eCommerce is a booming industry. And thanks to the recent Covid-19 pandemic, many new online stores have opened up to facilitate the 2.14 billion digital buyers in 2021.
But even if there is a guaranteed stream of customers ready to shop online, the fact remains that you must continue to advertise your brand if you want to grow your eCommerce business. Yes, there is more opportunity out there, but there is also more competition.
However, there is no hard and fast rule to ensure you get more sales on your eCommerce store. It mainly depends on the type of online store you run, the audience you target, and the manner in which you operate your store.
But yes, some surefire ways can help you accelerate the growth of your business. And as eCommerce keeps shifting and evolving, it is absolutely necessary that business owners adapt to the latest marketing strategies to ensure that their brand stands out from the competition.
In this post, let’s take a look at the 15 ways you can increase the sales revenue of your eCommerce business in the year 2021.
Create a Relevant Sales Copy
First and foremost, your sales copy needs to be honest. This is important in creating a reputation of trust in your business. Making false claims doesn’t work well with the customers of today as they can easily identify when things are too good to be true.
Instead of pretending to be something you are not, be upfront about your products and services. Go for a straightforward approach in your sales copy and remain consistent across all your pages, social media accounts, and email newsletter.
Secondly, use the sales copy to your advantage and answer every possible question your consumer might have about your products and services. Use the voice of the customer to create a compelling copy that addresses their every want, need, pain point, and expectation. Stick to the facts that illustrate the customer’s benefits rather than why your company is the best.
Be Mobile Ready
With 79% of the mobile users making purchases via their smartphones, being mobile ready is imperative for your eCommerce site. And in case your online store is not optimized for mobile devices, then this needs to be at the top of your to-do list. Whether you make a few design tweaks or do a complete redesign, you need to make it possible for your visitors to find and buy your products through a mobile device.
To achieve the efficiency in your eCommerce site, your website should:
- Load quickly
- Be responsive
- Be easy to navigate
- Have a straightforward checkout process
Another consideration is to build a mobile app for your eCommerce store. With apps growing in popularity over the past few years, your customers will appreciate the apps more when compared to a website. Plus, users spend 3 – 4 times longer on an app and spend twice as much money on apps than desktop or mobile sites.
But whether you have a website or an app, make sure that it enhances the experience of the consumer. In turn, you will see an increase in your sales and revenue.
Meet on Social Media
By now you must already have a presence on social media. But when was the last time you actively engaged with the visitors from your social media accounts? Probably not recently!
Active engagement with the prospects is one of the most overlooked sales tools. However, when done right, it is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness, customer satisfaction, and sales.
Think about the last time you tweeted to a company, or commented on a brand’s Facebook page – and they actually replied to you personally. How did that make you feel about the brand? I’ll wager that it became significantly more favorable.
Providing fast, personal, and honest answers to questions that potential or existing customers might have about your brand is an excellent way to increase sales. It will create a sense of trust with the customers and make your brand more legitimate amongst the users.
Show Off Customer Testimonials
In today’s social media environment, customer feedback is important. And you can use the same to increase your sales significantly in 2021.
Your satisfied customers will prove to be more influential than even the best-written sales copy, so make sure you include gushy testimonials and reviews from your buyers to showcase how wonderful your products and services are. Highlight them on your product pages, landing pages, social media accounts, and even your homepage to make sure your prospects know about your legitimacy.
Create Urgency
Modern technology has made it possible for the buyers to reach for their mobile and buy whatever they want almost instantly, without even getting out of bed. This is why it is important that you create a sense of urgency or FOMO (fear of missing out) to nudge the visitors further into becoming customers.
This can be done by showing limited availability products, time-sensitive offers, or limited edition products. By showing limitations to products availability and discounted rates, you can persuade the prospects to act fast rather than waiting for later to make the purchase.
Offer a Money-Back Guarantee
Sometimes, one of the biggest reasons a customer has not to buy something is the desire to avoid a potential loss. Most of the time, the potential risk is a financial one. Why should they buy your product? What if it doesn’t work as advertised? What if the consumer doesn’t like it?
Remember that even the smallest purchase comes with a ‘buyer’s guilt’ so overcome the emotion by offering a money-back guarantee with each purchase. By taking the risk from their buying decision, you will find them more likely to buy from you.
Use Free Shipping
Free shipping is another way to get prospects to buy from you. In fact, customers often buy more if the shipping is free. It is even more effective than a percentage discount, even if the discount is larger than the shipping cost.
When offering free shipping, you can either offer it across your entire inventory or set a specific threshold to be eligible for free shipping. You can also entice the consumer by telling them about the free shipping through email newsletters or as an exit-intent popup offer.
Offer Free Choices
While offering more products is a great way to increase sales, it can also lead to indecision and in turn result in loss of sales. A wide range of products can also overwhelm the visitors and make them go elsewhere.
If you are offering a lot of products on your eStore, try arranging the products into very narrow categories. This will not only reduce the load on the visitor but also make it easy for them to find exactly what they are looking for.
Invest in Quality Images
When it comes to an eCommerce store, there are two types of images that you need to utilize. One is the product images that accompany each item you are selling, and the other is used for promotional material such as blog posts and announcements. While you need custom images for the first, you can buy stock photos for the latter to enhance your content.
But regardless of what you sell, make sure the photos that you include are high-quality and relevant to the content. Avoid tiny thumbnails and poorly lit shots. Also, be sure to add a wide range of pictures for each product from every conceivable angle to give the visitors a comprehensive view. This will make their purchase decision easy.
Target Audiences on Facebook
With roughly 2.85 billion monthly active users, there is a good chance that your customers are already on Facebook. And one of the best ways to increase online sales in 2021 is to use your buyer’s persona to find people that will be attracted to your products and services.
Luckily, Facebook offers a very detailed ad targeting option that lets you target users based on the size of their home, the university they attend, and even their next vacation spot.
Lookalike audience is another feature that helps business owners find prospects that share characteristics with the existing customer. With the data available, you can easily create highly targeted ads on Facebook to entice the ‘target’ audience in becoming your customer.
Create a Straightforward Checkout Process
Cart abandonment is nothing new, and many consumers leave their e-carts in the midst of the checkout process. While the reason for this can be many, experts believe that having friction or obstacles in the checkout process impacts the conversion rates.
Because of this, you should make your checkout process as straightforward as possible. Remove any unnecessary steps from your checkout process that will dissuade the prospect from converting. Skip useless fields in the form. And above all, don’t time them out and make them start over from the beginning.
Provide Multiple Payment Options
So your business accepts only credit cards on their eStore. But what if the customer wants to pay through PayPal? Or Stripe? What about Google Wallet payments?
These days, the consumers have more choice than ever in terms of how they actually pay for goods and services. By offering them more payment options, especially those that are increasingly becoming popular on mobile, you are making it easier for the prospects to give you money.
Implement Tiered Pricing
When at a restaurant, most of us tend to avoid the cheapest and the most expensive dish and go for the middle-tier offering as the most appetizing. This is a technique called ‘decoy pricing’ that many restaurants use to manipulate customers. Well, the same can be used to increase online sales.
While creating a pricing structure, include a third ‘decoy’ option. This will push the people to go for the middle option – the one that you want them to buy and ultimately increase your sales.
Make the Experience Personal
The customers are often annoyed when their shopping experience is not personalized. This is why it is important that you provide them with the most personalized experience possible.
The process is incredibly simple. Just integrate a live chat tool to your CRM and retrieve customer details like their email address, browning history, and chat history. With this information, you can offer them a customized service and ultimately a better experience.
Use Remarketing
When it comes to eCommerce, one thing to always remember is that the customer will rarely purchase the first time they visit your site. And maybe not even the second time. But the more exposure your brand gets, the more likely the visitors will convert.
This is where Remarketing comes in! With remarketing, you can position your brand at the forefront of the minds of your prospect. It will also provide you with additional possibilities to persuade them into becoming customers.
To increase your sales, try targeting the users that visit your site but did not purchase. Or ones that clicked on a particular product but abandoned the cart at the last moment. Offers these customers with incentive to complete the transactions.
Final Words
Marketing campaigns take time, effort, and resources to thrive. If you want to outperform your competitors and make it big in the year 2021, follow the above tips and gradually see the results. Good luck!
Every online store has room for improvement and growth. Conversions and traffic can always be better if the right tactics are employed. Here is a list of some basic ideas to boost your E-commerce sales. These ideas cover most aspects of an online store, from acquisitions to reducing the number of customers abandoning shopping carts.
Plan for Mobile
E-commerce takes place entirely online, but that doesn’t mean it is all done on a standard computer. An ever-increasing amount of shopping is done through mobile devices.
Some sites can get by without mobile optimization, but from a user experience and SEO perspective, it is always a good idea. You do not want to take the chance that something doesn’t translate correctly to mobile and lose a sale because of it. Make it easy for people to shop from their phones and tablets.
Security
Whether for desktop, tablet, or mobile, your site needs to be secure. Before a customer gives you their information, they want to know that it will be kept safe. Adding security programs and “Secure” to your HTTP bar will help customers feel more at ease when using your site.
Leverage APIs
APIs, or Application programming interface(s), are a group of processes that enable the creation of applications that can access data of operating systems, other applications, and more. An API can plug into another program and pull data out of it that can be used in marketing. This allows for granular marketing campaigns with increased accuracy. APIs are also used to catalog products, manage logins, run site searches, customize customer experience at checkout, and more. APIs are found in almost every aspect of running an online business.
Offer Discounts
Sales make people want to shop. Seeing something you want on sale entices you to buy it while it is at a better price. If you are worried about margins, raise the base price and then put it on sale. It looks like a sale, but you earn roughly the same amount of money. It is a strategy as old as time.
Discounts mean even more during the holidays. Gift giving season means everyone is looking for the perfect present and everyone is looking to save. Having seasonal promotions brings in more sales than normal, making up for any discounts. The holidays are also when the malls are packed, making online shopping more appealing to a vast number of customers. You will have increased traffic because of the time of year, any discounts, and the conveniences of shopping online.
Reward Loyal Customers
Investing in customer retention is important. Sure, new customers are nice, but you must fight to keep the customers you have as well. Programs like customer loyalty rewards are a good way of making sure old shoppers stick around.
Some sites have mechanics that allow repeat customers to earn rewards. Others, like REI, have a membership program where customers pay to join but then receive exclusive sales. Tools like Shopify allow you to easily implement rewards programs of your choosing.
Cart Abandonment Retargeting
The brutal reality is that every time a customer leaves a shopping cart without buying something, you are losing money. Those are missed sales that failed to convert. There are numerous reasons a customer abandons a cart. Maybe they would have bought if shipping was less expensive or if there was a discount.
A simple tactic to try and bring those customers back is an email recovery campaign. Send out an email to customers with abandoned shopping carts and see if they want to buy now. It is entirely possible that they simply forgot about their cart and this email will remind them. Be sure to point out why the customer added the item to their cart in the first place by highlighting the good things about the product to entice customers back.
Ask for Feedback
Once you have customers who have made purchases, ask for their feedback. This will let you know how you are doing and what can be improved. Was the product what they expected? Did the ordering process take too long? These are questions only your customers can answer.
Send an email to your customers after a purchase, after they reorder an item, or a few weeks after they receive an order.
Boosting E-commerce sales may seem daunting, but with these simple ideas, you can make a big difference. By preparing your website ahead of time, reaching out to your customers and earning their trust, your sales are bound to improve.
Anytime you can inspire your customers, build them up or catch their interest, it can lead to sales. If you’ve been promoting your business for any length of time, you may feel a bit burned out with your marketing efforts. It takes a lot of traffic and advertising to gain just one new client. However, you can take a step away from the advertising and let it run on autopilot while you work to draw in people who truly appreciate your creative genius.
Inspiration is an elusive beast. What inspires one person might not necessarily inspire another. Fortunately, there are a few things that seem to be almost universally appealing. Try these ideas and see if they take you to new levels in your sales numbers.
1. Going Above and Beyond
One thing that can inspire potential customers is seeing how you’ve gone above and beyond for your customers. People listen to what others have to say when choosing whether to do business with a company. It starts with your customer service philosophy at the core. If you have a customer-first policy, you and your customer service people are naturally going to go above and beyond to make customers happy. Once the customer is thrilled, you can ask for a review or testimonial to include on your site.
No company can foresee every issue that might crop up, but JetBlue is on it when customers post comments on social media. See the screenshot above of a passenger posting that his flight is 20 minutes late taking off. JetBlue immediately assures him that they’ll be going soon. Though you can’t see the time of the response in the screenshot, it was almost immediate. This example shows other passengers the company cares enough to respond. While there might be issues at times, they are trying to make things right.
2. Build a Rapport With Buyers
Who would you rather buy something from — a person whom you like and have a connection with or someone standoffish? It is important for businesses to build a rapport with leads. You can do this in several ways. It starts with getting the person’s name and finding out what problem you can help them solve. From there, you can further build rapport by showing empathy for their situation, offering the information they need to make an informed decision and being honest about which option is best for them, even if that means buying the product elsewhere.
3. Insider Advice
Who doesn’t love a bit of insider advice to make your buying decision flawless? Take time to hire team members who understand buyers often like to be educated about a product before they make a purchase. This can take the form of buyer guides, a salesperson who is highly knowledgeable about all options or insider advice that shows the buyer the best course of action.
Look at how Cliffside Industries accomplishes this goal. They show a kitchen with ideas for both contemporary and modern designs. This is an insider look at how to design a kitchen, no matter your personal style or what suits your home best. The guide goes into great detail about the history of both contemporary and modern designs, what is different about the two, a look at other designers and what they’ve done, and ends with some solid advice for those wanting to design a kitchen.
4. Use the Data You Have
Take the customer data you’ve collected use it to make more targeted sales efforts. If you know Jane Smith in Dayton, Ohio, has purchased multiple blue shirts from your site, you can show her every blue shirt you have to offer the next time she visits. Another option is to show her what pairs well with blue, such as that gray scarf you have on sale today.
Segmented email campaigns are a smart way to drive more sales, too. A segmented campaign with a relevant message results in 100 percent more clicks than a non-segmented email.
5. Value-Add Content
Content is called “king” for many reasons, but one is that it can engage your site visitors and inspire them to buy the product discussed in the article. Showing the user exactly how other buyers can and are using your product allows the site visitor to consider how they might also use that product in their daily life. Content should have a purpose, and at the end of the content, you should offer a CTA to convert the reader into a customer.
Ulta is a good site to study for ideas for inspiring customers with content. They have a beauty guides area with various articles on topics related to beauty. So, if you read an article that is a step-by-step glow guide, Ulta gives advice and recommends specific products. In one article, they might have a phrase such as “try these cleaners,” then list the products and what type of skin it works for. This approach is quite effective at inspiring sales.
6. Go Social
Start a social media campaign. Ask your most loyal customers to upload photos of themselves using your product and to tag that photo with a hashtag you choose. You can then highlight these posts on your social media account. This is like a testimonial within a photograph. It not only creates social media buzz for your brand, but it gives you instant testimonials to draw upon to lead to more sales for your brand.
Get Creative
Try to think outside the box and figure out how to reach potential customers in new and interesting ways. People are bombarded with marketing messages day in and day out. If you can stand out from the advertising deluge, you stand a good change of inspiring consumers to consider your product or service. Try to look at your sales strategy as a reflection of your customers. If you were buying from yourself, what would speak to you, and how would you want to be treated?
Author
Lexie Lu is a designer and writer. She loves researching trends in the web and graphic design industry. She writes weekly on Design Roast and can be followed on Twitter @lexieludesigner.