When looking to boost the revenue generated by your website consider adopting one or all of the following strategies.
Dangle the Carrot with Inbound Marketing
Visitors to your website have a one-track mind. They want to get what they need and get the hell out. It’s up to you to capitalize on the opportunity to convert a visitor into a customer. The traditional solution to this challenge is to bombard your site visitors with endless calls to action for deals, discounts and more information. But the best solution is to present visitors with the information they seek while receiving something valuable in return. Inbound marketing is a practice that follows several steps to ensure that customers are engaged with the right offers and the right content at the right time. Leads require cultivation, and inbound marketing nets you the information you need to convert visitors into leads and leads into sales.
Back to the carrot. Think about your website in terms of the value that it offers to visitors e.g. your services, your ‘secret sauce,’ your content. For example if your website hosts an article listing “5 Easy Ways to Grow Followers on Social Media” and the article is getting a lot of traffic from search terms like “Social Media Marketing Ideas” or “Improve my Social Media marketing,” you gain practical insight into the needs of your visitors. Use this insight to create content that will bring in more visitors. Now ask yourself, “what are visitors doing once they find what they are looking for?” If the answer isn’t “contacting my company” then you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
If we apply inbound marketing to the example above, the scene changes dramatically. With inbound marketing we take a desirable piece of content like the “5 Easy Ways to Grow Followers” article, and convert it into a downloadable format like PDF or eBook. We display a portion of the article content to the visitor upon landing on the page. Then we offer them the complete downloadable file as instant gratification for filling out a simple contact form. If you prefer to display full articles on your site, you can convert a collection articles into a topical ebook and offer it as the incentive, while keeping the full articles available to visitors.
With inbound marketing visitors volunteer their contact details including the background information you need to facilitate your sales process, in exchange for the valuable resource they were searching for. Smart leads are worth giving away a carrot or two.
Add Value to E-Commerce with Product Bundles
Your e-commerce business is missing out on revenue. It is typical for online merchants to sell out of a handful of products regularly, while the bulk of the products remain on the shelves failing to generate revenue. E-commerce brands are adopting a new strategy to aid in liquidating slow moving products: product bundling.
A product bundle is a package of two or more products sold together for one price on a single sku. The goal of product bundling is to increase your site’s average transaction value and ‘add value’ to popular products. We do this by bundling popular products with less popular but related products on a single sku at a discounted price. For example instead of selling a popular pair of boots for $300 and a slow moving bottle of boot cleaner for $25, you sell a bundle, the boots and the boot cleaner together for $315.
The key to this strategy is bundling your popular products with products that are not only slow moving, but also high margin. Bundling high-margin products allows you to discount the bundle while still clearing a sensible profit margin. In the example of the boot cleaner, assuming that the vendor purchased the boot cleaner at wholesale for less than $15, they are making more money from the sale of the bundle than they would be on a sale of the popular product alone. That being said, the other key to this strategy is to NOT bundle two popular products. Under most circumstances bundling two popular products at a discounted price can only hurt your revenues.
Try bundling products and then posting the bundle to your brand’s Facebook page as a limited time offer. Measure the response, rinse and repeat with different bundles until you discover a few winning combinations. You will find yourself selling out of bundles in no time.
Capitalize on Mobile Traffic with Responsive Design
Share of web traffic is shifting to mobile devices at increasing rates. Take a look at your site analytics and make note of the growth in mobile traffic over the last 24 months. If your site is not optimized for mobile and tablet devices, mobile visitors will become frustrated with the experience and leave your site for a competitor. Visitors can become equally as frustrated with an app or dedicated mobile site experience (e.g. mobile.oniracom.com) that does not support the full functionality of your site.
The solution is Responsive Design, a smart take on user interface design that kills three birds with one stone. The three ‘birds’ are desktop, mobile and tablet device visitors, and the one ‘stone’ is a responsive website. Take a minute to pull up http://oniracom.com on your computer and your phone or iPad. You will notice a few differences between the user interface on each device.
First, the URL for the website is the same whether opened on a desktop or mobile browser. Second, the site content is optimized to be viewed within the bounds of each screen without requiring any double-tapping or pinching. Third, the menu, header, footer and other website features also scale to be device optimized.
With responsive design, all of the design elements and content on the site respond to the browser window through which it is being viewed. All of this happens in real time using fluid, proportion based grids, flexible images and CSS3 media queries. The framework for the layout of the site is based on relative units like percentages, rather than absolute units like pixels. Responsive design is the new standard for website design and should be made a priority for the next iteration of your website.
Use responsive design to capitalize on your mobile traffic, creating a better experience for your site visitors and a smarter canvas for your content.
Need Help Getting Your Website Up to Speed?
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Justin Davis is the Sales and Marketing Coordinator at Oniracom. You can follow Justin on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn
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