An Offer They Can’t Refuse: 6 Tools to Compel Your Prospects to Act
The key to effective marketing is to make it easy for prospects to accept your offer. Use our advice to improve your efforts and increase your ROI.
Aaron Orendorff
It’s an enviable idea: an offer people can’t refuse. How can you apply that principle to your sales funnel? A truly irresistible offer is driven by self-interest, so personalization is a must to compel your prospects to respond to your marketing. In this article are six adaptive or customizable ways to improve your offers.
1. Calls to Action
To be irresistible, your CTA buttons must be well designed, and they have to convert. Write CTA text that entices viewers to subscribe, submit, sign up, or buy: Offer value to your prospects. Additionally, make sure the colour scheme makes your offer easy to read.
Best practices for CTAs include:
- Logical placement throughout the page so your prospect is never a “scroll away” from taking action
- Contrasting colours so your button pops off the page
- Lots of space around the button so it doesn’t compete with other elements
- Sized so it’s easy to click on mobile devices
- Compelling, brief copy with verbs
A great way to create compelling copy and to be most effective in the current online marketplace is to use dynamic CTAs based on your user’s history and interactions. With a tool you can identify your site’s most profitable buyer pathways and automatically create custom CTAs based on each user’s real-time activity.
Tailoring your CTAs to what your customers are doing dramatically improves engagement. On average, conversions from existing content and traffic increase between 150 and 400 per cent. It all comes back to personalization: leverage the data you collect about your customers to make the click irresistible.
2. Images
Forrester Consulting interviewed executives at 12 leading digital agencies and came to the conclusion that “agencies leveraging innovative design tools and technology have proven their effectiveness in driving higher engagement online in a cluttered web environment.”
Product description pages are the hinge point of your sales funnel. And images play a huge role in compelling your visitors to act. But that’s not the only place images matter. In fact, visuals play a role in compelling your visitors just to stay on your website. Three studies found “people form an opinion about a web page” in roughly 500 milliseconds.
The single most determinative factor—94 per cent—in this split-second decision was design. Product pages and websites must have images and compelling visual elements to retain and convert visitors.
For budget-conscious companies, you can use a few different tools to find images for your website. There are tools that scan the text from your web pages and then scour the web to find relevant images for your site. This option offers a great new alternative to stock photography. Some tools also create automated pop-up images that appear when a visitor hovers over part of your content. Even better, these pop-ups can be set to include a CTA button within the images themselves to encourage conversions.
If you prefer to find your images on your own, choose relevant, beautiful photos. A great choice is to have images that show the product in action. Test the effectiveness of using images on different mediums: throughout your website, and in social media posts, advertisements, and coupons.
3. Coupons and Incentives
Sites that use targeted onsite coupons—whether they are discounts or freebies—can achieve a 19 per cent uplift in sales. For example, a large supermarket chain proved that customized coupons and incentives compel shoppers with an astounding $10 billion in revenue.
Like this chain, focus 80 per cent of your attention on knowing the customer, and 20 per cent on discovering the customer. You should also create coupons that suggest similar products to the ones customers purchased and viewed in the past.
Automation runs this process far more efficiently than a marketer can do so manually. Use tools that target by behaviour and segment products and visitors into groups applicable to your company. Then create discount offers of varying value that only display when prospects visit specific product pages. For one provider, targeted coupons result on average in an 18 per cent increase in conversions and as much as 23 per cent higher average order values.
Real-time information is priceless, and the power to accomplish custom incentives automatically is a huge benefit to time and conversions. Using purchase history, page views, device type, search term, and referral source, create your own segmented offers that appear strategically throughout your visitor’s onsite experience.
4. Onsite Banner Ads
Like onsite coupons and incentives, banner ads target your audience by their past behaviour, age, lifestyle, and geography better than most mediums. Used correctly, banner ads can add value to the user experience.
Banner ads are traditionally used incorrectly. The key to effectiveness is to defy their reputation. Place them strategically on pages, with targeted content, in an unintrusive fashion, all without siphoning speed from the true web content.
There are several SaaS solutions to take all of the guesswork out of how to be useful to your customers with banner ads. Many companies start with off-site ads on Google Adsense. Conduct testing to find optimal banner locations, sizes, and copy. Instead of interrupting your visitor’s experience with sales pitches for unrelated content, supplement the content the reader is already consuming.
5. Custom Pricing
Pricing anything is complicated, which is why automating the pricing process is so popular. Automated pricing software is implemented everywhere, from airlines to hotels, online retailers, and movie theaters. With user-specific pricing and automatically adjusted pricing software, you only need to research which solution fits your needs best.
Only 22 per cent of retailers use custom pricing. By the end of the year, it’s forecasted that another 43 per cent of retailers will implement intelligent pricing: Not only does automation make your life easier, it improves gross margins by 10 per cent on average.
How can dynamic pricing help you make an irresistible offer? Options to implement your own dynamic pricing strategy abound, but not all are created equal. Some track each visitor’s history, buying paths, overall traffic, and your competitors’ prices, which enables your prices to adjust automatically without any heavy lifting.
Know your prices are competitive and take the guesswork out of determining the best deal for you customers. This makes your offer almost irresistible.
6. Segmented Emails
Despite the rise of social media, email remains the most profitable source for online sales. Email is still a whopping 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. “The rate at which e-mails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17% higher.”
The key to irresistible emails is segmentation. Separate your audience into distinct categories that are both accessible and actionable. Your focus should first be on loyal customers, who, on average, are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.
In other words, first divide your list between current customers and prospects. Not only is transforming prospects into customers more expensive than selling to the ones you already have, but a 5 per cent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 per cent.
When you send emails to customers, think upsell and repurchase. Let them know about new products, expanded features, and added value. Keep their shopping history in mind and connect current offers with tested-and-true purchases for best results.
Alternatively, when you target prospects, offer copy that helps them overcome objections and questions. Offer free trials, highlight your pitch with social proof, and demonstrate the entry-level “easy buys” to build rapport while you convert.
If you don’t have time to parse your list manually, segment your audience with a tool. Start simple and divide your list by buying history, location, subscription date, and engagement rate (opens and clicks). You may boost your email open rates by 44.4 per cent.
Make an Irresistible Offer
How do you compel your visitors to act? Simply put, an irresistible offer is a marketing move your audience cannot help but respond to. It’s compelling and powerful, and it drives action. These six elements personalize your marketing efforts and engage your sales funnel. These proven strategies increase sales and improve ROI while making your customers feel catered to. That’s irresistible for both your customers and your company.
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