11 Tips for Closing Online Sales

Even if you rise to the top of natural search through SEO, get viral traffic from community sites, or earn customers through brand loyalty, you still face the daunting task of converting those visitors into sales. ATG recently published an article called “Eleven Ways to Close More Online Sales” that outlines strategies for building relationships with customers while shopping that eventually lead to a higher rate of conversion. Here’s a recap:

1. Begin with the right mindset: Serving your customers better. Focus on meeting your customers’ needs, not your company’s objectives.
2. Recognize that an idle shopping cart may not be an abandoned one. Many customers (they claim up to 50% of purchasers) add items to the cart, abandon, but then return to finish the purchase an hour or more later.
3. Re-engage idle shoppers with email. Their research showed that emailing customers who had abandoned checkout was three times more effective at converting people than mass-market email campaigns.
4. Make the cart work better for shoppers. Make sure your checkout process is as few clicks and pages as possible, and be sure to include helpful information like product photos.
5. Let the cart do the selling. Present conditional merchandising during checkout to encourage additional purchases (for example, free shipping with a minimum purchase amount).
6. Use alternative shopping carts. These can be wish lists or social shopping lists.
7. Use the human touch to close web sales. Because nearly 30% of online sales come from customers who want to speak with someone before completing the purchase, customer service phone numbers are key.
8. Simplify your checkout process. Ensure your back-end technology is causing a clunky front-end experience.
9. Cross-sell and up-sell during checkout. You can promote other items that customer previously viewed or related items that similar shoppers have bought.
10. Accept additional forms of payment to reach new customers. In addition to accepting typical methods like credit cards, consider adding newer forms like PayPal or Bill Me Later.
11. Test constantly to discover what works best with your own customers. As a usability professional who has worked on checkout processes, I can’t agree with this statement enough: “Sometimes small, unexpected tweaks can result in significant improvements in conversion rates.”

You can download the full article by signing up for a free ATG account. (If you register, they automatically sign you up for their mailing list.)

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