Beyond Product Promotion – 12 Great Ways To Engage With Leads And Add Value To Get The Sale

Start building trust in your products and promoting them to the leads you’re marketing to.  Here’s what you can learn from your current customers:

• Which products to promote.
• Which areas of your customer support practices need improvement.
• What areas of your Website you should optimize to improve the flow of purchases.

To get the first order from leads, you need to put in front of them the products they’re most likely to buy.  These products should be your most popular products.  By analyzing the buying behaviors of your current buyers, you can identify your best and top sellers.

You can find out all kinds of useful information by listening in to customer support calls, reading their emails or other communications.

• Turn the most common questions customers have before buying into FAQs, email newsletters, or answer them on your Website product’s page.  Ensure your customer support team is also ready to answer customer questions.
• Which areas of the customer support mix aren’t up to par – how fast are you replying to customers (Facebook, Twitter, Email, phone, etc.)? Can having live chat on your Website help? Does your customer support hours match customers’ requirements?

For this Stage, it’s important that the order and checkout process is as easy as possible for your customer to navigate.  If you put them through hurdles, you will lose the order and possibly lose them at the same time.

Set up your Google Analytics so you can get clear stats for how well leads and customers are progressing through your buying cycle.  These stats can highlight areas that might need further testing and optimizing.

Once a customer enters their order information, there’s only one thing they should do next, and that’s to click on the “process order” button.  You’ll have many customers that don’t complete their order, so you should regularly be working to find out the reason they abandoned placing the order.

When leads or customers abandon placing the order, analyze your funnel.  Your funnel will show how many orders begin the sales process, and at what point it has reached until order abandonment.

Find the drop offs in your funnel, then investigate why customers might be leaving prior to order completion.  At the stage of the customer placing the order, try to find what you can do to improve the process.  Does your sales process have distractions you can remove?  If the answer isn’t obvious, then this is where further testing and optimization is essential.

Are You Preventing People from Buying?

I’ve seen it a lot of times where many businesses both small and large make it difficult to buy from them.  It’s to the point where they make the buying process a painful experience.

They put up signs that say “Cash Only” or “$10 Minimum for Credit Cards” or “We Don’t Accept AMEX.”  These businesses don’t realize that although they’re saving money on merchant fees, they’re losing far more in terms of lost sales, lost customers, and lost goodwill. 

It’s like they’re stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.  You want to do the opposite of these businesses so that it will be easy for customers to buy from you.

Offer your customers their preferred payment method – not yours.  You don’t want to punish customers for using their preferred payment method by adding a surcharge.  Rather, factor the merchant fees into your general pricing or absorb them. 

Keep looking for things that could be roadblocks to sales conversion.  Are you requiring prospects and customers to jump over hoops, fill in useless forms or conform to processes that aren’t really necessary?

Look to see how you can remove any and all roadblocks or at the very least make them much easier.

Actions to Turn Leads into First Time Customers

1. You should analyze everything in your funnel, from the time prospects get past your landing page, receive your incentive (lead magnet), and go through your content and sales pages, all the way to order placement process.  You could use Google Analytics but you’ll find that it’s not an exact science because there are so many routes prospects, leads, and customers can take before reaching the order page for your products.

2. Remove barriers to purchase on your Website by conducting Conversion Optimization.  By removing obstacles to buying that maybe present in your sales process, it will become easier for prospects and leads to buy.

3. The name of the game is testing and optimizing.  Such actions will:

• Bring qualified traffic to your Website.
• Answer questions and increase trust.
• Remove barriers that make it hard for leads to buy.

4. Testing and optimization is a constant process that should be performed in order to improve your Website.  However, try not to get totally absorbed by testing and optimization and forget to see the bigger picture.

5. Remove order placement distractions by making sure that once customers are in the order page and are entering information in the order form, they’re able to complete the order placement process.  They shouldn’t be pushed to buy extra items within the same page, no emails, reminder, or live chat pop-ups while entering their order information.

6. Delivery information should be clear and easy for them to find.  Delivery is consistently one of the top reasons’ customers abandon the purchase on your Website – they don’t like the methods, price, or they just couldn’t find the information (let them know about everything upfront, nothing hidden).  By putting it clearly on every page and making it easy for them to find, will improve your sales conversion rate.

7. For the mobile version of your Website, make sure it’s optimized so that each order entry box shows the correct keyboard, e.g. if customers need to enter their phone or credit card number, the numeric keypad shows, when entering email address, the @ keypad sign shows, and so forth.  The key is to not have the customer do too much work at any point in your sales process.

8. If you’re marketing physical products, customers want to know that upon completion of placing their order, there will be available in full to be shipped to them.  As a result, you should make it clear to them the items you currently have in stock.  If out of stock, let them know when they’ll be back in stock.

You can seize the opportunity to build more trust with prospects and customers by offering them the opportunity to sign up for an alert once their item is back in stock.

9. To ensure you’re targeting the right prospects and putting the right things in front of them, you can use A/B Split testing.  This is the process of directing traffic to two versions of the same offer to see which one prospects flock to.

10. Static information can be added to a blog.  First try to work out the kind of content you should put out there and get right on with creating it.  Start off with content you think might make a difference to add value to your customers.

11. How often should you post blog content?  There’s no right answer, but if there are things your audience need to know, then it should be on your blog.  Start aiming for one post week and then increase the frequency as you feel might make a difference.  Start chipping at it slowly and you’ll start to see the benefits of your labor. As you begin to get used to the process of creating and posting content, you’ll become faster. 

12. Creating content for your blog can be very time consuming, so you can outsource it by hiring writers, bloggers, getting guest bloggers, etc.