Key ingredients for a successful sales-oriented Web site

A White Paper

A Web site on the Internet has almost become a requirement for any company doing business these days. Different companies have different goals for their Web sites. Some Web sites are designed to deliver technical information to existing customers, others follow traditional publishing models, and yet other sales-oriented sites are designed to direct their visitors towards buying products or services from the owner of the Web site. These sales-oriented Web sites are a unique form of advertising and marketing. In order for these Web sites to be successful, a number of key ingredients must be present in the design, content and ongoing maintenance of these sites. This White Paper describes those ingredients as well as the overall philosophy and promotional methods that result in successful sales-oriented Web sites.
 

Introduction

A successful sales-oriented Web site combines the best practices of traditional advertising and marketing with the interactive tools available on the Web. A Web site can be a powerful selling tool because it combines the qualities of a display ad, a detailed brochure or catalog and a retail store. In a traditional advertising medium a display ad can attract someone’s attention enticing the reader to take action. Brochures and catalogs convey detailed information about products and services. Retail stores allow a person to actually buy. A single well-designed Web site can do all these things at once!

A sales-oriented Web site acts as a 24-hour virtual sales person that can take a visitor through the entire sales process. It starts by presenting the company with its mission statement and the unique selling proposition. It educates the visitor to help him or her become ready and willing to buy. The site then helps the visitor choose the exact product or service that will fulfill his or her needs. Finally, it could even take the order online. Very frequently this process is split across multiple visits to the Web site.

In order for this sales process to occur on your Web site, it must be specifically designed to facilitate it. This is achieved through a combination of user interface design, strong sales orientation on every page and the choice of appropriate content. The following sections describe each of these important elements in detail.

 

User Interface Design

Navigation and Orientation

Easy Web site navigation is achieved when a new visitor to a web site can quickly, easily and intuitively move throughout the site. The visitor should be able to navigate freely, both within particular sections and between them. Orientation refers to the visitors’ ability to easily determine exactly where in the site’s overall navigation structure he or she is at any time. Without proper orientation visitors cannot decide where they are and cannot navigate to where they want to go.

Whatever navigation and orientation devices (i.e. navigation bars, menus, etc) are used on a site, they must be consistent throughout. Every section must be easy for the visitor to navigate without requiring a return to the home page. Orientation techniques such as highlighting, shadowing, etc. must allow the visitor to quickly determine where in the Web site they are regardless of how they got there. It’s always a good idea to supplement any graphical navigation features with text links, perhaps at the bottom of a page. In addition, if a visitor prints a page, the orientation devices used on the page must make it possible for a visitor to return to this page without knowing the exact URL.

Easy to reach contact information

Visitors must be able to reach a contact page containing e-mail, mailing address, and phone numbers from every page. Many visitors to your Web site just want to get to your phone number and call you. You should make it easy for them. The link/button to such a page should be prominent. The visitor shouldn’t have to hunt for it.

Professional-looking graphics and HTML layout

Your Web site doesn’t have to have fancy graphics or complex frames, dynamic layers, etc. But it must look professional and have a perceived quality of design that is at least equal to that of your competitors. If your competitor’s site looks like it was designed by a top design firm and yours appears to have been designed by a high-school student, your competitor will look like a much more successful, established, reputable, etc. company than yours.

Search-engine friendly design

In order for your pages to rank highly on search engines, your pages must be structured in a "search-engine friendly" way. This includes hidden features like the use of <META> tags and putting important keywords in the title of every page. Visitors and search engines alike will benefit if every page on your Web site has a headline at the top followed by an introductory paragraph that presents the main ideas on the page.

Because search engines frequently deliver visitors directly to any of the pages within your Web site, it is important that each page on your site can stand on its own and deliver a strong sales message to the visitor. Think of each page on your site as a stand-alone display ad that must grab the person’s attention, present some benefits and entice the visitor to take action.



Strong Sales Orientation

Traditional sales and marketing principles still apply

Just because your sales and marketing message is online doesn’t mean that the traditional sales and marketing principles and techniques don’t apply. Your site must be targeted towards a particular audience and you may need to create multiple versions of your site to cater to different types of visitors. Your site should follow the rules of written marketing material by stressing motivators, being benefit versus feature oriented and so forth.

Because your Web site is also the place where visitors select the products and services they want to buy, you must make it easy for them shop and avoid overwhelming them with too many choices. That’s where retail-merchandising techniques come in. By highlighting selected products or services you help visitors make the decision to buy.

It is extremely important to demonstrate to your visitor the value of shopping online. One of the reasons people purchase products and services on the Internet is the perception that they are more likely to get a great deal online. By changing the "value offer" frequently (i.e. monthly, weekly or even daily), you can create a reason for a visitor to return to your Web site regularly. Even if they are not ready to buy they may visit the site again because they will be interested to know what hot deal you are going to have next month.

Actively lead the visitor through the sales process

One of the most common mistakes you can make as a Web site owner is to assume that visitors to your Web site want to buy the type of products or services you sell and that they want to buy them from you. It is true that the visitors to your site are probably in the market for what you offer but you still need to make a sales effort to convince them that what you sell is what they want and that they should buy it from you and that they should buy it now.

To put it simply, sell, sell, sell! Every page of your site must be a self-contained sales piece that contains enough clearly stated benefits to entice the visitor to at least continue and visit other portions of your site. Use attention grabbing banners, promotions and specials on every page in a way that does not overwhelm visitors and does not detract from the contents of the page.

In addition, your entire site must be structured in a way that will lead visitors through a sales process starting with the introduction to your company, a sales piece on why they should buy from you, a description of your products and services along with pricing, promotions and specials that entice visitors to buy now, and finally a call to action and the way to fulfill it. This can be achieved with suggestions to the visitor in the form of links at the end (or on the side) of each page what pages to visit next (or to go straight to the buying action).

An important element of online sales is creating a way for you to stay in touch with visitors even if they are not yet ready to buy. Give them a reason to register at your web site even if they don’t buy anything. Use drawings with prizes or e-mail information of perceived value in exchange for registering.
On the other hand, if the visitor is ready to buy make it easy for them to place the order whether it’s online or by calling a toll free number.



Site Promotion and Content

There are two basic methods of attracting visitors onto a site: Advertising and Public Relations. The method appropriate to your site depends largely on content.

Advertising

By advertising heavily both in the traditional media and online on search engines, directories, relevant complementary sites, etc. you can drive visitors to your Web site. On average, the response rates of online advertising are similar to direct mail or print advertising, 1-3%. Well-targeted advertising such as banners and links on sites catering to niche markets or purchasing words on search engines can be more effective.

The Advertising method of promotion is very straightforward and does not require any special content aside from the usual "reasons to buy", product or service information, and information on pricing and promotions. The problem with this method is that advertising can be very expensive. For example, Yahoo charges thousands of dollars per month for targeted banner ads.

Public Relations

The PR method concentrates on getting free advertising for your Web site. As opposed to using the benefits of your products and services to attract visitors to your Web site (as you would in the advertising method), the Web site itself (i.e. its content) becomes the reason to visit it. To achieve this your site must have what people in the industry refer to as "magnet content".

Magnet content attracts visitors to your Web site because of the genuine value of the content itself to your target audience. Magnet content can be in-depth information on technology, tools, laws, and news, whatever is relevant to your audience. It can also be interactive tools that allow the visitor to instantly calculate, process, get information, etc on their topic of interest.

Everyone wants to share the knowledge of useful free tools available on the Internet. Because of that, the greatest value of magnet content is that if it is really good (compared to competitive sites), everyone who learns of your site and its content instantly becomes a promoter to their sphere of influence. Both online and traditional media will be happy to publicize your Web site as a useful tool to their audience, giving you better results than any advertising you could ever buy and at very little cost to you.

Once you have a Web site with magnet content, you will need to announce its existence to relevant media contacts, owners of relevant complementary sites, etc. This is usually achieved through a combination of press releases issued to established lists and services and personal communication with representatives of key sites and media professionals.

An important note is that your magnet content must be updated frequently so that it doesn’t "lose its pull." When these updates are made new features can be related to those media contacts, renewing the site promotion cycle. Plus, frequent updates to your Web site will improve your ranking in some search engines.


Other Tips for a Successful Site


In addition to proper design and content, having a successful Web site also requires a strong commitment from your entire organization to effectively support your Web site. You need to plan ahead, ask yourself who in your company has both the time and skills to keep your site updated, how often do your pages need to be updated and who will respond to visitor comments and e-mail (which must be done within 24 hours!).

You also need to continuously evaluate the relative effectiveness of your site and make appropriate adjustments. To do that you need to constantly test different promotional techniques and search engine optimizations. You need to analyze the usage patterns of your Web site to see where visitors are coming from, what path they take to move through the sales process and where they stop without buying. This will help you identify potential problems with the strength of the sales effort on a given page or with the site’s usability.

In fact usability of your site must be carefully watched as you balance between adding "magnet" interactive features to your site and keeping your Web site accessible to people with older browsers from different vendors, small screen sizes, etc. These considerations in addition to good navigation and orientation systems as well as good readability of all of your pages (which is achieved with proper choices for font type, size, color, background color, etc.) are extremely important to the success of your site for a wide range of visitors.

Finally, an important thing to keep in mind about Web sales is that it needs to be part of an overall marketing effort both in the traditional media (which should always reference your Web site URL) and online. Online it should also utilize other Internet tools such as mailing lists, e-mail auto-responders, forums, etc. to build long-term relationships with your potential customers and establish your company as an authority in its field.



Conclusion


This White Paper covers the most important elements of a successful sales-oriented Web site. The ideas presented here should provide you with a good starting point for improving the effectiveness of your existing Web site or planning for a new one. However, because the specific techniques and methods for organizing your Web site around the sales process and improving your site’s usability are beyond the scope of this paper, we recommend that you seek help from Internet Marketing and User Interface Design professionals.
 
 
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