It’s pretty much the worst thing that can happen in business; be it an online business or offline; large or small – if your sales are dropping off – panic soon replaces them.
The good news is, 9 times out of 10 the fix is an easy one; and it begins by finding the problem.
Chances are if your sales have dropped off (talking online sales here – but also enquires, contacts or leads) it’s more than just ‘one thing’, but one thing usually makes up the greater majority reason for the decline.
Let’s say you’re making on average 100 sales a month through your website and this month that’s gone down to 70 – 80 (round it a 25% decline). That on its own is nothing to worry about. If it were continue at the lower number for two or three months, then you can be sure that something has changed.
The first thing to look at is your traffic; and run a comparison, the number of visitors versus the number of sales. If you have a long running stable site then you can easily see that when traffic goes down, sales go down.
And of course, you track all this with Goals and Google Analytics, don’t you!
However, let’s assume that yes; your traffic is down also (surprisingly so, by the same percentage – yes, it actually happens that way). The question you then need to ask is ‘what traffic’? It’s important that you find out where you’re leaking traffic… is it from search, from social or from a site that once referred a lot of traffic to you but now doesn’t. Whatever the reason is, find out – and then fix it.
If it’s not your traffic than the first thing you need to do is check your sites order forms / contact forms / lead gen forms; I’ve seen enquires drop over half once on my own site because the Captcha that was being used on my forms changed overnight to something illegible that no one could read. I learnt the hard way that if it was too difficult for people to fill in my registration forms… they didn’t!
Start looking ON your pages for a problem. Look for broken links, products saying they are ‘out of stock’ or payment processors that have stopped working. Whatever it is, find the problem and fix it.
Lastly, it’s very important that you take a moment to evaluate what you DID in terms of promotion last month compared to this month. And then look at what you’re going to do NEXT month.
Guess what… once you’re site is up, and your products or registration forms are in place, 80% of what you DO should be off-site promotional activities (things designed to get you more traffic).
The other 20%...? It’s what you do ON-page; it’s the tweaking, the testing, the modifications to copy and images and calls to action.
Whatever you do, DON’T fall into the trap that now you’ve got a website, you don’t need to do anything more.
Paul Barrs
PS. This coming month I’ll have openings for three more consulting clients. If you’d like some help, some guidance and you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. Call me or visit PaulBarrs.com at http://www.paulbarrs.com/contact
My Goal is simple - to help you achieve *yours* online :)
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