Design to Sell – 5 Tips for Your Design

When you design your website you will have to be creative. But a good looking website alone will not help you to sell your products or service. You will have to convert your visitors to buyers. Let me show you 5 great tips for better conversion.

I love everything about SEO – but if I get a lot of visitors to my site – and they don’t buy anything it really doesn’t matter. I need to convert visitors to buyers.

No matter if you want your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, download a PDF or to buy a product.

So I let introduce you to some marketing techniques you can use when you are designing your website.

Prevent Choice Paralysis
This phenomenon is very useful to know about. Don’t give your audience too many choices to choose between. To give a choice is great. But don’t overuse it. You will confuse the buyer. If you confuse the buyer they might just leave you right away.

Make it easy to be a visitor on your site. If you want your visitors to sign up for a newsletter (I want that on my site here) be sure you have a visible call to action.

If you are writing about a product tell which one of the choices you like the most. With your design you can make your suggestion product picture bigger than the other ones. Make it with another background picture.

There is no doubt that SEOmoz wants you to buy the PRO version of its program right. They are telling you want to do. Just by using different colors. And you only get 3 choices.

Subliminal Suggestion
Have you heard of this before? It was a big hit in marketing a few years back. But you can still use some of the elements.

Newer research shows that it really didn’t help that much anyway and most of the sneak messages were eliminated.

A very famous example that everybody is still talking about is about a hidden ad picture in a movie, and suddenly everybody in the cinema wanted to buy that product. Well this wasn’t true I have heard.

But you know – the advertising industry is still using some subliminal messaging, and you can use it for your website design too. Today, you can meet subliminal messaging for personal development, when trying to stop smoking and a lot of weight loss aids. You can still buy theses CDs and DVDs commercially.

When you are choosing your pictures for your website, you must think about what kind of messages the pictures are sending. Choose pictures that embody your message or feeling. Don’t just use the first picture you find – think carefully about your use of pictures. No stock photos (please).

You get 2 different feelings here right with the bikes. One picture is selling adventure the other picture is just selling a bike.

What kind of messages do you want to send to your visitors?

Show the Product
Out in the real world (yes you can still sell products in the real world I am told) you can see and touch the products. Sometimes you can smell it too.

In fact I am sitting right now eating strawberries – I can taste them, smell them (I tell you they are awesome). But how do you want to sell strawberries on the internet.

Well show your product. We can’t make smell (well I have read about a way to do that on the internet too – but that’s another post) so we will have to show the product. Maybe make a video. What about a 360 degree photo.

A lot of companies selling software forget to show the product or the screen dumps. Show it – show lots of pictures.

Often people are making their judgments based on how the product looks like. Appearance is important – it’s an indicator of a product’s usability. This is also known as the aesthetic-usability effect.

This product is Rank Tracker. But the company has shown it in a kind of physical box. A great way to show a virtual product right?

Design and let People Try It
It is becoming more and more popular to let people try the product. Maybe try it for free 30 days or a limited version of the product.

People will get used to the product and after the trial period they just need to have it right? If you want the full version you will have to buy it.

This is really a great way for software products to sell.

I know – this is not a design element. But you can still get a lot of conversions. And get your sale.

Aweber which is a newsletter software (I use this software – awesome) has a sign up for just 1 dollars and the first month free. Then you will get your first sign ups with this program – so why change after 1 month?

Design by the Gutenberg Rule
I love this rule. The Gutenberg rule. Johannes Gutenberg was a German blacksmith, printer, publisher who introduced printing in Europe. His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution (Wikipedia). If you haven’t heard of him – go and check him out.

The theory is that a reader uses his mental path when he is viewing a design. This is called reading gravity. Here in the western world we read from left to right and top to bottom. So with this knowledge we can make the Gutenberg diagram.

So we read a page or design from “Primary Optical Focus” and end up in the “Terminal Area”. This is why it’s good to have a call to action in the bottom right instead of the bottom left. Let me show you an example here.

Market Samurai (great program about finding the right keywords) have a free trial for download.

Remember now we are talking about elements. Of course you can use colors and pictures to control your readers’ eyes too.

13 elements your home page must have

Go and check out this post too about 13 elements your home page must have. You will love it.

Free Marketing Giveaway
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All the best to you …

Henrik