E-commerce Sales
There are different ways to boost sales on your e-commerce website. In this post, I’ll outline ways to increase sales for your e-commerce website or online store.
let’s delve right to it…
E-commerce Sales
Understand your target audience
Understanding your target market and giving them exactly what they want.
“It might be tempting to want to design your website to appeal to everyone, especially if you sell a product that has mass appeal, but the more specific you can get with your target market, the higher your conversions will be because your web visitors will feel like you are speaking to THEM!” she says in her interview.
In practice, this isn’t limited to the products that you offer but also means building a look-and-feel that appeals to your audience as well as producing marketing content that’s likely to get them interested in what you have for sale.
Build Social Proof
Building social proof to drive up your conversion rates. Give visitors a real-time view of what other customers are doing on your website.
This helps enormously with building credibility with new customers and also assists them in making purchasing decisions.
“Social proof is about showcasing what other customers are doing within your store and with your product(s). These techniques have been shown to have a positive impact on sales and conversions as shoppers will often follow the lead of others.” Tom says in his interview.
The social proof techniques he specifically calls out as particularly effective are:
- Product reviews – displaying ratings and feedback generated by your customers.
- Bestsellers – prominently display which items are the most popular in their categories.
- Social buttons – use your social media presence to showcase what customers are buying.
- Customer images – Create some serious credibility by showing your customers using your products.
Carry out A/B Testing
Francis raises the importance of properly assessing test data to create knowledge about what works and what doesn’t from a conversion perspective.
“A/B testing in a structured and scientific way is the best way to learn more about your customers,” he says in his interview.
“This principle of testing applies to other parts of your conversion process as well. For example, testing Facebook Ad creative, Facebook Ad audiences, AdWords ads, and banner ads. Testing different channels or a combination of channels. As long as you keep testing, you can keep ahead of your competition and grow your store,” he adds.
Automate! Automate! Automate!
The first e-commerce tip you can use to grow your sales on your website is Automation. Marketing automation is gaining ground quickly. This is why more than 11x more companies are using marketing automation to grow their business as far back as 2011.
Also, in 2016, companies collectively spent $40 billion on marketing automation technology and by 2020, the figure will reach $50.3 billion.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate manual processes in marketing, such as sending emails, nurturing leads and social media posting. Marketing automation is a tremendous tool that can help your business to grow.
Below are more benefits of marketing automation:
- It saves time and cost
- It turns prospective customers into paying customers
- It generates high-quality leads
- It increases the lifetime value of your customers through customer retention.
- It gives you the ability to work ahead
Now you know the benefits of automation and how it can help you to grow your business, what tasks can you automate to grow your business quickly?
According to a study by Regalix, most businesses automate email marketing, lead nurturing and software integrations of systems such as CRM, mobile and social media.
These are the core activities of marketing that can increase sales productivity by 14.5% and reduce marketing overhead by 12.2% and thus help your business to grow.
Check out the different automation below:
- Social media automation: Social media automation helps you to manage your business’s social media accounts. Automation tools include Buffer, CoSchedule, Hootsuite and Crowdfire.
- Workflow automation: workflow automation helps you to take care of routine tasks to allow you to focus on more important business.
- Customer service automation: This enables you to take care of customer services using tools like chatbots.
- Marketing automation: This enables you to streamline your marketing activity to save time and cost. It includes email marketing automation.
- Sales automation: This helps you to seamlessly handle all sales processes such as prospecting, lead enrichment, email automation, sales engagement, and sales call automation.
Tips: Use marketing automation tools and (Leadsbridge has a load of marketing automation tools) integrate with your business to make it grow. These include CRM, email software, chatbot, events management, call center, messaging, payment gateways, helpdesk software, etc. My personal suggestion is to sync your favorite CRM with your campaigns.
Partner with other business in your niche
The second e-commerce tip that will enable you to grow your business is to partner with other businesses in your niche, especially those who sell complementary products. Instead of seeing them as competitors, see them as potential partners that can help you grow your business.
Focus on your existing customers
The third e-commerce sales growth strategy is to pay attention to your existing customers. When a business is having issues with growth, the normal thing is to think it is because of not having enough customers.
But here, instead of spending all your efforts on customer acquisition, look for ways to improve your customer retention strategy. The truth is, it is 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This is because they already know your business and they are familiar with your products or service.
Though e-commerce marketers still think that the only way to sell is to get new customers, pushing their products into their faces.
This way of thinking is mistaken, because sooner or later, your available audience dries up, plus you’re missing out on repeat customers by not remarketing to customers you already have.
Building a customer community of brand advocates is the most sustainable strategy.
Here is how to focus or retarget your existing customers:
Create Facebook Groups – Create a following, making it possible for your customers to interact with each other and build rapport with them
Build E-mail list – continue providing value after their purchase, sharing tutorials, tips for the product, etc. Use the 4 – 1 method; 4 e-mails of value sent, 1 email to sell.
Retargeting
Retargeting is a much-underutilized practice that brings serious results.
You can get really creative with your campaigns for retargeting, just some ideas would be:
Target all website visitors – probably the most widely used Facebook remarketing audience is the easiest one to create – it includes all your past website visitors. If you are a newer brand and have few daily website visitors, go with the below option.
Retarget Your Blog Readers – if you have a blog you can narrow down your remarketing audience to only reach the blog visitors with the highest potential of becoming a lead or customer.
Fruitful Options for reaching your high-ROI blog audience would be:
- Target people who have visited more than one blog article.
- Target people who have visited a blog article and a landing page.
- Target people who have visited a blog article and the Pricing page, indicating their interest in your product.
Retarget your cart abandoners – you know the drill. The baby cried, their cat got in the way, and the transaction is halted down. Just retarget them to make sure they seal up the purchase this time.
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