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Turning a Prospect Into a Customer Posted: 26 Aug 2009 09:26 AM PDT There is nothing more frustrating than checking your website’s analytics and realizing that, although a visitor has just spent over 10 minutes reading through a single webpage, they have not made a purchase. Sometimes it can be almost heartbreaking, because no matter how hard you try to increase sales, turning a prospect into a customer can appear to be a near impossible task. Sometimes the key to turning a prospect into a customer is not a change in your website content, but rather a change to your purchase page: Is it easy to find? Is it easy to use? Can your visitors trust you with their credit card information? One of the reasons that it is difficult to turn a prospect into a customer is because the customer may have a difficult time locating the final sales page, gets frustrated, and eventually leaves your website to search for a better purchase elsewhere. In order to increase sales, you will first need to check and make sure that your order form is easy to locate. Sometimes the best way to do this is to write a small paragraph that tells your visitors exactly where and how to find the order form. Also, try placing the link to your order form in an attractive, noticeable box at the top and bottom of your webpage, so that no matter what part of the page the visitor is looking at, they can find it easily. Offering multiple payment options is another way to increase sales. Some visitors to your website may be uncomfortable providing their credit card online and may instead want to pay with PayPal. Others may not trust PayPal and instead choose to pay with check or credit card. Whatever the reason, the more payment options you have available, the easier it will be for you to continue turning your prospect into a customer. It is also a good idea to improve your website’s credibility. One of the ways to do this is to offer secure encryption technology on your website’s order forms. In addition, offering a money-back guarantee (and sticking to it – something that many merchants have a problem with) is a good way to increase sales and offer a better user experience. Finally, increase your credibility by offering a method of contacting you, whether it be by email or phone number or both. And make sure that this method is easy to find on your webpages and is easy to use. Providing your contact information can be doubly effective, because if a visitor sends you an email asking you a question about your product, you will be able to remind them of your product when emailing back. Reminding a visitor of your product is an effective way to increase sales. Turning a prospect into a customer is no easy task. If you have noticed that although you are continuously tweaking the sales pages, but you are still not getting sales, following these guidelines can help offer another way to effectively complete the transactions you’ve been waiting for. This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box, are unchanged. To find out how you can bring the pieces of your online business together, go to: http://www.elitewebsolutions.com . Copyright 2009 Larry Lang. All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources %%Turning a Prospect Into a Customer%% Turning a Prospect Into a Customer

10 Tips For Creating a Brilliant Landing Page Posted: 25 Aug 2009 10:00 PM PDT Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers. While a great looking website can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services. Wikipedia defines a landing page as: the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-ngine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines. Wikipedia’s definition sums it up nicely but there is certainly more to a great landing page then relevant and keyword rich content. Here’s 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page: Relevant Content A landing page’s content should be directly related to organic search results, PPC campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other targeted inbound advertising, online and offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will be more likely to leave. Multiple Landing Pages A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website should have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages that will focus on specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher. Focus on Functionality More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind. Call To Action You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear a highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page. Send a Clear Message Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point. Offer Incentive Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more then your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials. Make Visitors Stay Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around. Simple is Better Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for. Power of Freebies Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality. Testing In a recent post “How to Turn Website Visitors into Buyers”, I’ve stressed how important testing is in finding out what your visitors like. Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion. Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics apps. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results. Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean website’s success or failure. Joanna Colek is the owner of Joanna Ciolek Web Design Studio, based in North Denver, Colorado. She offers affordable, custom and effective web design services to small business owners. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources %%10 Tips For Creating a Brilliant Landing Page%% 10 Tips For Creating a Brilliant Landing Page

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