Every business exists to bring in profits; whether you run your business online or off, without enough sales and then profit you won’t thrive.

Data from the 2011 National Small Business Poll from the NFIB has revealed that the most important reason a lot of businesses fail is due to lack of sales.

Whether you run a consulting/freelancing business or whether you have a startup or sell information products, your website won’t go far without enough sales.

This article shares 5 proven ways you can increase sales on your website:

1. Eliminate Potential Issues with Payment Processing

When it comes to improving sales on your website, the first step is to eliminate potential issues people might have with paying you because it doesn’t matter how impressive your marketing is if people can’t pay you.

There are various ways to eliminate potential issues customers have with paying. Some of them are very obvious while others are not so obvious; here are a few tips.

Include More Payment Options: When a potential customer has read your copy and is convinced about the importance of using your product or service, the last thing you’ll want her to experience is a brick wall when it comes to making payments.

Recent data from Bank Card SD has revealed that “82% of American Express card members and 79% of Visa & MasterCard card holders agree that regardless of the nature of the business, merchants should offer customers as wide an array of payment vehicles as possible.”

No matter the nature of your business, it doesn’t hurt to have more options. For example, most businesses only use PayPal and this is a huge mistake; there are only around 120 million Paypal users worldwide today; however, there are over 1 billion online shoppers worldwide. Imagine how much sales you’re missing out on by using just PayPal. In other words, by accepting other payment options you could make 10 times more.

Depending on the nature of your business, you could accept ACH payments, credit cards, bank transfers and even check orders.

Don’t let people waste time filling your payment form: Every additional second spent filling the payment form on your website that is unnecessary is a potential customer lost.

Popular blogger, Neil Patel, has revealed that by removing just one field from the form on the contact form of his digital agency firm website, he was able to increase leads by at least 26%. For him, that means additional six figures in yearly revenue.

Another great example to this effect is Expedia that saw an increase of $12 million in annual sales just by removing a form on its website.

2. Make Your Website Faster

40% of people will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load; for this reason, it’s worth asking yourself how much a 40% loss in revenue will cost your business.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there and a one second delay in your site speed can cause 7% loss in customer conversions. Furthermore, it has been revealed that slow websites alone cost the US economy more than $500 billion.

In other words, having a slow website alone can cost you a lot of sales.

You can make a lot more money by optimizing your website speed; if a delay of one second in your site speed can cause you a 7% loss in revenue, it only makes sense that increasing your site speed even by just one second could result in some serious revenue boost.

You can improve your website speed by doing the following:

  • Install caching software on your website
  • Limit the use of images on your website or compress images if you have to use them
  • Use a Content Delivery Network or CDN
  • Limit plugin usage on your website
  • Avoid having too many third-party tracking codes installed on your website

Following the above steps alone can help you experience a significant boost in site speed as well as an increase in sales on your website.

3. Use Social Proof

When people want to buy from your website they probably have a fear or objection preventing them from moving forward; by eliminating this fear or objection, you’ll automatically position your product/service to sell better.

One of the best ways to do this is by using social proof; when potential customers see that thousands of other people have read your ebook, subscribed to your course or read information from you, they’ll naturally be more inclined to buy from you.

4. Make it Urgent to Buy Your Product

In most cases, people will buy what they have to buy now… NOW; however, if they can buy it another day then they’ll buy it another day. Unfortunately, “another day” will never come.

You can get more people to buy your product by using urgency in your copy; this can be done by introducing a special offer that people have to take advantage of immediately or by bringing down your offer after a few days.

5. Keep Testing what Works

A particular approach that works for a certain business won’t work for yours and you never really know what works until you try.

Use split testing tools like Optimizely to consistently split test various elements of your website so that you can determine what works and what doesn’t. No matter what, don’t stop testing!

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