In our digital age, increasing revenue generated on a website and growing the number of paying users is how to successfully grow a business online.

Think of your website like an online sales person. When people arrive on the site, they are greeted with your design, they learn information about the business from your text and videos, and the website provides mechanisms that allows visitors to convert into paying customers.

To satisfy most growth strategies, it is common for a business to allocate significant amounts of resources to their website initiatives. However, only some companies have success while many others fail horribly at growing revenue with their website.

What is the difference between finding success for a business or being met with failure? Is it the budget, product market fit, is it the execution or is it something else?

This article evaluates the drivers behind successful online businesses and provides suggestions on how to successfully grow a business online. The content of this article is applicable for software as a service (SaaS), subscription, e-commerce retail, lead generation and other D2C/B2C businesses.

Three Growth Variables for Online Sales

If you examine how a typical company generates revenue, they have a product/service to sell.

Variable #1: The “Offering.”

Immediately, there are two segments;

• Company A: already sells their offering
• Company B: has no sales or has insignificant sales volume.

It is incredibly easy for company A, that has sales, to move a significant portion of their revenue generation activities and growth to the online markets.

Conversely, it is an uphill battle for a long period of time for company B, that has no sales, to start selling their offering online.

Variable #2: Available Resources for Online Initiatives.

Before considering the size of the budget in terms of spend, it is important to understand that engineering, development, design and marketing hours need to be estimated and converted into the pre-planned budget dollars. In addition to the budget to create the website, another budget will be needed for growth marketing.

• Typically, company A, who is producing revenue from their sales will have a large enough budget to allocate the proper amount of resources for any website initiatives. Alternatively, company A is producing revenue and they can also raise funds to cover such projects.
• Conversely, company B, who does not have any sales, will not have sufficient resources to allocate to build a strong online presence for their brand. They also are not producing revenue which will make it nearly impossible to raise funds from private investors to cover such initiatives. These companies typically are DIY in-house or deploy “growth hackers” in attempts to find pockets of customers for relatively low customer acquisition costs.

Variable #3: The Market.

When most businesses fail to sell their offering, they tend to blame this 3rd variable by saying there “wasn’t product market fit.”

This begs the question, who did the research for that company to build their offering in the first place if there was no market for it?

Surely they had identified some customer segment prior to engineering and developing their offering. And often there is a market indeed, but typically the business’s online initiatives were poorly executed. This results in little to no sales or traction in the market.

With a fine lens and expert inspection, one can find that often the “no product market fit” is an avoidable attribution to make. One that comes from several factors out of alignment with what is necessary to get sales and gain traction online.

In summation, the “offering”, the resources available to allocate to online initiatives, and the market are the three major revenue drivers behind successful online businesses. For a business to be successful with online sales, it is imperative to align all three growth variables.

Align the Growth Variables to Increase Sales

Evaluating variable #1, the “offering”, can have a tremendous impact at increasing sales.

However, as the old saying goes “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” If you’re Company A and have a high level of sales coming from your existing offering, then leave it as is. If you’re Company B, create several offerings to test which converts or gets traction.

Note, this is not changing your product or your service. Changing your offering is updating the visuals and the text copy used. This may also include providing an incentive for people to make a purchase such as a discount or limited quantity to invoke scarcity in the offer.

The details of the specific offer are going to be as unique as the company and the products/services themselves.

However, generically speaking, your offer needs to fit what the customer wants to buy and it needs to replicate how they are accustomed to making purchases online.

To make sure customer expectations are met to increase revenue growth, it requires the business to align variable #2 with the offering.

10 Customer Expectations Online:

1. Make the website load fast, under 1 second. If your website loads in over 3 seconds, then half of your traffic is leaving your website before they even see the web page load.
2. Make product pages aesthetically pleasing, clean, organized, and easy to navigate.
3. Provide detailed and well researched product information and specifications.
4. Provide clear and simple pricing.
5. Accept multiple payment methods like PayPal and and basically every credit card.
6. Provide free shipping or deeply discounted shipping rates.
7. Have lots of customer reviews.
8. Make customer service simple to access.
9. Have live chat with a live operator (nobody likes chatbots).
10. Have a checkout that is very easy to use with minimal data-collection points before the point of sale.

After your offer has satisfied customer expectations by creating a web presence to match the requirements, you’re half way done with variable #2. The next step will be to allocate resources to growth marketing to align your offering with variable #3, the market.

Essentially, to align your offer with the market using growth marketing, the company would need to run multiple experiential tests across multiple paid and non-paid channels to determine effective channels, messaging and targeting.

After successful channels have been identified, it is typical for a company to shift more resources to that channel until diminishing returns are reached.

Do you have any questions related to the growth variables or customer expectations? Would you like me to help you with this process? You can send me a message using the link in the menu and I will be happy to help.