When you own your own business, you need to make sure that you are able to tick the boxes on everything from the moment a customer arrives on the site to when they receive a confirmation email for their order.
Finalizing a sale is incredibly important, and luckily there are some things you can do to speed things along.
Start Before the Sale
You need to set yourself up as a trustworthy seller as soon as you launch your products. There are so many ways that you can set up a business, and you need to make sure that you are putting all the tools in place to ensure that customers are able to complete a sale.
One of the best things you can have is a review section. This is not always for your benefit – instead, it could be of more use to your customers. They will be able to give feedback on important points like shipping time and the helpfulness of your customer service. You can then make adjustments to your operations as needed. You always need to ensure that your website is the best it can be before you pursue complete sales.
Advertise Honestly
To try to attract attention to your website, you might often run special deals or flash sales through your social media. If you do decide to go down this route, you need to make sure that you are always advertising your products as honestly as possible.
Consumers do not like to be tricked in any way and the promise of a sale or a deal that is not real is one of the worst ways to go about it.
Make sure that any adverts you post fully explain what consumers can expect on your site. Even in the middle of a busy sale, you should also try to take down links to products that are out of stock. This will avoid people becoming disappointed and clicking away if they find that the one thing they actually want from you is already gone.
Watch the Website
What is the current state of your website? You always need to make sure that you have one that will load quickly and will be as responsive as possible. Though you might offer one of the most unique and interesting products on the market, a bad website might be enough to drive the customers away instead of welcome them in.
Start with the basics. The website needs to be a safe place to shop, so make sure it has the latest security. No one is going to want to put payment information into an unsecured site, so you need to make sure that this is ticked off your list quickly.
You should then make sure that the site loads quickly. If a customer gets stuck inside a loading page for more than just a few seconds, they are going to become frustrated and might either reload the page or click away. If there will be a page that takes some time to get through, make sure it has a notice warning customers that this is the case.
Finally, make sure that the website is easy to navigate. The cart should be accessible and other aspects of the site should open without issue. These are all truly basics and you need to make sure that they are in place to ensure that customers will want to stay on your site.
Follow Up on Abandoned Carts
People load up their carts, take things all the way through to payment, and then decide to abandon their carts for all sorts of reasons. However, you need to make sure that you are following up on these abandoned carts. They might have accidentally left the page and just never decided to go back, or they could be in two minds about whether the purchase is right for them.
Most e-commerce sites will have a member’s function, so you will be able to monitor the purchasing habits of your most loyal customers. If you see that one of them has indeed abandoned a cart, you should send up a follow-up email to try to convince them to complete the purchase.
Take a look at these abandoned cart email examples to find out more about what you should be putting in this content. It is a crucial step in ensuring that this sale falls through, as you never know what might have caused someone to initially walk away.
Always Ship Quickly
It isn’t good enough to just finalize one sale. You need to make sure that you can manage the next one, and the one after that. Ultimately, you want to convert a one-time customer into a repeat one. How do you do this? With a stellar shipping experience.
First of all, you need to make sure it is quick and inexpensive – especially if items need to travel overseas. However, there are some shipping companies that want to get packages from A to B as quickly as possible but the transit of the packages is extremely poor.
Ask for the opinion of your customers. They might be happier to see the package arrive in one piece if it took its time and was just a tad more expensive. Shipping is a balancing act, but it is one that can make or break your products.
Be Confident
Have confidence in your brand to finalize that sale and chase the leads that you have wanted for your business. There is always a way for you to make an improvement in your operations and get to the position that you want to be in.
Chasing and finalizing sales is just going to be one cog in your whole machine, but it is affected by the entirety of your customer’s journey. Make changes across its entire length and you should soon see more customers completing sales. Keep their well-being at the front of your changes, and you should be able to grab some fantastic results overall.