Focus on the customer, not the site – when you internalize these principles, you will achieve your goals in the development of the site’s sales 

Are you dreaming of boosting sales on your website to increase revenue and reduce advertising acquisition costs? That’s what all marketers do. Your website plays a vital role in growth marketing, but if you want to take your growth goals seriously, look beyond the details of your website. 

Can you explain why your site exists? 

When brands ask us for advice on how to develop website sales and customer experience, we don’t start talking about analytics details, technical criteria or even content. 

First, we’ll ask you the most important question: why does your site exist? 

Often websites have a reason or goal. They do not exist for fun. 

If marketing, together with sales, customer service and other departments, cannot answer this question, listing development measures is pointless. The purpose should be clear so that you can understand what needs to be developed and why. 

A marketing manager doesn’t need to know all this! 

Marketing managers who state that their goal is to improve sales and customer experience on their sites are surprisingly often overwhelmed by this most important why. 

We are not saying that there is a lack of skills behind this. Often the marketing manager is the wrong person to answer the question. And why not, because taking care of the budgets and goals of marketing and advertising channels alone is a huge chore in itself! 

Still, worrying about website goals too often falls on the desk of an already stressed CMO as a supposedly tiny extra. As a result, there is a lack of resources and appreciation. It’s hard to grow a business that the company doesn’t value in the first place. 

In the end, the site hums enviously as semmit, social media and displays devour huge budgets month after month and lead people to pages whose user experience no one has time or bother to worry about. 

Your website is not your customer’s entry point or destination 

If your goal is to grow your business through a website, development is not primarily about website development. 

Your website is just one step on a customer’s decision-making path that is anything but a linear funnel. Your customer’s experience often begins long before they even arrive at your website. 

Therefore, there will be no problems with your website. Only your customers have problems. A website is just a surface. Its functionality, on the other hand, depends entirely on how your customers use it and how they feel about it. 

Saying this may sound obvious. However, there are good reasons for saying this as long as marketers view the website as an island in its own right, detached from the rest of the world. 

In many organizations, the site is still like a house, within which designers spend a huge amount of time choosing the color options for curtains and optimizing the arrangement of furniture. No one just stops to ask if someone should enjoy themselves here, maybe even fit through the door frames. 

Do you understand the reasons that make users come to your site? 

So shift your focus from individual pages to customers as early as possible. They don’t show up on your site by chance or accident. 

Potential customers visiting your website are not a trafic on the dashboard. They are people whose daily lives have experienced something that has driven them to seek a solution, change or relief from their current situation. 

Your success in developing website sales and customer experience depends largely on how vividly you understand and are able to describe these situations. While you can’t directly influence the motivation of your site visitors, you need to at least show that you understand where that motivation comes from. 

Only by showing understanding can you convince a user who jumps from one tab to another that it’s worth spending a little longer than three seconds on your site. Only after this do you even have the opportunity to convert the visitor into a customer. 

Your willing customers need understanding help and good service, not a thick product catalog. For example, did you know that website copy has twice as much impact on conversion as visual design? 

Real growth doesn’t come from fine-tuning the elements of your site, but from understanding your customers 

 Sean Ellis, who coined the term growth hacking, sums up growth like this: growth comes from understanding who your best customers are and learning ways to acquire more of them. 

Quite simple on paper, often more complicated in practice. However, Ellis’ crystallization is fully applicable to the development of website growth as well. Many marketers want their website to sell better, but in the end, very few can describe their customers’ needs well enough. 

Correcting this discrepancy should be the number one priority in website growth marketing. Ask any experienced sales guru what good sales basically mean to them, and very soon the conversation will turn to understanding and serving customer needs. Why would selling on a website be an exception? 

If you want to take website development seriously, it starts with understanding what your best customers are like and how they use your website, following Ellis’ teachings. You might even be surprised how trivial your website ends up being to your customers – or how people browsing your online store prefer to choose a brick-and-mortar store because it’s easier for them to find the answer on the spot than on your website. 

WRITTEN BY

Esa Töykkälä

CX Specialist

esa.toykkala@dagmar.fi

+358440773260