Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Encouraging Viewers to Buy

Being available to your customers is important for people who stumble across your site while searching for something. To generate sales, however, you need to encourage those people to take action and buy something from your site. You can build a clean and robust Web site, full of exciting products, and then wonder why you aren't making sales. In the world of e-commerce, building your Web site isn't enough. You have to close the deal. Encourage buyers to place your products in their shopping carts and then commit to placing orders. You created your Web site to give them the means to do so, and now you have to give them a little nudge. In this section, we describe two techniques to convert browsers to buyers: Give them a time-limited offer, and then reinforce that offer when they're leaving your Web site.

Offering deals and promotions

Special deals and promotions are the most common way to ask for the sale because you're giving buyers a specific buying proposition. You're offering something to sweeten the deal, whether it's a discount, a free additional item, or an extra service. Usually, though, a successful deal or promotion has that all-critical time limit. You can limit these elements:

• The length of time that an offer is available: “Good for only the next 24 hours.”
• The number of people who can take advantage of the offer: “Only the next 25 customers can act on this deal.”
• The specific outlet you use to make your offer: “Like us on Facebook to qualify ...