All Marketing and No Sales?
Online marketing, network marketing, viral marketing, email
marketing, target market, guerrilla marketing……..
With the current emphasis on marketing it may be easy to
overlook the fact that without a good sales strategy, the
best marketing strategy may be wasted. Good marketing is
essential to business success, but you must also have a
strategy for closing sales. Even if you are extremely
skilled at one, your business will not survive without the
other. Success requires the right balance of marketing and
sales activities and skills.
In its simplest
terms, marketing is all of the activities that
generate interest in a product or service and sales
is the one-to-one activity that leads the customer
to actually make the purchase. For an online
business, you can think of marketing as the
activities that generate visits to your website.
Sales is what convinces any one visitor to make the
purchase.
Your online marketing strategy may include good
website content, search engine optimization,
publishing a newsletter, advertising, contest
promotion, and link exchanges. All of those
activities promote branding, name recognition, and
increase your website traffic.
A good sales strategy is what influences your
customer to make a purchase once they are at your
website. Your sales strategy must address the
reasons people shop online. You must convince a
customer that your product or service is the best
choice for her. Your sales copy must provide all of
the information needed in order to make the
decision to buy. And you must ask the customer to
make the purchase immediately.
Sales Strategy Tips
Address Online Shoppers
Online shoppers are looking
for convenience, price, or availability. If you sell a
unique or hard to find product or service, that may be all
the sales strategy you need. But if you are one of many
sellers, make sure you don’t inconvenience potential
customers with poor website design, slow loading pages,
hard to find order buttons, or cumbersome order forms and
be sure you are price competitive.
Write Convincing Copy
To convince someone that yours is the right product
or service for her, you must know your target
audience and address their needs and wants. Make
sure your descriptions answer all potential
questions about usability, size, color, taste,
scent, availability, desirability..…. all the
factors that go into deciding whether to purchase a
particular product or service.
Ask for the Sale
Sometimes simply directing someone to “don’t delay,
purchase today,” is all it takes. More often, an extra
incentive, no matter how small, will convince someone to
make the purchase. Whenever possible offer a free gift,
reduced costs, or some other incentive to persuade a
potential customer to make that purchase before they leave
your website.
Provide Quality Customer Service
Be
sure your shipping policies, return policies, and contact
information are readily available and clearly written.
Repeat sales will depend on quality product, prompt
delivery, and excellent customer service. When problems do
occur, how you handle those problems is the crucial factor
in whether you retain that customer and possible referrer
or gain an unhappy detractor.
Do you have the right balance?
How do you know whether you have the right mix of marketing
and sales? If your site has a great deal of visitor
traffic but not many sales you’ll need to evaluate two
things. First, does your marketing target the right
audience? It’s difficult to know who is visiting your site,
but you can make good judgments about where you are likely
reach your target market. If you’re fairly sure you are
reaching the right market, you’ll need to evaluate your
website and copy for good sales techniques.
If
you have little traffic, but most visitors buy, you know
your sales strategy is working and you will need to improve
your marketing efforts.
Resources to help with your marketing strategy:
Resources to help with your sales strategy:
Linda Stacy is General Manager and Newsletter Assistant Editor
for InternetBasedMoms.com. She works from her home in
Massachusetts where she lives with her husband and son. Visit
her virtual office, Another Day Specialties.
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