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.
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Hi Michelle,
Thanks for the tips. I’m just setting up my website to sell fabric to Canadian quilters and this was very helpful.
Thanks so much for this wonderful advice! Love, Goddess
I’m setting and ecommerce site on silver jewelry and this tips are just great!
Definetely trust buiding is the most important aspect of an online bussiness.
Thank you so much for your wonderful tips on generating more revenue for your online business. I’ve had an ecommerce site for about 2 years now and generating sells has been my biggest struggle.
Thank you for your post,
I’ve read some of the things you posted in a few books, however its always nice to be reminded to revamp things and double check how we present our presence on the web.
Tina D.
women-owned-business.com
These are excellent tips! I’ve recently come across some ecommerce sites that are attempting to appeal to the Gen Y consumer by using some form of internet speak (”lol”, “j/k”, poor spelling in general) and it’s such a huge turnoff. Your third point is right on - consumer trust is directly proportional to the lack of grammar/spelling mistakes!
Hi, I’m am just starting out with a new webstore and this list was a huge help - thank you for posting it.
I didn’t realize that a privacy policy was so important, very good to know.
Thanks again!
Great info!
“Double check grammar and spelling” - this is very important. I don’t know how many times I’ve found a site which had obvious typos. It creates a very unprofessional feel and you can lose a sale just because of that.
The big challenge is, need to find things that sites like amazon.com don’t sell or don’t focus on. Its best not to compete head-on with giants but pick niches.
hanks so much for this wonderful advice 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.
Online businesses are tough to start. But I enjoyed your blog post about the topic. http://www.bizology.biz often has great information on how to build a business system. Thanks again.
This is a wonderful list, thanks for sharing! I’m not selling a product but I am “selling” a service so this is useful for any venture.
Thanks for the tips. It will help me in how to grow my online business.
Many thanks, I found the 10 tips very helpful; trying to build conversions for my health and beauty products website. Trust is big and visitors need to know you care…with trust comes a following and interaction with potential clients…needed result…conversions!
Thanks for the nice tips. It will definitely help me as I’m in a process of building my website.
Michelle, this is a great article.. as a web designer, we try to teach these techniques to our clients. Business is all about trust, and building trust on your website could make the difference between someone buying a product from you, or leaving your site and buying somewhere else.. again great article!
Very informative post! Online privacy is a big issue as many ecommerce sites collect and retain personal information about customers. Ecommerce site owners should provide a privacy policy and post it on the ecommerce website. Once you have privacy policy in place, be sure to remain in compliance with it — if not your business can face costly legal fees.
Hi Michelle, thanks for these legit tips to run an e-commerce site in a planned way to attract most of the users to buy from us only.
I would like to use these tips at my e-commerce site where I use to sell the Old Books and hope will get increase in sells.
Thanks for putting up this article !
Hey Michelle,
thanks for this article! Its very informative and even beeing a newbie online I can follow these 10 steps! Thank you so much!
Hey Michelle,
Wow Great tip
And really useful info
Thanks for the tips - very useful. I’m going to set myself the goal of doing the top 5 tips by March.