How to improve website sales

The holy grail of running a manufacturing or maker-business is selling direct. You get better margins than your other sales channels but there just aren’t enough of them to live off.

We hear you, someone once told you to sell direct via your own website but they forgot to tell you how to get people to actually spend any money on it.

This is no small task, there are companies spending the proverbial ‘millions of pounds’ on conversion optimisation and traffic generation so competing is impossible, right? Wrong. The same techniques work for you as they do for them and we’re going to explain a very important part of this that you should know right from the get-go.

Google Analytics is your new best friend. Don’t be scared off by all that data and what each of the graphs mean. Just use the part you need for now – traffic sources.

Knowing where your traffic comes from is crucial for knowing how to find more of it, and getting more traffic is crucial for driving online sales.

Organic traffic should be around 30% of your total traffic. If it is more, your other sources are not working hard enough. If it is less, your site may not be optimised very well for search engines. There are specialists who can help you improve your search engine optimisation and also simple tips you can implement yourself, such as labelling images with descriptive titles and using relevant tags on blog posts – I’ll cover this in more detail on a subsequent post.

Paid traffic could be as much as 30% but let’s be realistic – when you’re a new designer, 50p a click to Google sounds pretty expensive. But don’t rule it out completely – when you get more sales coming in, Google Adwords can really help drive traffic. All those boring stats do show that people who click on those paid ads in Google are in ‘purchasing mode’ and you want those kinds of visitors.

Referral is next – these are all the other websites that are sending traffic to you. I generally aim for this to be around 20-30%. Yes, I’m fully aware that we’ve hit 90% of our traffic and I’ve not even mentioned two very important sources. But this is the reality of it – these three sources will send you most of your traffic and therefore most of your sales. Concentrate your efforts on improving these three if you want more sales.

Social media is around 5%. I expect, as a new designer, you’re getting more than that because you’ve turned to a method that is free to communicate your business. Great! Keep doing what you’re doing – social media offers a major opportunity for generating awareness, but it will rarely convert to a sale. And that’s fine. Don’t judge it poorly for this, the journey to a sale is not instant, and communicating is key to starting the journey.

Email is around 5% too. All that effort and so few clicks! People receive so many emails that it’s really tricky to be there at that important time – purchase time. So stop trying to make a sale from emails – you’ll just end up annoying your subscribers by pushing products every week. Instead tell them a story – tell them how you make your products, what inspires you, where you work – all those things that people love to hear about makers. Read my previous post about how to send great email newsletters here.

So take a look at your traffic sources and see how they compare to the above. Work out which areas need to be improved and build a plan to start to promote your website through those sources. Monitor these reports on the first day of every month to compare against the previous month and the same month of the previous year to see how you are improving. Good luck!

This post first appeared on confessions of a design geek.