Buttoning Up Your Sales
There was a time when I was a door-to-door salesman selling…doors.
Just kidding, but seriously I’ve sold a lot of things. In fact one of the most memorable moments of my sales career is of a former sales manager.
He had a favorite piece of advice that he’d throw out there when we had customers cancel their contracts a day or so after purchasing, “you guys need to do a better job of buttoning up your sales”. On the surface of it this might sound like a strange thing to say. But what he was referring to was the fact that although its often relatively easy to get someone to agree to a purchase (or to get someone to your website), if you don’t close the sale in the right manner your sale could disintegrate right before your eyes.
Buyer’s Remorse
You folks that have been in sales may know what I’m talking about. It’s that thing called buyer’s remorse that turns a substantial amount of new purchases into returns, charge backs, and cancellations.
Introducing Clicker’s Remorse
I think there is a similar phenomenon that takes place with online purchases. Online though I wouldn’t even call it buyer’s remorse; it’s something that I instead like to refer to as “clicker’s remorse”.
Due to the nature of online conversions. where the customer may need to initiate multiple “clicks” before the final conversion clicker’s remorse is much more encompassing than its cousin (offline buyer’s remorse) because there are multiple opportunities for it to crop up on your consumers-in the shopping cart, on the initial landing page (bounces), after the sale, and etc.
Example 1: Organic SEO
Here’s how it works. Let’s say that you are a new web developer and you develop premium WordPress plug-ins. Armed with your keyword research you’ve managed to get your site to come up in a couple of important long tail results.
So now you’ve got a visitor who’s just landed on your web site after going through three searches. Finally, after scanning the search results page their eyes have been led near the bottom of the page to your listing. So they click the result and end up on your landing page.
They’ve read the testimonials., they’ve clicked through your website pages, and now they’re on the order page staring at the call to action. And this visitor really wants to buy, after all by now they’ve already got a solid thirteen minutes of their time invested in this endeavor.
But guess what? Instead of buying they abandon the order page and made a beeline straight for the Google. Perhaps they did this because although they were comforted by the fact that you came up high in the search results they’d never heard of you before.
Example 2: Paid SEO (PPC)
Let’s look at a second scenario this time. Suppose that instead of using organic SEO to drive traffic to your site you invest solely in PPC.. But unlike the first example, because you understand the cost of driving clicks to your site you’ve put more effort into creating a sticky landing page.
So you’re getting enough orders to justify the ad spend. But you’re noticing that PPC is the exclusive generator of your traffic-clocking a whopping 80% or 85% of your total monthly unique visits.
This means that the moment you
1) have a sub par month with conversions or
2) have an issue occur that forces you to pause your campaign you’re in trouble. It should also be noted that in this example the clicker’s remorse occurs on the backend-the customer purchases once but never comes back.
Example 3: Social Media Optimization (SMO)
In the third scenario you are an SMO pro who also does WordPress plug-ins. You’ve figured out how to optimize your website for maximum share-ability but you’ve also created profiles on all of the right social media platforms. As a result of this hard work your website has been rewarded with swarms of traffic. But since this traffic comes from referrals and direct URL entry a much larger percentage of these visitors are window-shopping.
They want to see if the appearance of web site measures up to what they’ve heard. This would explain why your bounce rate. is so high and why so few of your visitors ever make it to your call of action page. Its because these consumers are essentially at the earliest stage of their buying cycle, which means that they may not even know that they have a need at this point.
Solution: Integrating SEO, PPC, and SMO
Let’s say that you’re the same plug-in developer. But instead of relying solely on one tactic you use organic SEO, PPC, and SMO-all together. Doing this does the following things for you:
- Reinforces Your Organic SEO. Organic SEO is powerful, but it often takes time to reap rewards. The utilization of tags, blogs, and social bookmarking help to get your web site noticed quicker by the search engine crawlers.
- Generates Awareness. The buzz that you generate through your SMO efforts drives traffic and conversations around your offerings.
- PPC Conversions Yield More Revenue. Since you have made it easy for your visitors to share your content, now your PPC inspired customers refer you to their friends. Since a number of these customers also liked you on Facebook, you’re able to stay in touch with them and let them know whenever you have new and relevant offers resulting in an average of one to two repeat purchases for each new customer that you bring on board.
- Gives You a Functional Funnel. When users who were initially exposed to your brand by way of your online buzz find that your PPC ads and natural results appear in their subsequent searches for premium plug-ins they now feel comfortable with you and click all the way through to completion of the sale.
Combining your e-marketing tactics should result in a balanced distribution of website traffic, which will in turn result in you overcoming clicker’s remorse.
Image Credit: Nonovyas
30 comments
Just wanted to add to the post that essentially this piece is about integrating your online marketing tactics so that you get more bang for your buck. I wonder if anyone here has had any experience with this? If you have please feel free to share your experiences with us. Thanks!
Hi Benin,
In Sweden have the find out that one of the biggest problem why people cancels/ not buy; it is to many click to come to the order page and/or to complicated order page that scare away many clients.
Hey Benin,
Nice article, I think being a salesman offline teaches you a lot, I never regret having sales experience and I was also a door to door salesman, I would never change where I have been in the past for the world!
Thanks for sharing!
No problem Dan. Good to hear there are some sales people in the house 🙂 Right you are so many people sleep on the sales profession. But you know what’s really funny? In reality every person is constantly in the process of selling something or being sold.
The sooner we as emarketers realize this the better off our industry will be…
Seriously though, I’m glad you enjoyed it Dan!
In Sweden have the find out that one of the biggest problem why people cancels/ not buy; it is to many click to come to the order page and/or to complicated order page that scare away many clients.
Hi PM.
Excellent points! As marketers, we must seek to get behind the issues that scare our users away. Something that dovetails very nicely with this topic is that of websites, especially for landing/squeeze pages, working to silo their sites to get rid of anything that is a barrier to that user from reaching the end of your conversion funnel (which by the way…when we create web sites that do this we create a harmonious environment whereby our goals and the user’s goals come into near perfect alignment)
Also one other point that scares away the clients/users is too many questions; how frequently do you buy on internet, how much do you spend on internet, were did you find this page, ect… 10-20 questions before you can buy….
Great point. Although I will say that often times marketers do need to know the answers to these types of questions. But I agree we don’t have to hit them over the head with a 20 question type scenario. Striking a balance between information gathering and selling by gleaning as much information as possible from cookie data is key.
These techniques you suggest are all very good and I will putting your advice to good use.
I think that many people who know about affiliate links(and PPC as well) purposely avoid it and search the product on the internet, just because of the psychological impact that they will go through a middle man (or for some really mean people, just don’t wont someone else to make money from their purchase/click).
At the end, you have to gain the thrust of your potential buyer/clicker and make them help you by helping them(pointing them to a right product/website).
Hi Alex.
Thanks for the comment. I guess I can see how that could happen with other internet marketers but hopefully things haven’t gotten so bad with the general public that they would overlook their own interests just to stop someone else from succeeding. You know?
What a profound point-
I agree. That’s where the opportunity lies-in helping the customer achieve their goals. Awesome!
That’s a strange phenomenon. Although it might sound like it’s true – I’ve never abandoned any purchase because of the number of clicks. Just recently it was proved that “the fold” doesn’t really exists in Web and that nearly 100% of users scroll the page down. So, not all of the traditional sales phenomenons make it online. Then the “three click rule” was actually debunked by UIE (google for “Testing the Three-Click Rule”). So, are you sure that this phenomenon exists?
Hi Slava,
Thanks for commenting. No. This is not the intent of the piece-to say that the number of clicks it takes to complete an action deters a sale. But I guess its more of a round about way to say that the more times you are in front of your consumer + the more online channels you use to do that the better you prepare your visitors to trust your online brand which should translate into things such as decrease shopping cart abandonment rates.
Let me also add that your point that not all traditional shopping/sales phenomena make it online is well taken and I think this adds an extra dimension to this discussion. Here’s my response to that…Correct, there are many instances in which consumers behave differently online than they do offline. However, as it relates to customer indecision or buyers remorse taking the interaction online takes their offline behavior and amplifies it.
So if the customer were actually in your store and had a tough time justifying a “pending” purchase in his/her mind then the chances of them following through and making the purchase anyway in person are much higher than they would be online.
Because online there are four things at play that lead me to say this 1) many more distractions online versus offline 2) Many more opportunities 3) greater transparency (i.e. customers can compare prices or other product attributes much easier) 4) the customer is in the drivers seat online ( i.e. they can leave a cart, website, or anything else for that matter with the click of a mouse-so much easier than fending off a live salesperson).
Hope that provides some additional context. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks!
Hi Benin, I must admit I had to read this twice to fully understand what you were trying to convey here, I think what I’ve gathered is that it will be natural for visitors to visit your page, and then click out of it to scope what else is out there? And the way you can counter act that is to make sure you well diversified in your other listings when users are searching for alternatives? If so, that does make sense to be well positioned, like they say, you don’t want to put your eggs in just one basket, and from what I’ve read here, this post goes to illustrate that famous line.
Till then,
Jean
Hi Jean, uh oh…That doesn’t sound so good-that you had to read it twice. But for someone who said that it certainly sounds like you’ve got a strong grasp on the topic. 🙂
But seriously, I’m sorry if this wasn’t very clear. Looks like I’ll have to work on that. Otherwise, the reason that the multiple basket approach works is this.
If you take any brand and were able to somehow see every single person who was part of their audience-you’d find that the individuals within that audience would range from people that might one day consider purchasing what the brand has to offer to people who are actively seeking products that fall within the brand’s industry to people who are actively seeking whatever the brand has to offer.
Many brands are aware of this and choose to only go after the low hanging fruit (those that are active seekers of product-think PPC) or the customers who already know that they’re going to buy from them (primarily SEO, but PPC to a lesser extent). However, in order to build a sustainable brand that is capable of flourishing in good times or bad you also need to cultivate the part of your audience who is only just becoming aware that they have a need-I’m going to generalize here and say think social media. As brands do this the tendency to over rely upon PPC tends to decrease.
Plus think of it like this…Imagine you were a consumer seeking a product online and you went to the search engines and found several different retailers of that product-but one of the retailers you’d heard wonderful things about a month or two ago on Foursqaure and Twitter. Then in the search engine results they come up high in the natural results and also come up within one of the top paid slots. The other brands who offered the same product were only in one or the other-who would you most likely purchase from?
So when
That’s perfectly fine Benin, it might just be that I was slow to follow this one, hehe, you article was great, no doubt in my mind. Thanks for the awesome followup to my comment, and yeah you would certainly follow the purchase through someone you are most familiar and comfortable with in your mind after seeing it across many places.
Till then,
Jean
No problem, Jean. True, and maybe that is the central theme here…
Perhaps the next best thing to building trust in person is doing it through familiarity…
Truly, it is all of us who benefit from such meaningful discussions-thanks for your thoughtful commentary, Jean.
Very interesting read. I never thought of refered traffic as window shoppers but the analogy sounds apt. Seems the key is to get those visitors back to buy later.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. Although I don’t want to over generalize I will say that based upon my experiences referred traffic tends to be there more out of curiosity as opposed to visiting to make an immediate purchase. However, as you’ve said the key is in getting the referred traffic to come back.
And one way to increase the likelihood of that happening is by dominating all three online channels-PPC, SEO, and social media.
Richard, something that I wanted to add is that there are many types of referred traffic and they do not all behave in the same way. For instance, article traffic tends to be more targeted than social media traffic.
Otherwise, thanks again and hope to see you back here again. Take care.
No offense, but its same with me.
Hi FVC,
No offense taken. Please see comment to Web Design LA and see if that makes it a little more clear. Thanks!
If only there was a sure fire way to get more sales
I’m sorry about that WDLA.
Certainly not my intent. I probably should have started the piece with a primer. But since I didn’t the best that can be done is to post it here. About a month back I wrote a post here called, “5 Reasons PPC is Undisputed Champ of Internet Marketing”.
That post sought to explain why the PPC industry is so much larger than the other segments of the Internet marketing industry. Although my intent was not to say that marketers should use PPC in isolation of other web marketing tactics some of the comments that I received seemed to indicate that the readers felt the post was not recognizing the value of organic SEO and social media.
Since thats a point that I agree with I wanted to do a post explaining why marketers should use the three tactics (SEO, PPC, and social media) together. Clickers remorse is something that I penned to describe what happens when a user or a visitor isn’t prepared for the next step (whatever the next step may be; such as clicking an offer link, following through on an order, or what have you). Something that seems to be working for me at cutting down the number of users who stop in between actions to leave the site is integrated online marketing, which is what we’re talking about here.
Sorry if this wasn’t as clear as I’d hoped; but thanks for letting me know. Hope that sheds more light. Take care!
Hi WEEE,
Yeah. If it were only that easy. Sales is one of those things where we must really commit to being students of it before we can really reap the fruits.
Thanks for stopping by!
Great tips Benin. I have had a sale or two disintegrate before my eyes in the past so I know exactly what your former sales manager ment by “buttoning up your sales”. Some good advice.
– Robert
Hi Robert. Isnt it funny how little things like that can make the greatest difference for us-going forward? I mean, even though most sales people live under the motto SWSWSWN (some will…some wont…so what…next) having a sale blow up in your face can still feel like the end of the world. Yet when viewed through the lens of making money online these experiences are the ones that can really help us succeed.
Thanks for the comment, my friend.
If we are using organic SEO we are dare to stand in the competition for longtime but in case of PPC when we are lacking money then what would be the future of our website?
Property,
Good point-organic seo benefits can be long lasting and PPC benefits can be fleeting immediately upon ending the campaign.
But there are exceptions to this, of course. For example, I’ve noticed after running PPC campaigns on the Google content network that publishers who ran the ads showed up as back-links-long after the campaign ended.
My Dear Benin. what I have been witnessing recently on several page results, ranking, it’s several the relevant results. Many bloggers Internet marketers are just giving too much importance to optimisation and leaving quality content behind frustrating visitors. with all techniques and strategies out there content is and will always be King.