “better” product during checkout or before adding the product to their cart.
At Payge.io we’ve embedded up-sells and cross sell in our platform, making it easy for our customers to add upsell products and cross-sells without a line of code.
Tip 3. Think global, act local
The good things with online sales is that you can reach customers worldwide.
Sell something in United kingdom today, and sell something in the USA the next day…
But this only works if you’ve made sure your services are available in other countries.
Here is a list of things we make sure to get right for our customers:
- Payment pages translated for customers worldwide
- Accept payment methods from the customer country
- Selling in your customer own currency
- Display the appropriate delivery cost for different part of the world
- Making sure your support is trained to answer requests
- Make sure the timezone you operate is displayed to your customers
- Making sure the product is adapted for the country
Tip 4. Increase trust
Creating trust with your customer is another key element that will lead you to a sale.
Trust doesn’t come in one day and is something that has to be built over time.
Here is a list of small things you can do:
- Add testimonials of your current customers
- Show businesses you worked with before
- Make sure your website looks professional (put yourself in the boots of your customer)
- State clearly your sales condition, terms of service, etc…
- Display your customer reviews
- Make sure your customers are happy with your services / products
Trust doesn’t come with a refill…
Tip 5. AB Testing and experimenting
As for many things, there is no A to Z path to running a business, there is many ways of doing it some right some less right.
I like to think that running a business is sort of like running a scientific experiment, you try things, you try to understand why they don’t work and try again.
AB testing is the process of testing two different version of a subject (could be a product page a payment page, a better checkout,…). To test them you split your customers in two equal group, and proceeds to show the A(first version) to the first group and B(second version) to the second group.
Once this is done you simply look at the KPI (sales, conversion rate, etc..) of each version and conclude on which on was the most successful.
You can then disregard the less successful version and run other tests to keep experimenting.
Tip 6. Use analytics and data
As I mentioned in the previous tip, running a business is sort of like running a scientific experiment.
All of us have subjective views, this causes us to have biases and might causes us to make the wrong connection and see things that other might not see. (False Pattern recognition)
This is why I strongly recommend you to use the scientific method.
Keep trying things that make sense to you until the data says otherwise.
If something doesn't work then it might be a case of troubleshooting for it to work.
You can use different analytics tool to help you visualise data, here are a few that we use:
- Google Analytics
- Search console
- Matomo
- Payge.io
- Excel
- Tableau