If you’re running an ecommerce store, it goes without saying that you want to increase your sales online and grow your business.
But how?
It is easier said than done. It’s no easy task to get more customers and increase online sales.
Here’s the good news though.
There are strategies you can implement to reach your target audience and grow your online business. For example, you can employ social media marketing. You can improve customer experience. You can facilitate your customers by simplifying the checkout process.
Keep reading to learn how to increase ecommerce sales online.
Increase online sales
No matter what industry you're in or what size your business is, you need sales monitoring to track your progress and optimize performance for better results. Knowing the numbers eliminates the need to second-guess every decision. In turn, you can make data-driven decisions that will help you increase ecommerce sales quickly.
To increase online sales and see steady growth, start tracking your business performance. Monitoring the right things will assist you in improving conversion rates over time.
Your sales monitoring strategy should be custom tailored to the needs of your business. This allows you to select the optimal KPIs for tracking marketing campaigns, conversion rates, social media engagement, and more.
With a good strategy, you will also be able to determine which of your products are the most popular, the best time of year for sales and discounts, and how to boost customer loyalty.
To help you increase ecommerce sales, we cover 12 strategies you can take advantage of below.
1. Leverage your social media channels
2. Provide free trials and giveaways
3. Offer free or subsidized shipping
4. Improve customer service
5. Simplify the checkout process
6. Create stunning photography
7. Display customer testimonials and reviews on product pages
8. Instill a sense of urgency
9. Support multiple payment options
10. Optimize your website for mobile devices
11. Utilize paid digital advertising and Google Shopping
12. Bring in potential new customers with a blog
1. Leverage your social media channels
Most product marketers use Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Twitter Ads in their digital marketing campaigns to increase online sales.
You can reach more customers by sharing products that interest your ideal customers on relevant social media platforms and improve your conversion rates.
You can start social media marketing campaigns to:
- Connect to your target buyer personas on different social media channels.
- Get your customers to purchase your products directly from social media posts using CTA (call-to-action) buttons.
- Help your customers make better decisions through detailed photos and videos.
For example, you can create high-quality photos and videos of your products and share them on your Instagram as a content marketing effort. Your customers will see its true potential to decide for themselves.
Additionally, you can connect your online store to your Facebook account and grow your business by reaching the broader social media audience. Also, it builds up search demand and optimizes your SEO (search engine optimization).
If you want to learn more, read our post on social media marketing.
2. Provide free trials and giveaways
While the 2020 pandemic shifted the businesses online, scams followed too. In the U.K., online shopping fraud increased by 37 percent in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in the previous year.
Customers are anxious about trying new products and ecommerce stores. They fear giving away financial details to malicious agents while transacting online.
You can bypass that by giving demos, free trials, or money-back guarantees. It will provide your customers with the chance to test your product before committing.
Once the trial ends, your customers can confidently upgrade to the premium version, increasing your online sales.
With your social media channels, you can also try arranging a giveaway — providing the premium version to a few customers for free. It will promote your product and social media platforms and provide you with reviews for improvement and email lists for email marketing.
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3. Offer free or subsidized shipping
In the U.S., nearly half of the shoppers term extra fees — shipping charges and payment processing fees — as their top reason for abandoning their cart.
Popular retailers find their way around it by offering free shipping to their consumers. You can also adopt this tactic by incorporating the product’s shipping cost in the product pricing and marketing your free shipment to increase your sales online.
If that doesn’t work for your business — the higher price pushes away new customers — you can offer free shipping if a customer meets the minimum order limit.
4. Improve customer service
Walker’s 2020 customer experience study found that user experience provides the most critical competitive advantage in the modern business atmosphere.
For online stores, it’s crucial due to limited personal interactions. Instead of distance, staff, and prices as in physical stores, customers look for customer support, return policy, and website functionality.
Customers who like your products encourage their friends and other internet users to check you out. A review on a social media website becomes a better word of mouth than the actual word of mouth.
To improve your customer experience:
- Add a FAQ page on your website.
- Mention your contact information on the homepage.
- Optimize your search function with tags and common search phrases.
Also, consider ecommerce customer service software to provide better customer service and increase your sales online.
5. Simplify the checkout process
Complicated checkout processes accounted for 18 percent of abandoned shopping carts in the United States in 2021. Whenever possible, offer a guest checkout option to permit customers to purchase your products right away.
Also, you can simplify your checkout page by:
- Removing unnecessary steps, pop-ups, and fields:
- Full Name instead of First Name and Last Name.
- Avoid company names and multiple address lines.
- Ensuring proper operations at all times — no time out.
- Using single-page checkouts.
Note: Flux Checkout, which provides fast and distraction-free checkouts for reduced cart abandonment, is included free of charge with almost all managed WooCommerce hosting plans with Nexcess.
6. Create and use stunning imagery
A picture is worth a thousand words.
In online businesses, your potential customers judge the look and feel of your product through the photos you have on your landing pages or social media platforms. Therefore, getting product photography right is a big deal.
Include several studio images and real-life videos on the product page to increase conversions and reduce bounce rate.
It’s not all about the product photos. The entirety of the website should include high-quality streamlined images to increase visitor engagement and retention. This includes everything from banners to icons, and especially your company's logo.
Don’t forget to consider how your images look on different devices. For best results, they need to convey the same great message on all screen sizes. Give all of your customers a premium visual experience to keep them coming for more and, in turn, increase ecommerce sales.
7. Display customer testimonials and reviews on product pages
User reviews, customer testimonials, and case studies add social proof to your products.
In 2021, seven out of every ten customers read reviews left by other customers before deciding on a product. Many go to Amazon and review websites or check out YouTube reviews of the product they intend to buy.
A product consistently receiving negatives will hurt your online sales. Follow up on the issues and make improvements.
8. Instill a sense of urgency
The longer someone thinks about whether or not to purchase a product, the more likely they are to talk themselves out of it. By creating a sense of urgency, you can persuade customers to buy a product at that moment with time-sensitive offers.
You can do so by:
- Providing discounts
- Offering free shipment
- Adding unique bonuses
Strong ad copy and a compelling CTA can mean the difference between a purchase and losing a visitor. Time-related terms are very effective at instilling a sense of urgency.
To take advantage of this fact, try integrating some of the following phrases into your copy: now, one time only, clearance, limited time, don’t miss out.
If you want to learn more, read our post about CTA (call-to-action) buttons.
9. Support multiple payment options
Not everyone uses American Express credit cards. To increase sales online, you have to consider all your customers and provide multiple payment options.
If you reject their payment method, you leave money on the table. Support multiple popular payments and reduce your store's cart abandonment rate.
10. Optimize your website for mobile devices
eMarketer shared that 65 percent of online customers in 2021 made their purchases through their mobile devices. It is only going to increase from here.
You need to ensure that your mobile visitors can easily navigate and make purchases from their mobile phones to increase sales online. For that, your ecommerce platform should render correctly on smaller screens.
11. Utilize paid digital advertising and Google Shopping
Running paid advertisements is an excellent strategy to increase sales. Paid advertisements are an efficient approach to showcase your business to a big audience and improve website traffic.
To start off, you should find the channels where your target audience spends their time and then engage them there.
Once you find them, you can use Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and other paid ad platforms to publish your advertisements. Social media offers excellent digital advertising tools for any company seeking a good return on investment. Depending on your product and target market, Instagram and TikTok could work even better for your paid advertising strategy.
Another good advertising platform is Google Shopping. You've probably stumbled upon a Google Shopping ad if you've ever looked for a product on Google. They frequently appear at the top of the search results page as images when you look for specific products.
While a standard Google sponsored search ad is text-only, Google Shopping ads showcase your goods with a high-quality photo and price tag. It’s more similar to a product listing rather than a standard search ad.
If you want to learn more, read our post on ecommerce paid advertising.
12. Bring in potential new customers with a blog
Last but not least, to increase online sales, you should take advantage of SEO marketing by building a blog on your website.
Starting a blog will open up new channels to reach out to potential customers in unique ways. You can get their attention by delivering quality content and, in turn, create an opportunity to convert them.
By blogging about topics other than your products, such as current industry developments, client success stories, answering questions, and providing reviews, you can turn your visitors into customers. Then, throughout your blog posts, use a call to action to send them to your product pages.
If you want to learn more, read our posts on SEO tips for ecommerce and blogging for ecommerce.
Final thoughts: How to increase sales online
Now you know how to increase online sales. Having learned how to increase ecommerce sales for your online store, you can go ahead and implement these marketing strategies.
Try experimenting with these strategies for your ecommerce business until you find the right strategy mix that fits your needs and boosts your online sales.
Think it’s too much to handle?
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This blog was originally published in September 2021. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
