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Hello and welcome to another 123-reg Swift 6. This week I’m going to be talking about six ways you can overcome sales objections on your website.When you’re buying something in a shop you’re probably dealing with a sales person there, and that person has been trained to overcome any objections you might have about buying a product. A classic one here is if you’re buying something to say: “well, I’m not really sure if I can afford it” because that’s a really easy objection to overcome. The sales person could just say: ”That’s not a problem. We have a payment plan. We can spread your payments over a number of months. You can now afford it.”That’s possible because you’re having a conversation with them. With your website visitors, you’re not having a conversation with them so you need to think about what objections they might have and then address them right on the page so that they will go ahead and buy from you. I’m going to take you through six very common objections and how you can address them right there on the page.
The first thing, and a very common one is: can I really trust you? Business online is pretty faceless, you can’t get to check out someone face to face, you can’t necessarily get to speak to them. You might well be buying from a business you’ve never heard before. A great way to make people trust your business is to provide testimonials from people who bought from you in the past. These are really reassuring for the website visitor.

But don’t just include a snippet that someone has sent you saying: “Oh, I’m really pleased with my product. Thanks very much.” Make sure also that it’s very specific feedback about the product, that you try to include that person’s photo. Or, the absolute best thing that you can do is get a testimonial on social media because then your website visitor can check out that person, verify that they’re real and even ask them a question about your business or about your products and service. Nothing can really work better than that.

A second sales objection that they might have is: “Is this product really right for someone like me?” A good way to address this is to demonstrate how your product or service has been chosen by people exactly like the person visiting your website. If you’re a local business make it clear how many local customers you have. For example, if you’re a plumber and you’re trying to get someone to submit their form to have an online quote, say: “I look after 150 families in your area”. I think it will work better to reassure people that there have been others in their situation, just like them, who have decided to go ahead and to buy anyway.

The third thing that you need to focus on to overcome is around pricing. When it comes to pricing, what people don’t want are surprises. You might feel that you’re clear with your product pricing but what the website visitor really wants to know is: “what are the costs might I incur with your product?” For example, how much tax do I have to pay? How much is it going to cost to get it delivered? When I get it to my house am I going to need to pay someone to put it together? Am I going to incur any kind of servicing, is there something that is going to need to be maintained later on? Or even if it’s electrical appliance, how much energy does this use? Does this cost a fortune to run? Make sure that you are really clear with your pricing so the user knows the entirety of what it’s going to cost them, that there will be no hidden surprises.

The fourth sales objection would be: “Does this product really address my needs?” This is an absolute classic one when it comes to websites. When we’re writing website copy, we’re often writing about the features of the product: how fast it is, how strong it is, how high it is. But that’s not really very important to the website visitor. What they want to know is what are the benefits of the product: How does it solve their problem? How does it address their needs? When you describe your products describe them to someone else and then ask yourself the question: So what? It’s what comes after the “so what” that is the benefit of the product. So make sure that you are talking about your products in terms of benefits and not in terms of features.

A fifth objection people will have on your website isn’t so much a specific objection but it’s still “I’m not really sure if I should go ahead”. It’s more a kind of hesitation and a certain amount of doubt. It’s this, at this point, that you need to really provide as many reassurances as you can. A classic reassurance, for example, is for you to actually offer to price match anyone else in your market so that the user is not concerned that they’re going to be able to get the same product for less somewhere else. It’s also really good to make it obvious what guarantees you give. The website visitor won’t think that as soon as they bought something from you that you wash your hands of them. Make it clear that you want to have a long-term relationship with them by guaranteeing the product or the service they are buying from you.

The sixth sales objection that you might have to overcome is a kind of more general: What is this product? How do I use it? Does it work with this other stuff? It’s here that you really need to be providing things like tutorials and how-to guides or product guides so that people can really understand the product and how to get going with it from your website. They don’t need you to come out and give them a lesson in how to do it.

That was the Swift 6: Ways to overcome sales objections. I’ll see you next time.