4 Website Features to Boost Your Sales

Your website’s content isn’t the only thing that drives sales. How your website looks, and how easy it is to interact with, also informs whether customers decide to buy from you, or navigate to a competitor. A few key website features will help you keep potential customers engaged for longer, hopefully long enough to make a purchase!

Videos

People love to watch videos, and you can keep them engaged with your website by providing interesting and relevant video content. If you’re rolling out new products, consider videos that explain how those new products work and what’s great about them. Use videos to answer some FAQ questions, or post videos about industry news. They don’t have to be long and they don’t have to look like you shote them in a Hollywood studio, they just have to be short and informative.

In fact, if you put videos on your landing page and substitute some of your text for video content, you could increase your conversion rate by as much as 86 percent.

A Great Mobile Layout

Imagine you’re surfing the web from your smartphone and you come across a website that looks like something out of the early 2000s viewed on a first generation BlackBerry with a white background and blue underlined text in Times New Roman. Terrible! You wouldn’t be able to navigate away fast enough.

Having a stellar mobile layout is extremely important when you’re trying to boost your online sales. So many people use the internet primarily through their smartphones these days, so it’s important that your website looks good for these potential clients. For those with slow networks, it can be difficult to load pages with too many graphics and videos. Those with faster networks, like T-Mobile, will find loading pages easier.

Bear in mind the variety of screen sizes. While some will be using a phone with a large screen like the Galaxy Note 5, others will be using smaller screens that make it harder to navigate. Avoid the complicated layouts, bad graphics, and difficult user interfaces that crop up on bad mobile sites.

The text has to be readable, the graphics need to be simple, and you don’t want to send anyone through too many screens to get to the information they want. It may take you longer than you expected to craft a superior mobile site design, but it’ll be worth it when you’re done.

Customer Reviews

People like to know what they’re buying before the box arrives, and if you’ve ever been disappointed by an internet purchase before, then you understand why. In the store, people can physically examine the products they’re thinking about buying. They can test them, touch them, and ask employees about them. Online, the closest thing is reading customer reviews from people who’ve already bought the product.

Display customer reviews. Highlight a few quotations from your best customer reviews right on your landing page. Then, on your product or service pages, display more customer reviews so that potential buyers can read what others have had to say. Make the customer review form stand out, so they know they can leave a review if they’re satisfied or unsatisfied.

Live Chat

No matter how many technological innovations shape how we do business, one thing will never change: good customer service is essential to keeping a business afloat. In a physical store you have employees there to answer questions and offer help. The store is also the place the customer can return to if something is wrong with their purchase. Online, it’s frustrating when the only recourse a customer has is to shoot an email into cyber space, fill out a form, or call an 800 number and hope that after hitting zero enough times they get to speak to a real person.

Add a live chat feature to your website so that customers can reach out to someone in real-time. If you’re a small operation, you don’t have to run the live chat 24/7. Run it during business hours, and as long as you post the hours in an obvious way, customers will respond. Live chat is a quick and easy way to give customers help, answer questions, and handle any problems they may have with their purchase.

When you show customers you care about their experience on your website and take steps to engage them, they’re more likely to trust that your products and services are top-notch as well.

Image via Flickr by wocintechchat.com