Increase Your Website Sales in 5 Simple Steps
If you sell products or services through your website, it's vital that your website convert well. Follow these 5 simple steps to increase conversions, make more sales, and create a better buying process for your customers. From CTAs to purchasing, this quick guide covers it all.
Here at Lemon and the Sea, we’re all about strategy. We want your website to work for your business and convert visitors into clients and customers.
Part of how we do that is to make sure you’re website is set up to make buying easy for your ideal clients whether you sell services or products.
I’ve helped all sorts of clients from non-profit product vendors to service providers to course creators & educators create more sales through strategic design. In fact, one of my retainer clients just re-launched her course sales page after following the steps in this post and made it much easier for customers to find and purchase the course option that was right for them.
But you don’t need to hire a designer to see big results from your website - just follow these five simple steps to see how your website sales can increase.
1. State who your product/service is for
It might seem like common sense, but this first step is often overlooked. You know exactly who would benefit most from your product or service and you’ve geared your copy to those people, but do they know if they’re the right fit?
You need to clearly communicate who your product/service is for. This is especially true if you offer multiple products that are geared towards different people (example: contract templates for designers, wedding pros, and online courses) or services that have different tiers based on what someone needs (example: day-of coordination vs. full service event planning).
You can do this in one of two ways.
If you have a course or service that has different tiers, you may want to have everything on one long sales page, but clearly describe the different options and compare what’s included in each. A comparison chart works great here.
For everything else - or if your services are very different - you want to create a separate page for each type and clearly state who this is best for at the top of the page. You can also create a drop-down menu with the different types of customers so they can easily navigate to the right page.
2. Show them what they’re buying
When someone is interested in your product or service, they want to know the details of exactly what they’re buying.
For physical products, this is pretty easy. You should have multiple photos of your product, both as a standalone image and with the product in use. Learn more about product photography in my interview with Crystal Hollman.
If you sell digital products or courses, you should include mockups of what’s included. This might be a laptop with a screenshot of the course platform, a layout of some PDF pages, or the cover of your downloadable guide. I love using Canva for creating these images and I generally purchase my mockup backgrounds from MOYO Studio.
For services, this can be a little tricky because your clients don’t all get the same outcome, but you should link to your portfolio where you show images that highlight other client’s results.
3. Have one call-to-action
When designing a sales page, whether for a product or service, you need to choose one call-to-action and stick to it.
The biggest mistake that I see people make when it comes to selling through their website (especially on long-form sales pages) is having too many places for people to click.
As an example, I had one client who found that visitors were confused by her course sales page, so she kept adding more links trying to answer all her potential customer’s questions. She ended up with 10 different calls-to-action and a checkout process that was really confusing (more on that later).
Course calendar
Waitlist
Sign up for a interview call
Learn about group training
Purchase Option 1
Purchase Option 2 (with 7 different smaller courses underneath)
Purchase Option 3 (with 7 different smaller courses underneath)
While her goal was good - she wanted people to get all their answers from one place - visitors were left confused and unsure of how to purchase what they wanted.
In her redesign, we simplified things into 3 different options (one for each tier of the program) and removed all the extra links. This made it significantly easier for people to choose the right product (along with a comparison chart - see step one) and register for the course.
The takeaway - choose one thing you want visitors to do. Then repeat it multiple times on the page (at least 3 times for a long-form sales page) so they won’t have to scroll to the very bottom to buy.
4. Make buying easy
That customer with 10+ links on their sales page? The checkout process was super complicated as well.
Visit sales page
Choose correct tier
Go to another page with course modules
Select which module to buy
Go to product description page
Add product to cart
Go to cart page
Checkout
Receive email with detailed terms & conditions
Sign terms & conditions
Receive access to the purchased course
When you write it all out, this is ridiculous, but at the time, she was just trying to give a customer all the information they needed - and ended up overcomplicating the buying process.
During our redesign, we kept it simple.
Visit sales page
Choose correct tier and add to cart (on the same page)
Go to cart page
Checkout
Receive access to purchased course
A big part of this simplification came from reducing the number of options available for purchase, but we also simplified the terms & conditions and kept all the information and “add to cart” buttons on the same page.
When you’re designing your sales process, set it up and walk through it yourself. It should be easy and make sense for anyone visiting your website.
Products should be able to be added to the cart directly from the page where they’re being viewed, whether that’s a detailed page (for more complicated products like templates) or from a larger products page.
Services can be a bit more complicated because sometimes you need to have a call with someone to make sure they’re a good fit or that you’re available on the date of their event. If you don’t need to have a consultation call, they should be able to purchase the service right from your sales page. If you do need a consultation first, consider including a link to book that call right on the page.
Tip: It can also be helpful to include your price range so people who can’t afford your service know that before taking the next steps.
5. Make it easy for customers to pay
This is one step that shouldn’t take you long to implement and it can make a huge difference in how well your website converts.
You should accept different payment methods so that anyone can purchase. I like to include Apple Pay, credit card (through Stripe), PayPal, and Stripe. This way people can checkout, even if they don’t have a credit card handy. There’s really no need to accept things like checks or wire transfers (although I do occasionally receive checks from clients - set up in advance).
You should also keep your checkout form simple - don’t ask for more information than you need. If you don’t need a phone number, don’t make people enter it to purchase.
Tip: If your payment processor allows it, don’t require payment information for $0 purchases. If I have a discount code for a free product (usually as part of a bundle), I don’t want to enter my credit card number to purchase something that I’m not actually paying for.
Take action today
If you want to see more sales from your website, make note of one of the steps above that could be beneficial and take action on it today.
Prefer to have someone else do the work? Learn more about how we can work together.
