The 3 Steps From Interested Customer to Sold When a potential customer clicks on your site, they've already said "yes'' a little bit.
By John Rampton Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
"Yes" is a powerful word. With just three letters, "yes" opens doors, moves mountains, and unlocks your success in business.
And yet, getting to "yes" in sales is hard, especially online, where the personal touch that is so effective is missing. I focus on getting to yes in my business every day. A "yes or no" answer makes things black and white. It's how my company knows exactly how to focus our time and gain more conversions.
In online marketing terms, when a visitor arrives at your website, they've already committed to a "micro yes." Regardless of how they got there, they've already shown some interest in your proposal, content, website, product or service. Leveraging that micro-yes into a macro-yes is vital.
Unfortunately, instead of building on small commitments, most online businesses throw road blocks into the buying process. My company did back in the beginning. With our web traffic, instead of making it easy on visitors, we made it difficult. Since improving our micro conversions, our traffic is converting almost twice as often online.
Here are three keys that I've found you need to make sure you're giving your prospective customer that they want.
1. Make finding what they want easy.
For an online business, user experience is king. Based on the premise that people want what they want as easily as possible, Steve Jobs' famous "Rule of Three" stands out as the standard for making it easy on your customers to find what they want.
As Walter Isaacson explains, Jobs' one demand was to "simplify." He would go over each screen and apply a rigid test: if he wanted a song or a function, he should be able to get there in three intuitive clicks. If he couldn't figure out how to navigate to something, or if it took more than three clicks, his feedback was brutal. The Rule of Three can be applied to any website. Boil down the entire buying process (your sales funnel) to just three clicks.
As a marketer, online user experience should be a top priority. Keep tabs of your customers' thoughts and intent through platforms that gather these insights through funnel analysis or surveys. Solutions like Marketizator and UserTesting help you personalize and optimize based on user data, as well as gain insight through real users interacting and rating with your site. The difference is that Marketizator provides a SaaS solution to implement adjustments on the fly, while UserTesting requires on-site adjustments to implement the optimizations.
Each of those three clicks is its own micro-yes that must culminate in a macro-yes. You can rely on external help to make sure you are following the behavior of your leads closely, and understanding the potential of those micro-yeses. I personally use Trendemon and MixPanel to track our user behavior from initial impression to the final click.
Related: Key to a Successful Business? Simplify, Simplify AND Simplify.
2. Show what you're selling in action.
The process of moving from a short series of micro-yeses to the final macro-yes should unfold like a story. This means making your customer the central character, their problem the enemy, and your product the solution.
A favorite method of mine is Dr. Robert Cialdini's six weapons of persuasion, social proofs that focus on the power of concrete examples like testimonials and endorsements. This way, when your visitor sees and hears from others just like them, who use and like your product, their belief in your solution skyrockets.
If other people said "yes," your prospective target demographic will too.
Related: The Best Practices for Selling Via Social Media
3. Offer custom coupons.
I love coupons because, like and everyone, I want to feel like I'm getting a good deal. We find that offering custom coupons is a terrific way of generating new sales based on personalization. Custom coupons cater to each visitor on our website with a particular need recognized by their buying or viewing history. I give them exactly what they want. That makes saying "yes" easy.
Custom coupons are also good for generating brand awareness, which is why they are also known as "social coupons." If one customer is satisfied with the coupon offer, there is a great likelihood they'll pass on this information within their social circle. We can get an average of 1,000 coupon views per customer that posts them. Wouldn't it be great to have your brand in front of another 1,000 people?
You have something your prospects want. The point is to build on small yeses that culminate in a big yes by making it easy to find what they want, showing your products in action and offering personalized coupons. The smaller you make your onsite yeses, the better. So, what small yes can you start with today?
