TRUST TRUST TRUST!

It’s no secret that it is difficult to convert new visitors into a paying customer.  There are a lot ways that your information can get taken by the wrong people out there in cyber land.  How can we overcome this?

Build trust, Duh!

There are a number of ways to build trust, but none are more powerful than online reviews.  Using 3^rd party trusted review sources allows you to give your web visitors the confidence that other people regular purchase from and trust your company.  There are a number of review funnels that help get good feedback from your customers and promote more conversions.

Another way to instill confidence in your visitors that they are making the correct decision in choosing you is an SSL Certificate and the proper security badges.  Having an SSL Certificate is key as you are protecting your customer’s private information, but it also gives your customer a comfortable feeling that they can rest assured they are protected.   Upon checkout security seals like McAfee Secure and Verified Authorized.net can give your customers that warm and fuzzy feeling that they are safe purchasing from your website.

GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR PRODUCT PAGE

There is one place where your customer actually clicks on your products and starts down the path of purchase.  Making sure your product page has a clean user-friendly look is of the utmost importance.  High resolution and high quality images of your products will help increase conversions as it is more clear for your customers to make a decision.

Make sure that there that it is easy for your customers to navigate and answer any frequently asked questions.  They aren’t speaking with a customer service rep, but still often times have questions that need to be answered.   Software Ad ons like Snap Engage can even give you the option to chat with a live person if you are able to dedicate staff time to help with online inquiries.

IMPRESS THEM WITH THE DETAILS

Taking the extra time to create engaging discussion of your products is what drives customers to want or need your products.  Make sure that you appeal to emotions and use descriptive language that speaks directly to your customers.   Most customers are looking for products that will either solve a problem or serve to make them happy.

Product specifications are another important aspect for the analytical shopper out there.   Don’t skimp on the features and benefits when painting the products picture.  More often then note companies will entail the help of a professional content writer to get their point across.

DRAW THEM IN WITH SPECIALS AND COUPONS

Have a huge stock of a particular product you are looking to move?  Make a special highlighting this product.  Email drip campaigns with specials, advertisement on the homepage; there are a myriad of ways to entice your customers that now is the perfect time to pull the trigger on that product they have had their eye on.

Free shipping is always a great feeling at check out time.  Offering free shipping on certain products or all products will really help move the needle when it comes time to break out the credit card.

CREATE URGENCY

What happens if I don’t buy now?  If your customers can see that your stock of a certain item is getting low they will often times not want to risk losing the opportunity.  Making it clear what products you have, what products are sold out and the quantity you have them can help be transparent with the opportunity that is presented to them.  Act now or you may lose the opportunity may seem cheesy, but works.

Want to learn more?  Reach out to Shane Bader with Iceberg Web Design.

The post How to Increase E-Commerce Conversions appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) can be a daunting task. Between Joomla, ModX, Ruby on Rails, Drupal, Concrete5, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, TinyCMS, and WordPress, among others, there are certainly plenty of options to choose from.   In this article we discuss why we build a vast majority of our websites in WordPress and what advantages it has over other CMSs.

Keep Up to Date on the Latest Technology

One main reason WordPress has kept its market share over the years is the constant improvement of the application. Regular updates to WordPress have added more features that allow users to include all types of content. From Fortune 500 companies, to government institutions, e-commerce businesses and membership websites, many organizations have found WordPress a perfect fit.  At this time there are 48,225 plugins for WordPress, allowing nearly endless options for users. Getting these plugins to communicate properly with your website and each other typically calls for hiring a company who works regularly with WordPress and has extensive knowledge of it’s framework, to ensure design and functionality are implemented flawlessly.

Grow Your Market Share

We use WordPress for a majority of our projects because most of our customers are looking to have a high ranking on Google and the other major search engines. WordPress allows us to use best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), that makes it easier for us to rank our customers website. With the exposure of a being found easily on Google, we can help businesses generate a high return on their investment with their web presence. Our main goal is to solve the business needs for our customers and the SEO functionality of WordPress allows us to accomplish this by optimizing their content to rank on Google.

Don’t Let the Hackers Win

In this day and age cyber security is a top concern of any business that relies on their website to perform. Hackers are continuously trying to find loopholes to break into WordPress websites. Not to worry though, Iceberg Web Design has you covered. With regular updates being released, we stay on top of making sure that your website is updated, working correctly and protected from viscous hackers. These updates are very effective in keeping your website safe as long as you are paying attention to their release. This is why it is important to hire a professional team that works on a daily basis with WordPress and its updates to prevent hackers from disrupting your business.

Content is King in This Jungle

There is a saying “content is king” and this rings true for any successful website. To support this mantra, WordPress allows us to integrate different types of multimedia within our customers website. Then having the ability to train our clients to be able to update multimedia such as video, audio and text allows them to make changes themselves or hire us for a nominal fee. The importance of having good content that keeps your website visitors interested in what you have to offer and the information that surrounds your products or services. This is key to a healthy website that produces positive results.

Achieve Results

The ability of WordPress websites to be able to capture information from a visitor that wants to take action and talk with someone is a great feature. Building out your sales funnel is not only important for a business as a whole, but also the ability to incorporate it into your website to capture potential customers information. There are plugins that allow you to export information into email campaigns and incorporate retargeting to stay visible. Being able to incorporate contact forms, squeeze pages and your companies contact info in a creative way that spurs a “call to action” is one of the reasons why we choose WordPress so often.  Consumers want to be able to easily find the content they are looking for, reach out if they want to learn more about your goods and services and often times make purchases directly online. We find that the customizability of WordPress allows us to solve our customer’s business solutions on a daily basis.  This is why we choose WordPress for 95% of the websites we develop at our Minneapolis website development firm.

The post Why WordPress? appeared first on Iceberg Web Design.

In this two-part series, we will talk first about how leads enter your sales funnel and then how you will convert those leads into customers.

Step 1: Entering the Sales Funnel

The top of the funnel is often defined as the awareness stage, where as they are just now becoming familiar with your company, products and/or services. At this point they are typically interacting with your sales and marketing efforts. With these efforts it is important to maintain a consistent message across all levels of their interaction.

Step 2: Customers Take Action and Progress Through the Funnel

During some point in these efforts potential customers will “take action” and reach out in one form or another. Making this easy and seamless is of utmost importance to generating qualified leads that turn into clients. Some customers may want to call directly and talk to a professional. Others may want to fill out a contact form and wait for a call from you. Other times customers will want to walk into your place of business and talk face to face. Advertising these different ways to interact, while advertising the same consistent message is key to the consistent growth of your business.

The lower stages of your funnel are all about the actual sales process they experience. Leads at the middle and lower stages of your funnel are the ones most likely to turn into closed paying clients. These are the potential clients you want your sales representatives interacting directly with as to get the most out of their time.

Keep Your Funnel From Leaking

Minimizing the breaks in the funnel is key to generating consistent revenue for your business. During any point when the sale moves through your funnel, the potential customer can be lost in the cracks for a myriad of reasons. Making sure that you are addressing all of their concerns, explaining the advantages, and moving through the process with consistent messaging will minimize the cracks in your sales funnel. The more granular you focus your stages, the easier it will be to identify where the leaks are happening.

Retargeting To Maintain Interest

One tool that has proven to be a great to recapture and reengage your potential clients is the use of retargeting across multiples mediums. Taking your website as an example. Only 2% of traffic converts for most websites on the first visit.   Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion.   The design of your Website along with use of retargeting can help get the most of your visits.   Displaying your message and branding across multiple mediums will keep reminding potential customers of what they can gain from your business.  By recapturing their interest it creates another opportunity to reengage you companies sales funnel. There are lots of different tools to retarget and increase your conversions. Building your database of clients that have interacted with your website or ad, it makes it possible to continue to interact with them.

There are two types of retargeting pixel based and list based.   Pixel based is a way to redisplay your information across any anonymous visitor. List based is redisplaying to potential clients that you have gotten their contact information in your database. Moving potential clients along the funnel it is necessary to have good retargeting practices.

Join Us Next Week For Part 2

 In next week’s article, we will be talking about the sales process and turning the leads in your sales funnel into paying customers.

To learn how Iceberg Web Design can help with your sales funnel and retargeting, contact Shane Bader 763-350-8762 or email [email protected].

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