Enjoy this guest post from Mike Seddon

It’s a fact that many businesses are loosing money through a leaky web purchase process. Most of these businesses choose to ignore the problem and will prefer to look at increasing traffic as the way to grow sales.

The analogy I like to give is to imagine you had a bucket with holes in it that you needed to fill with water. What would you do first? Fix the holes or just try to fill the bucket with water faster than it is leaking? Believe me; many businesses go for the faster filling leaky bucket solution!

What I want to do is show you five ways you can fix those holes and just by doing that you will boost your sales because you’ll close all the sales that were originally escaping you. In other words, you make more money from the buying traffic your website is already getting.

Step 1 – Stop Hiding that Buy Button!

You’ll be amazed how many businesses seem to hide the buy button. They make it blend in with the colour theme of their website or they put it below the fold (ie: you have to scroll down the website to find it).

Just making your buy buttons stand out and putting them in a prominent place will boost sales. Trust me. Try it.

Step 2 – Don’t ask for stuff you don’t need

Why is it that some websites ask for my inside leg measurements when all I’m trying to buy is an ebook! Why do they need that information?

Okay so I am exaggerating but you know what I mean. We’ve all been to sites where we have to fill out screens of questions before we can just get our credit card out and buy the darn thing.

So take a good long look at your payment screens and make sure you are only asking for information that you need to make the sale. Keep it short. Keep it brief and get the money!

Step 3 – Reinforce the Benefits

When most website owners install their shopping cart software they tend to only concentrate on setting up the pages so that they can collect the data they need to process the sale. They miss an opportunity here to help ensure the sale. If they were to add benefits of the products onto their payment screens they would find that less people abandon the shopping cart. Seeing benefits of your purchase as you go through the sales screens reinforces your desire to own the product and keeps you in the process.

Step 4 – Use Testimonials

This is the same approach I just outlined with benefits. Make sure your sales screens have testimonials. It helps reassure your purchaser that they are making the right decision in buying from you.

Step 5 – Guarantees

Do you offer a guarantee with your product? If you do make sure you repeat them on the purchase screens, especially the one that asks for the credit card details! What’s the point of having a guarantee if you don’t shout about it and use it to make sure you close as many sales as possible?

If you don’t have a guarantee then shame on you! Offer one.

The better your guarantee, the more chance you will have to make the sale. So make sure you offer a compelling guarantee. You may worry about the cost of honoring your guarantee but let me assure you that the increase in sales will more than cover any slight increase in costs due to covering a guarantee.

So there you have five easy ways you can quickly fix the holes in your purchase process and boost your sales as a result.

Once you’ve done those then you’ll be ready to increase the traffic to your website safe in the knowledge that you will maximize the sales from that extra traffic. You’ll find lots of free advice on increasing your web traffic using website promotion at the KKSmarts website.