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Do
You Have A Clear Path to Purchase?
Have you ever been to a
store, and when you were ready to make your purchase, you couldn’t
find anyone to complete the sale? Well it is just as frustrating
when it occurs online as offline, and it’s a sure fire way to lose
customers as well as potential customers. So if you are advertising
a specific product, test the purchase process and make sure it’s
quick and easy. Sending advertising traffic to a site that’s hard to
navigate is a waste of money.
The path to purchase may make complete sense to you, but you need to
ensure that it makes sense to your potential customers as well.
Visit your site and try to keep an open mind. Make sure your links
to purchase are clear and visible, and not overpowered by adsense or
other advertisements. Also, make sure your purchase links are in a
logical place, and not just in a place where you had room on your
website.
Visitors should be able to easily see where the purchase points are,
they should not have to look for them.
Also, see if a friend or relative would be willing to “test”
purchase an item. You can offer to refund their purchase price, or
you can simply ask them to be your first sales! Ask them for their
honest input on how smoothly the transaction went, if they received
any error messages, and if they received the product in a timely
manner. This is especially important if you are advertising an
electronic product such as a pdf file or e-book. You want to make
sure that as soon as their payment is confirmed (and not before)
they receive the download link or file.
Don’t neglect your thank you page. The thank you page isn’t just a
nice way of using your internet manners, it is also an excellent way
to offer other products or services that are related to the product
that you just sold. Many experienced internet marketers will tell
you that a good deal of sales come from offers made on their thank
you pages.
Although the hope is that your customers won’t ever see one, it is
also a good idea to upgrade your “404 Error” page. Your error page
can be edited to offer specials, discounts, and links to your other
pages and products, it doesn’t have to be a dead end. By
personalizing your error pages to point your visitors towards your
products, as well as offering personal apologies, you will seem more
“human” and visitors are more forgiving of people rather than
machines, and it will also help to restore their confidence in your
website and your products.
Depending on the client that you use to accept payment, you will
also want to ensure the security of your transaction for your
customer. Many internet purchasers won’t complete a transaction is
the “https” isn’t showing, as well as other security features. Make
sure that whatever method you use is secure and that your visitors
know that it is secure.
Once you’ve checked all of the above, start advertising and hearing
that little “cha-ching” each time you check your e-mail and see that
you’ve secured another sale! Congratulations!
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