10 tips to generate more revenue from your online business

For many businesses nowadays, it’s the Internet that’s a significant revenue generator. Setting revenue targets for your website and projecting growth plans are a great start and look great on paper. However if you haven’t mastered the reasons why visitors will spend money with you, you’ll find it hard to covert visitors into active customers. Here are 10 ways to increase revenue from your website starting with building online trust to optimise the visitor’s on site shopping experience.

Building trust with your potential customers is the first step to convert more. You must remember that in most cases the visitor has yet to visit your website and might not even have heard of it. Building trust will increase the likelihood of making a purchase.

1. Display your full contact information - Having your address, company reg number and telephone number listed in a visible place across the website will help boost credibility, an important part of building trust.
2. Make sure you have a privacy policy - Visitors will often quickly scan your homepage to see if you have listed a privacy policy. This policy highlights what you intend to do with their information and in some cases might be included in the website’s terms and conditions.
3. Double check grammar and spelling - Poorly constructed product or service pages and especially those with grammar and spelling mistakes will instantly cause a lack of trust.
4. Display 3rd party accreditation - Highlighting your association with well known organisations is useful for building trust. 3rd party accreditation and association could be, in its very basic form, displaying a PayPal logo or your Yellow Pages badge (that is, only if you’re signed up with them).
5. Encourage customer reviews and testimonials - Accepting reviews some glowing and some less can help build overall trust. While some might view these with a skeptic eye, others might find it convincing.

After building basic trust with website visitors, the next stage is optimising the online experience to ensure visitors will part with their money on your website.

6. Check your prices regularly - Statistics say that over 85% of website visitors first visit your website because they are conducting market research. Therefore they are likely to view other offers on other websites so make sure your prices are always competitive.
7. Diversify product offers - Some customer groups find sale items appealing, some find ‘buy one get one free’ appealing and some find free delivery appealing. To increase your chances of converting any of these customer groups consider diversifying product offers often.
8. Place your best sellers up front - Most of your website visitors will first visit your homepage therefore it makes sense to put your best sellers on the homepage. You could also apply the same logic to displaying your best seller on a category level.
9. Cross and up sell when possible - Increasing revenue by cross selling is often used under “customers who bought this also bought that”, while up selling is often achieved by suggesting complementary products. Both are very popular ways to increase revenue.  
10. Offer additional payment gateways - Very similar to diversifying product offers, some customer groups might prefer to pay by credit card. Others use one of the big 3rd party payment gateways such as PayPal and Google Checkout. To maximise your conversion potential try and cater for these customer groups as well by offering two payment gateways.
    
I hope my tips will point you in the right direction.

Guest article by Michelle Strassburg Head of Sales and Marketing at online hardwood flooring vendor Wood and Beyond. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing.