5 things that are killing your online sales and profit
Acquiring new customers is one of the top priorities of almost all businesses. The newcomers bring new sales, and sales are the lifeline of every business.
However, as much as one should focus on acquiring new customers, retaining the current ones, and keeping an eye on those business aspects that affect online sales also play a crucial role.
This article lists various situations and aspects that may have a negative impact on your business’s online sales figures. These range from technicalities regarding the website all the way to marketing and even customer service.
Poor social selling strategy
When a business’s online sales team is not properly trained in the art of social selling, and not even the marketing team can help, the chances are that their social selling strategies will be unsatisfactory.
Social selling only produces great results when the seller understands its purpose and is competent enough to deploy it. Keep in mind that a good (and comprehensive) social selling strategy deals with a wide range of important areas such as setting goals and choosing KPIs, personal/professional branding, customer research, effective messaging, establishing authority on your topic, and so on.
Also, every experienced social seller is familiar with the four most important principles:
- Finding the right people who are the best fit for investing your product
- Creating the right profile that makes people want to connect with you
- Effective messaging and communication with prospects
- Creating and sharing valuable content to build trust and credibility
Having knowledgeable marketing employees partnered up with experienced online sales representatives guarantees great social selling strategies.
However, if this is not the case at the office, it’s best to learn how to find a social media marketing agency that can help with social selling. These experts will provide great services and take your social media game to the next level.
Unsecure website
An unsecured website puts your customers at risk and it can potentially ruin your business. If a visitor feels that something is off, there is a big chance that they will bounce and never come back.
An unsecured website is a website with little to no security layers that is easy to break into. Cybercriminals like low-security websites, since it is easy for them to break in, intercept, and steal sensitive details such as customers’ credit card information, personal information, and so on.
So, if your website has loose security measures, you might lose your customers’ trust, as well as lose them all in the long run.
One great way to make a website safer is through HSTS technology. This web security policy mechanism is designed to help protect websites against various attacks (cookie hijacking, protocol downgrade attacks, and so on).
HSTS allows web servers to declare that web browsers should automatically interact with it using only HTTPS connections that provide TLS or SSL security measures.
So, think about moving everything to SSL. If you have a WordPress website, try to enable HSTS using a predefined code. WordPress website owners can just drop a code into their theme functions and have HSTS enabled in no time.
Asking before establishing trust
Sadly but truthfully, trust is not in ample supply these days. And if a business is an online business only (eCommerce industry), establishing trust plays an even more important role compared to the traditional brick-and-mortar businesses.
Entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly aware of this fact, and that also means that potential customers are more distrustful of businesses. No one likes to be deceived, so it’s not wise to ask for anything from potential customers if the trust has not been established first.
Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a fully-fledged relationship, but just a basic level of trust to steer a potential customer in the right way. For example, building trust with prospects can start by first listening to them on social media networks.
Try to get to know them, learn something about them, figure out their pain points, and try to use the language they use. Having a good understanding of their challenges is the first step towards a meaningful bond. It will pave the way for your business to find out how to address their pain points and, ultimately, make them an offer too good to refuse.
Also, many people praise valuable content pieces during this stage. Make sure to produce and share interesting articles, videos, and even tutorials, as this will speed up the bonding process significantly.
Involuntary churn
High churn rates are every entrepreneur’s nightmare.
Customers that stop being paying customers are the ones that cause churn. Now, voluntary churn refers to a conscious choice by a customer to leave your service, while involuntary churn happens when a customer doesn’t intend to leave a business.
To be precise, involuntary churn often goes unnoticed and is caused by preventable reasons such as failing to update payment information, credit card limits, etc.
Involuntary churn is silent considering that the billing is silent too. The vast majority of businesses set up their billing systems and expect everything to go well. However, just like any service, these systems do not work perfectly and all sorts of problems can happen, especially when dealing with a large volume of transactions.
Some of the more common reasons behind involuntary churn include expired cards, declines and soft declines, fraud, as well as outdated billing information.
One great way to tackle this problem is to turn to a good failed payment recovery service. Some of these companies can even recover almost half of all churn. The companies that offer this kind of service usually guarantee that their clients get to work with payment recovery specialists that can:
- Capture unpaid invoices
- Retain customers
- Collect customer feedback
- Uncover customer churn reasons
- Take care of chargebacks and disputes
- Execute dunning email campaigns
This seems like an investment well worth every penny, so think twice before ignoring it right away.
Not doing your due diligence with prospects
Comprehensive and thorough research of your prospects can make a world of difference between making a sale and never getting an answer. And since we are living in the digital age, there really is no excuse for not taking the time and effort to properly research the potential prospects.
When a business does its research on prospects, it leaves a nice impression of professionalism and thoroughness. Just this little extra effort on the front end can make all the difference when it comes to converting prospects into clients.
Do your best to thoroughly research any company you might want to sell to before approaching it. Try to learn about a company’s decision-makers, its target market, its rivals, as well as the industry, to gain the most complete picture.
For instance, social platforms are great places where one can learn more about the decision-makers or buying committees you’ll be approaching. It is often the case that people find a lot of both personal and professional information about prospects on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even Twitter.
Final thoughts
Try to avoid practices that lead to revenue loss. The mistakes we mentioned in this article are common reasons why many businesses failed to rake in enough revenue to survive and thrive.
Go through the article again and make sure you apply every tip that can be applied to your own business website. Don’t lose online sales and profits just because you were lagging behind the rivals that have already implemented these tips.
