10 May Nine Smart Ways to Increase Your E-commerce Sales
The e-commerce industry is a booming market today. While it may be easy to start your own e-commerce business, it can be difficult to find long-lasting success. Increasing web traffic and generating sales should, of course, be your top priorities if you have an online store. In order to maximize sales, it’s important to put an effective marketing strategy into place.
Before we explore nine smart ways to help you increase your e-commerce sales, let’s first uncover what e-commerce marketing is.
What is E-commerce Marketing?
E-commerce marketing is done through effective promotional strategy with the intention of increasing your store’s web traffic, boosting conversion rates and gaining recurring customers. Your e-commerce marketing strategy should focus its online efforts both on your website and other places online. The best strategy will spread brand awareness, encourage customer loyalty and grow online sales. An e-commerce marketing strategy can be applied to your entire online store, as well as for individual products.
Nine Smart Ways to Boost E-commerce Sales
As an e-commerce business owner, your top priority is to see your store succeed through selling your products. Here are nine ways to increase your e-commerce business sales:
1- Start upselling and cross-selling products.
Take a hint from the e-commerce pros like Amazon, where upselling and cross-selling comprise nearly 35 percent of total revenue. Upselling is encouraging customers to buy a comparable or even better product. Suggesting related or complementary items is cross-selling.
If your customer is buying a blow dryer, you can suggest a comb as cross-selling. If your customer is buying a printer, you can upsell by suggesting a more expensive printer that comes with enhanced functionality rather than a basic model. Upselling and cross-selling are a great way to generate revenue for an e-commerce business.
2- Reduce cart abandonment.
You miss a selling opportunity every time a user leaves your website, abandoning their virtual shopping cart before making the final purchase. In fact, a total of 69.23% online carts are abandoned on average. Users can abandon carts for many reasons, including unexpected prices (shipping, other fees, taxes, etc.), requiring opening an account before purchase, complicated checkout processes, untrustworthy or malfunctioning websites, unsatisfactory delivery or return policies, lack of payment options – among others.
Address visitor concerns in order to maintain a successful e-commerce business. Follow-up emails are an effective way to reduce cart abandonment rates. You can increase email open rates and conversion rates by reminding customers what they put in their cart, catching their attention with pop-up headlines or photos, offering a discount and holding their selected items.
3- Use (and spend on) social media.
Social media is crucial to the e-commerce industry, especially Facebook. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit are also among the most popular social media sites. However, not every social platform may be the best fit for your business and target audience, so be sure to do a thorough audience analysis.
A Facebook store is one easy way to integrate e-commerce and social media, especially since it can seamlessly connect with your Shopify store. On Instagram, products can also be added to posts and stories that customers can click on to buy from your store.
4- Connect with affiliates.
Affiliates are a great way to help you sell more products to boost e-commerce sales. A part of your profits will go to your affiliates for their commission, but the benefit is that you are likely to sell much more of your products with their help. Thorough research which networks are best for your business, find and connect with individual affiliates, and make sure to appropriately pay your affiliates (which can cost less than advertising).
Make the sign-up process easy for your affiliates, and make sure to put tracking links on their website, blog, or landing page. It will be better for both your business and your affiliates if the process to promoting the product is easy.
5- Indulge in creativity.
Creativity brings your product and your e-commerce business alive to your customers. Create engaging product presentation and web copy that’s completely your own – not from a database. You can implement creativity while still optimizing for SEO. Take clear, visually appealing product photos, as well.
Other avenues for e-commerce creativity include developing effective social media accounts, providing users the option to create wish lists of your products to be notified when they’re on sale and encouraging customer reviews.
6- Build your email subscription list.
One of the most reliable methods to increase sales and gain repeat customers is through email marketing. Social media – while useful – can also be very crowded, making it hard to be noticed by potential customers. Email marketing directly connects your products to customers and allows for more depth of content.
Increase your email subscription numbers by promoting your brand’s blog, newsletter and any other email attention-getters. Prominently feature an email subscription option on your website detailing the type of exciting content users will receive.
7- Make your email campaigns engaging.
Increasing your number of email subscribers is pointless unless you also provide engaging, valuable content for your recipients so that they will be more likely to make purchases. These engaging emails also need to be sent regularly to be fully effective.
Here are some easy ways to make your e-commerce email campaigns effective:
• Automate welcome emails when a customer subscribes or makes a purchase.
• Share recurring newsletters informing customers of any new discounts, product information and any important company news.
• Promote content relevant to your brand and your customers’ recent purchases.
• Offer exclusive email-only promotions and free items.
• Feature BOGO campaigns during peak holiday seasons.
• Show appreciation for high-value customers with personal thank-you emails.
• Ask for feedback from your customers on how to improve their experience, especially if a visitor leaves your site without making a purchase.
8- Email wish list reminders to customers.
Another effective e-commerce email marketing effort is to email customers a remind of the items in their wish list. Wish list reminder emails work very similar to email reminders about abandoned carts, as they both call customers’ attention to make purchases they may have forgotten about.
You can email your customers if some time has passed since the last time they viewed their wish list, if a listed item is on sale, or if a listed item is close to selling out. Wish list email reminders may prompt your customers to finally make that purchase.
9- Implement a content marketing strategy.
There are multiple ways to approach an effective e-commerce content marketing strategy. One of the best and easiest is through a regularly updated blog with topics related to your products and customers’ interests. When paired with an SEO strategy, a blog will also help you rank higher on search engines results pages (SERPs).
Other forms of content marketing include podcasting in order to build your credibility and community, guest posting on other sites and blogs in order to grow brand awareness and improve SEO backlinks, and creating long-form useful content for customers – such as guides.
This list is not exhaustive on all the ways you can improve your e-commerce sales.
Other options include seeking out user-generated content for both brand exposure and community engagement, optimizing product pages for ease of use, optimizing for a mobile responsive web design, and more. The possibilities for increasing your e-commerce sales – along with growing your brand and community – are endless.
Virtual Stacks Systems UK provides a wealth of expert marketing services and strategies designed to increase your brand awareness, boost sales and increase ROI. From PPC advertising services, email marketing, SEO services, web design, and more, we are here to help you see your e-commerce business succeed.
Contact us today to start your custom marketing plan.