Your company website directly influences your revenue-generating activity. Your sales team sends prospective clients to it. And your social media, email marketing, and digital ads direct traffic to it. Additionally, your target audience might find your site organically through search engines. 

Your website has tremendous potential to contribute to your bottom line by supporting your sales. But are you taking advantage of the many opportunities to make your website a better sales tool?

Think about it: your website can perform as a sales tool around the clock. When it does, you can be confident that all your sales tools rest on a stronger foundation.

Here are seven ways you could be using your website as a more powerful sales tool. 

1. Verify Your Reputation

Your website serves as a qualifying tool. It’s a platform for your prospective customers to verify the legitimacy and quality of your business. It takes only milliseconds for your website visitors to make a first impression of your website. Even if you have a great sales team, a poorly designed website can be unattractive to potential clients and could result in lost business. 

A good website boosts your reputation by using familiar design systems, good user experience (UX), and compelling content. More specifically, pages for your products and services will speak to your customer’s specific pain points so they know you understand their needs. 

Your website’s About Us page should provide necessary information for potential customers to verify the legitimacy of your business. Taken together, all of the elements of your website serve as strong sales outreach tools.

2. Capture New Leads

Your website can serve as a digital sales tool by capturing new leads for your business. The overall goal of your site is to turn curious visitors into real-life customers. One proven way to make this happen is to include an easy-to-access contact form on your website. 

Whether someone arrived at your website by clicking an ad or by using a Google search, you want to engage them and prompt them to take action. A simple contact form that requires minimal input from your visitors can be one of the most important types of sales tools on your site.

3. Build Trust With Potential Clients

Potential customers don’t just want promises. They want to see results before they trust your business. You can use your website to build trust in several ways.

Testimonials

It is hard to overestimate the power of a glowing testimonial. Some websites dedicate a page to testimonials, while others place them strategically on key pages, such as product pages or ordering pages.

Case Studies

Case studies are testimonials writ large. A case study offers a long-term form of social proof that not only demonstrates short term satisfaction, but also long-term results. Case studies can also make excellent downloadable marketing collateral for curious visitors.

Other Social Proof

Social media mentions, Google Reviews, and industry awards are other examples of social proof. Social proof reassures visitors that choosing your business is a smart move. 

4. Educate Existing Clients and New Prospects

Educating people helps move them through the sales funnel. Suppose they have a problem and see that one of your service pages solves it. They will then be more inclined to choose your business over competitors without these helpful resources. 

Your own sales team can use your product or service pages as resources when presenting information to potential clients. They can also use these pages to help answer questions from existing customers.

An extensive content library is a digital sales tool in itself. For example, an insurance agency could send links to pages about homeowners insurance to a client who wants to ensure their policy covers their exact needs.

Providing information with genuine value to prospects and existing clients gives your website far more depth than if your site was all about urging customers to “buy now.” Everyone wants to make wise choices about purchases.

5. Target Unique Audience Personas

Your website shouldn’t strive to be everything to every possible customer. But it can target a number of different audience personas with different types of content. 

An auto repair shop, for example, could offer content for the casual home mechanic, the car enthusiast, and the driver who simply wants to remain safe while on a long road trip.

Reaching multiple audience personas requires that you first identify who they are. Second, it requires creating content designed for them.

This often means using long-tail keywords to reach specific audiences. Long-tail keywords may not be searched as frequently as highly popular keywords. 

Over time, however, they reach out to people with more specific needs. These people are often more ready to make a purchase than the casual visitor who finds your site using the most popular keywords.

6. Close the Sale With Online Checkout

An obvious way to use your website as a sales tool is to offer straightforward online checkout. When someone finds a product that solves their problem on a site that has earned their trust, they may be ready to make a purchase then and there. 

Offer clear, simple online checkout that reassures customers of transaction security. Then, follow through with outstanding service. You may earn additional social proof that can further bolster your trustworthiness and draw more new customers.

7. Keep It Simple

Do all these things and keep it simple? Yes! Simplicity in this context is about creating a website that is beautiful, easy to navigate, and easy for visitors to consume. Websites with these attributes perform better. 

Visitors want a website that feels immediately familiar. When they don’t have to waste mental energy finding their way around your site to what they want, they focus on why they are there in the first place. 

The ease of user experience can make or break your website’s success as a sales tool. Therefore, you need to design it with UX at the forefront.

For your business website to be an effective sales tool, it should do several things:

• Feature an “About Us” page covering vital information about your company
• Capture leads with easy-to-use contact forms or opt-ins
• Use multiple forms of social proof (testimonials, case studies, industry awards, etc.) to build trust
• Educate potential customers and answer questions they are likely to have
• Understand different audience personas and give them tailored content
• Close sales right online with secure, easy online checkout
• Offer outstanding UX from the moment someone lands on your website

It’s understandable if you want to do these things but either don’t know how or don’t have the time to do them. That’s where we come in. With a Best Website, you can have all the features necessary to turn your website into a digital sales tool that gets measurable, positive results. If you are interested in finding out more, schedule a call with our team.