Want to Increase Your Online Sales? Make Sure That Your Web Site Has a Unique Selling Proposition

by Gerardas Norkus

If you own a web site or if you are going to build a new
one, the most important thing about your site is to achieve
as high as possible visitors to sales conversion rate.

Although they say that "the traffic is king online", if
your website converts poorly, your online business will
fail, unless you receive tons of free traffic which I doubt.

On the Internet today every website has competitors. So,
in order to have a high conversion rate your online
business should have a unique selling proposition,
sometimes also called "unique value proposition" (USP or
UVP).

What is this unique selling proposition? Your USP is the
biggest unique benefit to your prospects. A benefit is an
answer to your customer's question of "What's in it for
me?" You should tell your prospects what makes doing
business with your company better than doing business with
your competitor.

Here are some guidelines for creating a compelling unique
selling proposition - USP:

Write down every possible reason you can think of why
someone would want to do business with you. Review the list
and eliminate everything that is also true of your
competitors. If a competitor can make the same claim, it's
not a "unique" proposition.

Some quick guidelines:

1. What is unique about your service compared to your
direct competitors?
2. Which of these factors are most important to your
prospects?
3. Which of these factors are most difficult for your
competitors to imitate?
4. Which of these factors can be understood most easily by
your prospects?

Rework your USP until you have it simple and clearly
defined that your customers can instantly identify with.
USPs work best when they are a sentence or two for the most.

Lowestfare.com is an example of a company whose unique
selling proposition is clearly defined in their domain
name. This company provides the lowest air fares in the air
travel industry.

If your business doesn't have a unique selling
proposition, you must create one in order to be successfull
on the Internet!

When you have your USP, you should present it in your web
site's headline, web copy, in every ad, do so year after
year, and... remember that you must deliver what you
promise.

When writing your web copy, it is also important to
understand that there are four online personality types,
and they look for information that specifically answers
their questions. Note that sales conversion rate also
highly depends on personality types:

1. Competitive/Assertive personality - answer "What can
your solution do for me?" question.
2. Spontanious/Amiable - "Why is your solution the best
for me?"
3. Humanistic/Expressive - "Who has used your solution to
solve my problem?"
4. Methodical/Analytical - "How can your solution solve my
problem?"

So, try to answer all above questions (What? Why? How?) in
your web copy or sales letter.

After your website is up and running, in order to further
increase sales conversion rates of your online business,
you should run a split-testing, or A/B test, on your web
site.

Note that direct marketing professionals don't guess -
they base their decisions on statistics.

What is a split run?

A split run is where you measure a new idea or way to sell
a product against a control or default that you know works.

So, you might have two pages of sales copy - one that you
know sells 2% to a targeted audience, and another that is
selling the same thing but at an unknown rate.

To do the split-testing online, you should have a decent
measurement system that accurately records the number of
people arriving at your web site and their actions (leads,
sales).

You could test different headlines, graphics,
background/text combinations, link colors, buttons (buy
now, order now, buy, order), you can even test paragraphs
of content. There is nothing on a website that cannot be
split-tested.

Any of these changes affect your sales conversion.

After you have run a split-test, you should find out if
your test results are statistically significant.

Use SplitTester. This free tool will tell how likely two
ad copies are to have different long-term results:

http://www.splittester.com/

So, before thinking about how to drive more traffic to
your web site, first make sure that your web site has a
unique selling proposition (USP) and converts well.

About the Author

Gerardas Norkus is a successful author and publisher of
http://www.1st-in-rewards.com

Great tips on receiving free merchandise and money from
top on-line rewards and incentives programs.