The conundrum: You need to increase sales, but you don’t have a team of enterprising salespeople to help you meet that goal. Maybe you’re a startup, maybe you’re just not ready to build a full-fledged sales team, or maybe your product or service is just so absolutely fantastic it just sells itself! (But if it did that you wouldn’t need this blog post, so….)
Without a sales team, you need to make sure that your lead nurturing efforts go all the way down the funnel. You can’t stop at MQL. We know sales might not be your thing, but there are several simple ways to amp up your nurturing efforts and clear the path for visitors to make purchasing decisions without a conversation with a salesperson.
The solution: Sales team or no, the following tactics can help you boost sales without having to resort to cold calls.
Targeted email campaigns
Emails are quick, easy, and especially effective if you’re already qualifying leads through the process of lead scoring. If you don’t already do this, you really should start. It will help you understand where your leads are at in the sales funnel, and when and if you hire salespeople, they won’t have to waste time selling to leads who aren’t interested.
You can send emails that promote your business to any sales-qualified leads. Qualified leads are more likely to open your email and make a purchase from your website, making your targeted email more effective than a mass email sent out to every single lead in your contacts. Using this approach, you can also send product or service-specific emails to leads who have previously visited those product pages.
Mobile optimization
It’s safe to say that nearly everyone in 2018 owns a smartphone, so it’s wise to optimize your website for mobile users. This could mean everything from eliminating clutter from your mobile site in order to highlight the purchase path for visitors, to improving page load speed. According to Kissmetrics, even a one-second delay in page response on mobile can result in a seven percent reduction in conversions. And no one wants lost sales due to site performance.
Basically, your mobile site should be as simple as possible to encourage users to take decisive, quick actions that position them to learn more about your brand or simply buy. These tweaks, along with others, contribute to a better mobile experience and encourage users to make purchases from their phones.
Clear sales pathways
How can you optimize your website to maximize sales? Similarly to mobile optimization, page load speeds should be improved, URLs should be simplified (no long, drawn-out URLs), and your homepage should be cleaned up to make a good first impression. Product pages should also be simplified to encourage the sales pathway (remove any distracting, unnecessary buttons that lead potential customers away from making a purchase).
Short on time? There is a WordPress plugin that does a lot of the SEO heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on other matters.
Offers and sales
Is there anything more enticing than a good deal? You can drive up traffic and sales with limited-time promotions on your products or services. Ten percent off a first-time purchase is a common example. This is definitely a quick-fix to increase sales, but don’t rely on special offers to drive your company’s sales in the long run. We suggest using sales and offers as a supplement to one (or all) of the other methods in this blog post.
Advertising and remarketing
If you’re not getting results with softer methods, digital advertising can be a great way to drive engaged, sales-ready leads to your website. Google Ads makes it relatively easy to discover keywords and concepts your potential customers are passionate about, reach them either via Google searches or by following them around the web with remarketing ads, and tweak campaigns. Using your CMS or a marketing platform like HubSpot, you can set up landing pages to capture submissions, and once you get a good pipeline all you’ll really need to do is monitor for sales-ready leads and then reach out to them.
Of course, advertising comes with its own challenges in terms of time, resources and expertise. That’s why you might want to…
Engage with a partner
Any digital agency worth their salt (and perhaps their pepper) can help you set up and launch all the campaigns listed above, and they can work with you directly to better define sales qualified leads and sales pathways.
Gone are the days of shiny-shoed, suited door-to-door salespeople. Today you can make the majority, if not all, of your sales online, and without a sales team. We recommend implementing at least one of these methods to increase your online sales, using these inbound and sales resources to get you started. If you find your company is still struggling to make online sales after all this, then it could be time for a website audit.
