Internet Marketing for Wealth CreationLesson 5: On-line Business "to Sell Products" (Part 2)
|
In a conventional business you get to meet the customers, look at their eyes, facial expressions and body language. They can look at you, your shop, brochures, products, etc. It is possible for you to convince them to buy your products.
During the marketing process on the internet, you are not going to meet the customers. The only way you will interact with your visitors is through your website and later communicate through email. So it is much more difficult for you to sell your products to a customer online.
Unlike a shop, the website will have many doors to enter. When someone is seaching for a product/service, the person is not going to search your url, unless he/she has already visited your website and knows your domain name! Your visitors may reach any page of your website!
Keeping that in mind, you need to plan your website in such a way that your visitor finally reaches the order page (and of course purchases your product).
A website may contain any or all of the following: 'Home page, Sale letter, Subscription form, Order page, Payment confirmation page and Product delivery page'. In addition, depending on your strategy, you may have 'Various landing pages, Subscription confirmation page, Subscription through Squeeze page, etc'.
If you are specialized in a subject and have designed a product, you need to create a mini site. A mini site is the one that sells just one product in the front-end.
Usually the sales strategy of a mini website is to direct the visitor from 'landing page' to 'sales page', then to 'order page' and then after collecting the payment, to the 'product delivery page'.
One of the powerful strategies of a mini website is to 'deny' any information to the visitor (prospective customer) unless he/she subscribes (with name and email address) to the seller's mailing list. This is basically forcing the visitor through a 'squeeze page' and then (after subscription) provide necessary information. This helps the seller in 2 ways: Keep frivolous vistors away (thus saving on bandwidth usage) and chance to followup through email later, if the visitor does not purchase during the first visit!
No strategy is better than the other. As you had seen in the first part of this chapter, initially you choose a strategy based on your product, target market and the competitor. However, the final decision will entirely depend upon the results after testing each strategy.
You need to design your website to funnel your visitors through the sales process and take them to payment gateway! The major portion of the process is achieved through a "Sales Page" also known as 'Sales Copy or Sales Letter'.
As the heart of any sales process is the sales page, you need to give special attention while creating this page. Though it is not difficult, it involves lots of trial, error, correction, testing and tracking. If you are not confident, you may hire a professional to do the job for you.
Writing a Sales Letter
A sales page is not just to display the specifications, features and the price of your product, but to talk to your visitors and convince them to purchase your product.
Unfortunately, you will not be sitting next to your visitor to make them read your sales letter. So you have to write your sales copy to persuade your visitors to read it from the headline to the end and then to take their decision.
This section will guide you in creating a powerful sales letter. There are many books available on this subject. But there are no fixed rules for writing a sale letter. A sales copy that works perfect for my product and my method of marketing may not bring in expected results for you.
The end result of your sales copy depends on various actions like how you brought your visitors to your website, where you advertised, what you promised to pull them to your website and the demand for your product. There are many other factors that can govern the effectiveness of your sales letter. The colours, graphics, your dominance over language, font size and the way you present, all must appeal to your target audience. It may be difficult for you to believe. Even a small change to your sales copy could have major impact on your sales.
A sale letter could be short and sweet in just 1 small page or can run as lengthy as 10 pages with lots of information. Your ultimate aim is to convince your visitors to buy your product. The fact is that a 'long copy' works better than a 'short copy'. If people are interested in what you write, they will read as much as you can write.
The following are the generalized ideas that you may consider while writing your copy. Remember: to implement these ideas you must first understand your target audience and the benefits that your product will give them.
Grab Attention
Be it the caption of your sales copy at your website, subject line of your email or heading of your advertisement, the first thing you must do is to grab the attention of your prospective customer. The intention is to make them read further. Be creative and form the words that will grab attention. People use certain words known as "trigger words" like secret, tips, hot, discover, insider, free, warning, etc. Try to make it memorable so that even if they do not get attracted the first time, they remember your heading and search you later when they need you.
Writing to Please Your Audience
In the earlier chapter you did research to understand your competitor and their target audience. You must have already decided to whom to target. Now put yourself in your prospective customers' shoes.
Assume that you are the visitor to your site. What were you searching before reached the website? What would be your expectation while you are at the site? What should be the content of sales copy to please you (as a prospective customer)?
Get inside your visitors minds. You have to trigger their emotion that is associated with your product. It can be anything, desire, lust, greed, fear, envy, angry, whatever. It's strong. You have to tap into that emotion.
Building Relationship
Best way to do this is to talk to your visitors through the sale letter. Let the message flow naturally, in logical order, as if you are talking to them personally. Include some story or your experience and make it interesting.
Benefits not the Products
From the 'Heading' till the end of the sale letter, talk about the benefits that your product will give. Never mention about your product till the end of your letter. By the time you talk about your product at the end of your sale letter, your prospects have already read all the benefits and advantages with an open mind, without thinking that something is being sold to them.
Benefits not the Features
Repeatedly stress on the benefits of your product/service throughout your sales copy and not about the features of your product. What is the ultimate benefit that your target audience can expect from your product / service?
The Offer
Your page should create a desire for your offer and urgency to grab the offer instantly. Your sale letter should focus on just one action of your visitor. Your offer could be to sign up for your free list or join your members' site or buy your product. Never give options on your sales page.
Ask for Order
You have to ask for the order. Though it is not at the beginning of your sale letter, you must ask for the order. Offer incentive for ordering immediately. Show them in step-by-step how to order.
Guarantee
It is natural that any human will feel the pain if he / she has to part with his / her money, especially when they are not aware of the value of your product. Though you have listed the benefits of your product, you need to make them more confident in order to make them pay you. To do so, backup your product with an extraordinary money-back guarantee. Don't worry, if your product is good you will not get returns.
Payment
After lots of efforts you succeeded in convincing a person to buy your product. Now if you do not make it easy for them to pay you, the order is going to slip away from your hands. You have to provide all the possible methods to collect the payment.
First and foremost, you must be able to accept credit cards. If not you will lose more than 50% of your orders. You can open a merchandise account with your bankers to accept credit cards from your website or you can apply for the same through agents.
Alternatively you could register with companies like 'PayPal', 'eGold' or 'StormPay and ask your customers to pay using credit card through them. One problem here is that your customer needs to register with those companies before they pay you (latest update: your customer need not register with PayPal to pay through credit card). Some people do not have the patience to go through the registration process, especially if they are not regular buyers on the net.
If yours is a physical (tangible) product, you can take order and ask them to pay when they receive the product (payment-on-delivery basis). In this case, it is a good idea to phone and confirm with them before you dispatch the product.
Or you may provide your multi-city bank account number and ask your customers to transfer funds or deposit cash or cheque in your account. Finally, you can ask them to post you the cheque or demand draft (it's most unlikely they will take pain to do so - still there is no harm asking!!!) and send the product on receiving the payment.
Testing
Like any other part of the online business, testing the sales copy is essential. Initially, you must create at least 5 different versions and test 2 versions at-a-time. This is called A-B split testing.
There are various programs available to do this test. If you have Google Adwords account, you can split test your website, free-of-cost. They call it as "Website Optimizer".
You may search the web for more information from here:
Previous Chapters
Lesson 1: Introduction to Internet Marketing
Lesson 2: Online Business v/s Conventional Business
Lesson 3: Major ways of Earning Money On-line
Lesson 4: Understanding Legal Aspects and Scam
Lesson 4: (a) Usage of Credit Cards, Passwords and Misuse
Lesson 4: (b) Copyright, SPAM and Scam
Lesson 5: Online Business to "Sell Products"
Lesson 5: (a) Get an Idea to Create a Product
Click Here to Help Your Friends!