How to Design a Website That Sells

What’s the true goal of your website?

There are probably many answers to this, most commonly:

• To improve my brand
• To have an online presence

At the end of the day, these answers all point to one goal: to help boost your business. To create a website that sells, the design a website needs to captures your customers’ attention and persuades them to do business with you.

A good website design sells its own sales pitch to customers. But how does one achieve this?

To design a website that sells and gets you more customers or clients, here are 6 principles to keep in mind:

1. Clear Value Proposition

A clear value proposition is a statement that shows your customers what your company is about. It must be simple and most importantly, persuasive enough to capture your customer’s attention.

In this digital age, your customers have too many options when it comes to choosing who they should buy from. A value proposition helps you win them over.

Value propositions are most effective when placed at the top of your website home page so it is immediately visible to all customers visiting your site.

Here are some examples:

View at Redbrick

View at Yoghurt Labs

View at Curt’s Special Recipe

2. Less Clutter

Take a look at this:

Would you ever read the website? I’m guessing not, and I don’t blame you.

We all have very short attention spans these days. Clutter is the enemy of readability.

If your website looks cluttered or messy, no customer will take the time to read your content. A sales-driven website should be,

• cleanly designed,
• use easy-to-read fonts,
• and have key pieces of information placed in strategic locations

Easy reads encourage customers to read more about your business.

Here’s a visual representation of the idea:

This difference can make it or break it for your business.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing, another form of content marketing for businesses, is simply the art and science of using email to market to your consumers.

Here’s a harsh fact: Most of your customers leave your website without converting.

It is estimated that only 3% of new customers purchase immediately, 45% want to consider their options, weigh out pros and cons before committing, and the rest will never buy.

That is why every website should make it a priority to capture leads of these new customers as soon as they visit.

Through email addresses, businesses can continue to engage with the 45% potential customers to gain more revenue and market share.

How do you capture email addresses? You implement an email lead magnet: offer something of value to potential customers in exchange for their email address.

Some examples here:

When we work with our clients, we help them plan and think of the best email lead magnets to use for their business.

4. Proof Elements

People only buy from you when they trust or believe in your product.

Without belief, there is no sale. Period.

In order to get people to trust you, you need to include proof elements to your websites.

Proof elements are basically items on a website that helps build proof of your credibility.

Examples of proof elements:

• testimonials
• endorsements
• video demonstrations
• content that demonstrates your expertise
• social proof like number of Facebook likes, and etc.

With more proof comes more believability, and more believability means more clients.

Here are some examples of the use of proof elements on a website:

5. Persuasive content

Visitors often arrive at websites looking for a factor for comparison against your competitors. Therefore, the content on your website needs to be persuasive and benefit-oriented.

Your website should be able to persuade visitors to choose you over competitors for the various benefits that you offer.

Tip: Write your content for your customer, not for yourself. Focus on what benefits they can get from your company.

6. Call to actions

Once you’ve successfully won your customer over, he’s likely to make a purchase.

An effective website would have call-to-actions located at places easily visible to customers.

Call-to-actions on a website are such as:

• You business contact number at header and footer of your website
• “Contact Us” at navigation bar
• Call-to-action buttons at homepage or landing pages, for example, “Buy Now” or “Read More”

A good call-to-action encourages your customers to take that next step, which means more revenue for your company.

Conclusion

We hope the 6 principles we shared helps propel your business even further. As a digital marketing consultancy in Singapore, we have personally revamped websites and seen 200% increase in sales for our clients.

Having an effective website can make a world of difference to your business. If you are looking to get your website designed, then get in touch with us to turn your website into a sales-generating machine.