10 Ways to Help Your Website Sell
Like most people in different professions, we as web designers have a tendency to neglect our own websites. My own site is now under redevelopment because I couldn’t believe how long ago it had been since the last time I worked on it. While most of my customers are referrals, they still go out and look at my website. This makes it important enough for me to pay attention to my website’s content.
Update Your Website Often
Of course any SEO expert knows the value of updating their website. It draws the attention of the search engines. Search engines aren’t the only reason to continually update your website. Clients want to know that you are staying up with the times. Update your design once a year to reflect the current design trends on the internet for your core client base. Content updates help your site to stay fresh and give the customer plenty of reasons to stay on your website. Copyrights should have the year they were developed, but you should also list current year. For example, list your copyright like this - © 2000 – 2009. This also gives your potential client an idea of just how long you’ve been in business as well as an idea of your experience level.
Fix your broken site
This is something that shouldn’t have to be mentioned but I’ll put it here because it bears repeating. You simply have to make sure your website is working. It’s not just broken links to outside resources you need to fix, it’s the way your website works in the different browsers. You need an nice clean exciting layout to promote yourself but more importantly you need a website that works. Test your website often. Visit it once a week to check that everything is working in multiple browsers. Make sure all links are still working. Check your site as you check your website’s statistics. You are checking your stats right?
Don’t Be Pushy
You’d be surprised at how many times I’m browsing the internet and find people using the old tactic “buy right this minute or you’ll never see this price again”. While promoting specials are great, reserve most of them for your current clients. Attach real dates to them. And don’t be pushy about it like the above sales copy. No one likes to be pushed into purchasing something, especially in web design. You need to let your problem solving and benefits make the sale. There is also the fact that most large web development projects are custom projects with specific price tags attached to them. When you set a price, you open yourself to projects with unexpected commitments that you cannot recoup. Now that’s not to say that you shouldn’t run a sale occasionally. But, if you do, list the time period of the sale for everyone to see. Just make sure you don’t tell every customer that visits that they must purchase now (today), because most customers will price shop and compare products before they purchase.
Solve Their Problems with Your Services
Most web designers list the product or service features, but that doesn’t tell a potential client how this will help solve their problem. Remember that your website is also your salesman. Salesmen find out someone’s problem so they can fix it. Just the other day I had a young lady come to my door selling a cleaning product.. She was quite good in an infomercial sort of way. The key thing that she did was to get me agreeing with her about my problems and that I wanted a safe product around my pets and my kids. So as you write content for your website, think about how you can get your visitors to agree with you about different problems they are facing. Then, show them how you can fix their problems. Show them the benefits of using your services. It’s easy to say you’re the best web designer, but go a step further and tell the customer what that means to them. In other words, what’s in it for them? If you have trouble defining your benefits, ask the one person that would know best – your customers! If they are happy with your products or services, they will be able to tell you what problem it overcomes and the benefit they receive. Besides, what better way to find out how you’re doing in servicing their needs?
Include Contact Information
As the internet has grown, so has the number of fly by night operations. One day they are here and the next they’ve disappeared. Make sure you have physical address location posted on your website as well as a phone number. This information is reassuring to potential customers. It gives your business a professional polish rather than the appearance of hiding yourself behind the internet.
Make It Easy to Pay
With a web development company, this can be tricky. Most web design customers don’t purchase until they talk to you or have reviewed a proposal you’ve sent them. However, you can still offer them a way to make a payment on your website. The best way is to accept credit cards.. If you don’t have a merchant account already, the easiest way to get set up immediately is through services like Pay Pal, Clink Bank, and 2Checkout. For those of you willing to offer products to the Do It Yourself course, you can sell templates and guides. Sometimes the DIY people end up becoming clients because as you know, building a website is harder than they think. You are then in the position of offering your services to these potential clients.
List Your Guarantees
Everyone wants to feel that if a service or product they’ve purchased is not up to the standards or expectations they thought, that the company will take care of them. And because of that, you should always list a guarantee. It doesn’t have to be a full money back guarantee, but it should be a reasonable amount of time or a reasonable procedure to follow in order to rectify the issues. And better yet, if you have a web application or open source application that you customize for clients, you could allow a limited amount of time for a “test drive”, it will decrease the apprehension some people have about doing business with someone they don’t know.
Include A Privacy Policy
This may not seem obvious but a privacy policy makes your website more professional. When you include a privacy policy, you are saying to your potential customers that you have policies in place to protect them. You’re also saying you’ve thought about how you will run your business. It’s another element to your website that tells the customer that you are not a fly by night operation that will disappear once you have their money.
Include Terms and Conditions
This is also a way to convey to your customers and potential customers how your company does business. This is the place to list exactly how you do business and in what conditions you will offer a refund. You have to take into account that the majority of your customers or not looking for something for nothing. Now I will admit there will always be a small percentage of your customers that will try to take advantage of you, but you’ll find most customers just want to be treated fair and know you’ll take care of them. Setting up the terms and conditions on your website will also help deter people whom you probably wouldn’t want as clients.
Tell Them What’s Next
After they’ve purchased or started the contact process, tell them what the next step will be. If they will be downloading a template or application, let them know when or how they will download it once they’ve completed their purchase. Or, if you will contact them, let them know when you will contact them and how. Or better yet, give them options on a form. Let them choose how you will contact them. Of course, the best way to handle it is to contact them within a day. You don’t want to give them a chance to change their mind. Make sure you explain each step and show them what great customer service you provide right from the beginning.
We preach to our customers all about how important their website is to their business. As web designers it is important to practice what we preach. This list is only a partial list of things that we as web designers and developers need to do to our websites so that they do the sales job we need them to do.
Web Out
Des
Tracey Grady:
An excellent set of points to remember and implement, including some which are not necessarily obvious, such as including a privacy policy and providing information on what happens after a customer/client makes contact or payment. That last point is something which I believe is broadly overlooked; I’ve been recommending it to my clients for some time because it really sets them apart from most of their competitors.
Las Vegas Website Design:
One More Important Factor which I believe your website should have to sell itself.
Your website needs to have STRONG CALL TO ACTION.
From that I mean it should be fairly easy for a customer to find what they are looking for & call to actions related to either newsletter subscriptions, request proposal or contact us or otherwise the telephone numbers.
Research has find that website with strong CALL TO ACTION tend to get better results whether it be a lead or a sale !
Affordable Web Designs:
You do have great points. Also you will need to have really good alexa scores, traffic, and different types of revenue generating from the website. People want to make money and if you can show that the website is currently making money then you have a strong case for selling your website at a competitive price.
PJ
Restaurant Website Development:
You bring up two very good points
1) Don’t Be Pushy
2) Solve Their Problems with Your Services
People need to avoid using what I like to call gobbledygook when trying to sell their services. Just be clear and let people know what they need to know.
Brad Sherrill:
Very excellent points indeed, and I would say content, content, content is the key always!
Ryan Hearn:
“Don’t be pushy”
I like this one very much. It does seem currently everywhere on the web, from e-commerce stores to PPC ads, advertisers and site ops are shoving incentives in our faces. Actually heard a quote on this the other day: “If you talked to people the way advertisers talk to people, they’d punch you in the face!”
Hopefully thoughtful articles like this will change this trend. If not, the web may soon be in all caps…
Daniel:
excellent points. These tips will help everyone in the market.
What Do You Think?