Businesses have been selling their products via online marketplaces for a long time now. However, given the evolving digital landscape, many business owners have taken the plunge to embark on their own e-commerce stores. No wonder, an e-commerce store provides numerous benefits to a business owner. From being able to grow your own customer base and loyalty to saving big on commissions and spending that on digital marketing strategies to grow your business instead, owning an e-commerce store is game-changing. However, in order to sustain in the long run, you need to have a steady growth pattern and consistent good sale year on year.
Just like a brick-and-mortar store, your e-commerce store needs a sustainable strategy to boost its sales. Don’t be thrown away by big industry jargon like digital marketing, conversion rate optimization, technology disruption, etc. Increasing e-commerce sales is easier than you can imagine. And we will help you with just that. Here are some solid ways to effectively increase your e-commerce store sales. You can thank us later!
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10 Ways to Increase E-commerce Sales
According to Statista, the number of digital buyers keeps expanding each year. In 2020, when the world was battling a pandemic, even then the number of digital buyers scored to 2 billion. During the same year, the sale of e-retail jumped by a whopping 4.2 trillion US dollars worldwide! This means that no matter what, customers are going to shop and who doesn’t want to shop from the comfort of their homes? All you need to do is put together a strong strategy and you will have a regular influx of customers thronging your e-commerce store! Here are some tried and tested ways that will surely help you increase your sales:
1. Understand your target audience
The first step towards your e-commerce store’s success begins with your customers. More precisely, understanding who your target audience is. You probably already know that your product is meant for a specific section of people. Going with this knowledge, you have to leverage the same to attract buyers. There are SEO tools and techniques that can help you target those customers. In addition, you can:
- Study their online behavior- since you own an e-commerce store, all of your audience is going to be online. This means you are not going to meet any one of them. Hence, it is important that you do thorough research on their online behavior to understand what works for them. For example, if you are into the footwear business then what kind of footwear are your customers looking for, the color, design, patterns, price, etc.
- Segmentation of customers- very important to understand that based on different demographic information like name, age, address, and user behavior, you have to segment your customers. This is to get a better idea of marketing.
- Keep a close eye on your competitors- a great way to get a hang of what your competitors are doing is to become a customer for a day and visit their site. Understand how they are doing things and implement the same if they could boost your sales too.
- Extensive surveys and feedback- how can you understand if your business is going well? By hearing it from your customers. So, take regular feedback and surveys which will help you understand their concerns better.
2. Create an email list
This is an old-school technique to boost e-commerce sales, however, quite underused. In the first step, we understood how important it is to identify your target audience. The next step is to actually target and retarget them. By creating an email list of all your existing and potential customers, you can significantly improve sales. The click-through rate and customer acquisition potential via email are surprisingly higher than through social media platforms.
Creating an email list is fairly simple. You can include sign-up boxes on your websites offering special discounts and offers, email requirements during checkout and special incentives to sign up for newsletters are some ways to do so. An email list gives you a broader opportunity to attract your target audience by curating special discounts, offers, and promotions for them. You can also add a personal touch to certain emails with named greetings.
3. Curate different marketing campaigns for different social media networks
Owning an e-commerce store makes it mandatory for you to have a social media presence. This helps you reach out to a large number of customers and drive traffic towards your site. This practice not only helps you create a customer base but also helps you tap into influencer profiles, engage audiences, and create brand awareness.
However, every social media platform is different. So, for example, Facebook might be a great place to start a conversation but via Instagram, you can utilize popular influencers to endorse your brand. So, it is important to understand what works and doesn’t work in each platform and create strategies accordingly in order to drive sales.
4. Use AI to create smart chat boxes
Artificial Intelligence has taken over the world by storm and it is crucial to riding this bandwagon. The best way is to create a chatbot or a virtual assistant that can drive customers to make a purchase. How, you ask? By answering simple questions like whether a product is available in a particular color or price range, return and refund policy, can the customer pay using cash on delivery method, any additional discounts if applicable, etc.
A customer usually has several questions and by answering those, you can create a positive customer experience. This certainly convinces the customer to make a purchase.
5. Use the “Too few left” Tactics
Nothing creates more urgency in customers than scarcity. It gets their blood pumping and they end up making a purchase. So, it can be a limited period offer, free shipping on certain products only, a sale that is live just for a couple of hours or even a product that has limited pieces available. All these tactics can push your customers to make a purchase thereby increasing your e-commerce store sales.
6. Start upselling
It is a fairly new tactic but works wonders in increasing your e-commerce store sales. As a business owner, you surely must get very excited when a customer adds products to their cart. While that is indeed something to be excited about, you can further boost your sales by upselling other similar products alongside. Using upselling, businessmen can earn nearly 70-90% of their revenue. You just have to be clever about placing objects that your customers would be interested in.
7. Optimize your e-store for mobile view
When you open an e-commerce store, you must keep in mind that people will not only surf on computers but also mobile phones and tablets. Therefore, your website must be compatible across all platforms. Also, ensure to invest well in designing a good website that showcases your products or services in a welcome style. The idea is to create a hiccup free website that is easy to navigate.
8. Try generating organic sales
Just setting up an e-commerce store isn’t enough. What benefit would it provide if your customers are not able to find your store online? To prevent that from happening you need strong website content. And how better to do it than using SEO or search engine optimization?
The first step is to plan your content well. Optimize it using SEO keywords. Even using SRLs that are user-friendly can help you create amazing content on google that will gradually attract traction. Following SEO trends that are constantly changing can help you build and maintain a strong site.
9. Try and prevent cart abandonment
Many times a customer browses a website, adds products to their cart, and later forgets all about it. This can spell trouble for your online business. To prevent that from happening you need to understand why your users are not making the purchase. Are they concerned about the increased price during checkout after adding all the taxes and carrier charges, discounts, or delivery charges? It could also be the lack of payment options or security issues. Find out what they are and take measures to rectify those concerns.
Some simple ways to tackle them are by providing multiple payment gateways like cash on delivery, credit/debit cards, bank payments, UPI, etc to providing discount coupons at the end. To provide a sense of security to your customers, you can again take the help of chatbots where a representative can assure your customers that their order will reach them safely.
10. Add reviews
Last but not least it is the most essential step to boosting your e-commerce store sales. People invest in a product when they hear from others that the product has benefited them, or their money spent was worth it. A simple step of adding reviews to your website can aid in brand awareness, build brand faith and promote sales.