How To Increase Your Revenues More Effectively

We have seen that you can increase your revenue by increasing your traffic, merchandising and improving your C.R (Conversion Rate). Though you should use all the three techniques, there is a particular order in which when applied will result to making more money more easily and consequently is more effective. This order has such far reaching effects on your total web revenues that it worth dedicated attention.

In trying to increase sales in your website there is a natural urge to increase your traffic. Simply double your traffic and you tend to double your income. Unfortunately increasing traffic is the most ineffective of the three. As we have previously seen here, you have two options in increasing traffic; first, you can buy traffic through PPCs (Pay per Click Search Engines) and/or you can optimize your website for Search Engines (SEO). Buying traffic is the more ineffective of the two. This is because every visitor to your site costs you money. This automatically eats into your revenues. On the other hand SEO is a specialty few internet businesses willingly want to tackle. It involves designing your web-pages to rank high in Search Engines like Yahoo and Google. This in turn results to increase in internet users who find your web-business. This traffic is free. Unfortunately the mechanics of SEO have a long learning curve few are willing to learn. And to make matters worse, results are not guaranteed.

The more prudent approach to increasing revenues would be first to increase your Conversion Rate (C.R) before merchandising and/or increasing traffic. And this can be attributed to two reasons. First, a higher C.R ensures you are making the most money possible from a given volume of traffic. A poorly converting website is equivalent to a leaking bucket. Such a website loses willing and able buyers which amounts to losing money. The cost of losing willing and able buyers can be enormous. Apart from the immediate loss of profit, there is the loss of repeat business. This makes other strategies like merchandising ineffective. All in all the cost of losing willing and able buyers due to poor C.R amounts to the lifetime worth of a customer.

The second reason to opt first for an improved C.R to increase revenue has to do with control. Unlike increasing traffic to your website, improving your C.R involves testing and changing elements within your website to find the most effective combination. Though not an easy task, the fact that you control nearly everything about your C.R gives desirable control that you can manage to your benefit.

Once you have a optimized your C.R, you can then reap the maximized benefits of other two techniques for increasing web revenues, namely merchandising and increased traffic.

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How To Increase Web Revenues

Last week we looked at Adsense etal that have proven to be both powerful and effective revenue streams as a compliment to your primary offer. However, most internet businesses still search for methods to increase their total revenues. Indeed most websites are producing far below their potential. There are three main ways you can increase your web revenues.

First, you can choose to increase traffic. The life blood of internet businesses is in traffic – your website visitors. No traffic means no customers which consequently means no sales. The more targeted visitors come to your site the more money you can make. For example, if your site has 10,000 targeted visitors a month at a C.R of 1.8% and you make Ksh 1,000 per sale, then your revenue would stand at Ksh180,000. If you doubled the traffic to 20,000 your income would automatically double without doing anything else. It is no wonder that this is the most preferred means of increasing revenue for most internet businesses.

This involves strategies like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PPC campaigns, Article submissions and Link exchanges to mention a few.

Secondly you may opt to merchandise. This involves encouraging the already paying customer to spend more money. This technique that is so popular in our local supermarkets also has it uses online. ‘Back-end products’ is a common term used to refer to merchandising on the net. This is whereby once a visitor makes a purchase of your lead product, you overtime introduce them to other similar and/or related product- the back-end products.

For example, you can sell a Fitness e-book and make Ksh 1,000 per sale. Thereafter you can introduce your customers’ mail list to fitness equipment that nets you a profit of Ksh 5,000. Usually if you have gained your customers trust from the first sale, a significant percentage of the customers will make a repeat purchase. This automatically increases your revenue. One can keep recycling the same customer list making money by offering value through merchandising.

This technique is especially useful in introducing high ticket items that customer would otherwise be too cautious to spend on first time.

Thirdly you can increase your CR. For example a site with a C.R of two percent can be redesigned and reworded to increase it C.R to six percent. Such a jump would automatically increase your sales by 300% without merchandising or increasing traffic. Though the most potent of the three strategies it is the least used because of it complicated nature. It involves alot of testing and retesting of different elements of your web pages as well as website structure. However for maximum effect you should use all the three strategies.

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Desire Determines Conversion Rates

Once you have grabbed your visitors’ attention you want to sell each and every one that fits your customer profile. The only way to do that is to create enough desire for your offer for them to take action. Indeed the majority of an online sales letter or copy is made up of persuasive content with the express purpose of creating desire. Its persuasive ability entails the quality of the copy.

A poor copy has little conversion. The visitors are neither motivated nor compelled enough to take action now. The sales copy allows for procrastination and the like. Eventually the visitor does not buy. The very nature of the internet is such that if you cannot convince a visitor to buy now, they will probably buy somewhere else. You will lose them forever.

A fair sales copy results to half-hearted buyers. Such buyers tend to have a “so-so” kind of perceived value of what they have purchased. Often you will register higher rates of refunds. For the ones who keep the product or services, most were motivated to buy anyway so you just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Equally important fair copies will rob you off the viral effect that results from word of mouth. Word of mouth commonly referred to as buzz online, can be a huge contributor in increasing both sales and conversion rates.

You want a zing bang copy that has you visitors still tingling with excitement weeks after a purchase. This will only be achieved by sufficiently creating desire and ofcourse a product that over-delivers. Sales is said to be a transfer of enthusiasm. Online, a sales copy should do that literally – pun intended. The reason for quality prospecting and capturing your visitors’ attention is to bring them to this point. And this is where conversions happen.

Creating desire involves persuasion which in itself is a transactional process that results to change in beliefs, attitude and/or behavior. The choice of words in the sales copy; sequence of though; what you choose to draw attention to ,what you do not; how you say what you say and what you do not say; these and more contribute to the effectiveness of you persuasion. With persuasion comes desire which demands action hence a conversion.

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Creating Effective Headlines

You have less than five seconds to capture the interest of your visitor. Unlike face to face sales where a prospect will stand poor salesmanship for etiquette sake, online the back button beckons. It is said people do not get bored in print. If a page does not deserve their attention they just flip over. Online, they click the back button; alternatively they go to the next link. When this happens, your chances of a conversion have just gone up in smokes, many times, for good.

With such a short yet critical time available to make an impression on your web visitors, effective headlines play a major role in getting results.

AIDAS, a common sales acronym that stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action and Satisfaction outlines key points in the sales process. The more visitors you can squeeze through this process the better your conversion rates. This far we know that prospecting involves grabbing the attention of a specific customer profile by using keywords. But as mentioned, the reason for prospecting is not just to increase web traffic – turning heads so to speak. Rather it is to successfully lead them through a persuasion process and make conversions; sales or otherwise. As such, in the short time you have a prospects attention you need to quickly turn it into interest. Gaining their interest allows you to engage them. Engagement means that the prospect is opening up for persuasion. The visitor will be thinking, let me see what they have to say.

An effective headline should be able to get attention and translate it into interest. This is done by creating a rapport. A rapport engages your prospect by harping on their immediate interest. You achieve perfect rapport when your headline identifies spot on with what your visitor is thinking when searching for the specific keyword.

For example, if a visitor is searching for a Samsung hands free accessory, the keywords “Samsung” and “hands-free” in headlines would demand their attention. The exact keyword phrase “Samsung hands-free” on the other hand would grab their attention in a snap. This is the power of keywords in a headline.

If the visitor was unsure of how exactly to go about choosing the best accessory, the headline “The Cheapest Samsung Hands-Free” may demand their attention but will only translate to reserved interest if there is no option. However the headline “How to choose the best Samsung Hand-Free” would resonate with the problem the visitor is trying to solve and consequently create a basis for a strong interest. Keywords and resonating headlines that allow engagement (rapport) create effective headlines.

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Conversion Starts by Prospecting

An effective and efficient conversion starts by accurate prospecting. Indeed any good business plan starts with an accurate identification of its market. Likewise prospecting, which is a part of a websites marketing effort, has the onus of identifying effective demand in the market and thereafter wooing it.

Like the majority of web-marketing, prospecting occurs outside of your website. It involves getting the attention of the most likely customers and creating a rapport with the intent of introducing you business offer. The phrases “Targeted Visitor/Traffic” and “Qualified Leads/Visitors” so often used here refer to such individuals. Targeted traffic exhibits a propensity to buy. They show strong indicators of effective demand which is both the willingness and ability to buy. And though you cannot exactly qualify a lead in this early stage of a conversion process, they should show signs of both interest and ability to purchase.

Such interest is exhibited by a surfer searching for terms relevant to your offer in Search Engines or engaging content related to your offer. For example a surfer that searches for the term “Motorola C139″ is a prospect to an internet mobile phone accessory business. Similarly a surfer that is reading content about weight loss is a prospect to a purveyor of dieting pills.

Due to the monstrous size of the internet, poor prospecting can result to unnecessary inclusion of ineffective demand in your flow of traffic. This will in turn place unnecessary stress to your conversion techniques and further result to poor conversion rates. Ineffective demand occurs often due to lack of ability to pay. And this is not always due to lack of financial ability.

For example, a website whose offer is only good in a specific region in the world will tend by default attract ineffective demand from regions not included for the offer. This is simply because the website has a worldwide presence. Such a case is synonymous with crowding your supermarket aisles with people who will never buy. And though you cannot completely steer clear of ineffective demand prospecting should serve your sales process with the most likely customers.

Prospecting involves finding customers where they are and grabbing their attention. There are several techniques you can use to achieve this. Next week we will look at the major techniques and how to include them in your web marketing.

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Benefits Tend To Out-Sell Features

Would you care if a newer model of your car has a 90 degree engine block, whose cylinder displacement had been enlarged and compression increased? And that the old single overhead cam, three-valve-per-cylinder-head had been replaced with a dual overhead, four-valve-per-cylinder head with variable cam phasing on both intake and exhaust cams?

But what if the car salesman told you that the car’s new engine version allows for more power with no increase in fuel consumption? And they further gave you an example; that with the new version you would over-take another car moving at 60 KPH on a hill at half the time you would with the older model with absolute zero increase in fuel consumption. Which then gives you powerful accelerations as well as higher speed without increase in fuel cost.

I bet the second pitch would pique your interest for the new model. Obviously so as it gives you a feel of what the car will do for you. It explains to you the benefits of owning the new model. The former pitch would probably appeal to an expert mechanic, but gives the rest of us commoners a headache.

Desire, which in turn result to sales, is created by developing on the interests of the client. You do this by identifying an appropriate feature or a characteristic of your product and showing how they gain or benefit for that feature. Simply listing a feature or even worse, going on and on about a feature without showing the customer the benefits they get from having it, will work against conversion.

You realize in the above example that it is the new engine design that results to the powerful acceleration and fuel efficiency. However a good sales man will not harp on the engine design. Rather they will detail the benefits of the power you get from having the new engine design.

This by no means implies you should not include you product features or attributes in a sales copy. Infact a short detailing of the dynamics, technology or mechanics of a feature can exhibit expertise. Just do not forget to connect how those feature turn to benefit to the user. Nearly always, benefits out-sell features but often work best in tandem online or off.

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