You're not alone in wondering how to boost your eCommerce sales. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased stay-at-home orders, projecting over $5 trillion in e-commerce sales in 2022.
This has also caused a surge of new e-commerce businesses, so you must implement the best marketing strategies to stand out. Here are 13 ways to improve your e-commerce sales.
1. Know your target customer
The first step towards improving your e-commerce business sales is identifying and familiarizing yourself with your target audience. This helps you provide quality products and services that meet your client’s needs, enabling you to stand out. It also allows you to develop a robust digital strategy and run a successful e-commerce business.
You should conduct primary market research to collect information about the types of consumers you will be serving. Using this information, create a buyer persona to understand your target customer’s likes, dislikes, and needs. Based on your findings, you should develop innovative strategies to help you boost sales.
Conduct sales analytics reporting to find insights into your business sales outcome data to develop a tangible strategy that intrigues customers to your services and products and enhances market demand.
2. Develop an optimal customer experience
One of the most significant differentiating factors in finalizing a sale is customer experience. For this reason, you should create a seamless shopping experience at all levels of the customer’s purchasing journey. The following are effective strategies for streamlining your target customer’s shopping experience:
- 53% of your website visitors will likely leave your site for the competition if it takes more than three seconds to load. You should reduce image sizes, remove unnecessary plugins and add-ons, choose the web hosting wisely, and clean and compress the site code to improve your website’s speed and performance.
- Provide answers to frequently asked questions on your website to help prospective clients access the information they may need to purchase
- Ensure clients can see their carts and navigate the payment page with a single click
- Add user-generated content to your site
- Keep your product descriptions short but informative and include as many images as possible. You should also consider using videos in your descriptions to improve conversion rates.
- Add new products to your store and remove underperforming items. There are many ecommerce wholesale companies that cater to small businesses and allow you to purchase in small quantities so you can test new items without a big investment.
3. Provide excellent customer service
The secret to getting customer referrals, more return customers, and a superb reputation for your business, which increases e-commerce sales, is providing superior customer services. Potential customers have peace of mind when they receive exceptional customer services or know that they can quickly contact you for solutions to their queries, increasing the chances of purchasing from you.
Ensure that your contact details, including emails and phone numbers, are functional and visible on your site. You could also consider investing in automated customer service tools such as live chats and chatbots tailored to your business’s requirements to ensure your audience gets instant responses for 24/7 sales conversions.
4. Collect social proof
Did you know that nine out of 10 potential customers read online reviews before making a purchasing decision? When a customer is torn between two different brands or mulling over a purchase, they often turn to other people who have used a specific product before for guidance, so you should seek reviews and testimonials from happy clients to appeal to a broader audience. Social proof also boosts your business’s credibility and strengthens customer engagement and trust.
In addition to displaying textual reviews and video testimonials from influencers, enlist existing satisfied customers to speak about your company’s efficacy and usefulness. Next, upload the testimonials on your brand page or homepage to be among the first things users encounter when visiting your site.
5. Offer great deals and discounts
Most online shoppers often prioritize price before deciding to purchase. You should consider offering incentives such as discounts or end-of-season sales to make clients feel like they are getting deals out of their purchases and create a sense of urgency. Motivate them further to act quickly by including deadlines or indicating that your offers are on a first-come-first-served basis. However, it is worth noting that low prices often showcase low quality in the customer's mind, so before offering incentives, determine how your target audience feels about your products and services. This ensures that any changes in prices drive the desired market behavior. Temu can serve as a great example by regularly offering lightning deals on its products, ensuring that shoppers receive the best possible prices without compromising on quality.
6. Develop a solid email marketing strategy
Emailing provides an effective way to reach your business's target market and reduce cart abandonment. According to research, email marketing guarantees a $36 return on investment for every dollar you invest when done the right way.
Place sign-up forms on your e-commerce business website to create an email list to get started with email marketing. The more extensive the email list, the higher the conversion rates, sales, and profits. You should then send personalized emails with quality content that aligns with your target customer’s behavior and interest. You could offer exciting discounts and deals, inform subscribers about new services and products, or share tips, news, and other valuable information. Be sure to use tools like Constant Contact or MailChimp to determine the open and click-through rate of your emails to gauge the performance of your email marketing campaign.
7. Leverage the power of social media
Apart from search, social media is one of the leading discovery points for brands. According to a Forbes report, 25% of social media users follow different brand pages, impacting their purchasing decisions with distinct individual online and retail stores. This gives you the potential to increase sales through Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram.
Strive to build a solid social media presence by sharing user-generated content, working with social media influencers, developing giveaway promotions, and posting quality and engaging content to entice customers to purchase. Remember to add links to your website and contact information on your social media content to boost client acquisition.
8. Develop an SEO strategy
When your target audience is looking for services and products on the internet, they will often choose the first supplier that appears on the first page of their search results. This means that your e-commerce business has to rank to enable prospective customers to find you; this is where SEO comes in.
Including SEO in your marketing strategy allows you to research high-volume with low-competition keyphrases to create stellar content, optimize your listings for text-based and voice-based search, and cultivate backlinks to establish domain authority. This improves your site’s visibility and credibility, increasing traffic and better conversion rates. Be sure to hire a reputable digital marketing agency if you are running an eCommerce business to ensure you get powerful SEO for ecommerce business and can grow quickly.
9. Establish a content marketing strategy
Content marketing is an effective way of improving e-commerce sales. While it requires a lot of effort and time, and the results are not instant, writing and publishing engaging content can boost organic SEO. Creating quality content also establishes you as an authority in your niche, helping your e-commerce business be more visible online. This attracts more customers, which in turn increases sales.
To create quality, informational, engaging, and educational content, think from your target customer’s point of view. What type of information would benefit you the most if you were a potential customer? By considering the customer needs, you will create content that triggers them to spend more time on your website, increasing their chances of purchasing. You could share tips, checklists, or e-guide content relating to your services and products in blogs, newsletters, or guest posts. Be sure to publish new content regularly to drive the desired results.
10. Make your e-commerce business mobile-friendly
Over 79% of online shoppers purchase through their smartphones. This means that you have to optimize for mobile e-commerce to provide a seamless experience through the different levels of your customer's journey. Ensure that your website is adaptable and includes clickable hyperlinks, autofill suggestions, and reduced animation usage. The content should also be displayed appropriately with fast processing time to improve your mobile e-commerce sales.
11. Accept multiple payment options
Payment gateways are crucial to the success of your business, and selecting an appropriate payment gateway is critical. However, while choosing a single option may seem convenient, it hurts conversions. It often results in cart abandonment, so consider accepting multiple payment methods, including ACH transfers, Visa, Mastercard, and mobile money transactions. Accepting various payment options expands topographical coverage, enhances the client experience, and improves conversions and sales.
12. Sell internationally
Improving your e-commerce sales can be as simple as expanding your business internationally. Hire a professional to help you optimize your e-commerce platform with suitable add-ons and plugins designed for multiple countries and ensure the payment processor can accept payments in distinct countries’ local currencies.
13. Reduce customer churn rate
Customer churn rate refers to when a client halts all engagement with a specific company. For an e-commerce business, a customer is considered churned when an agreed amount of time passes after their last engagement with your site. Consider engaging your customers in proactive communication to sustain relationships or provide incentives to targeted clients to reduce churn rates and increase sales.
Endnote
Boosting your e-commerce sales does not have to be challenging. Familiarize yourself with the above strategies, identify what works for your business, and implement it to improve sales and achieve your revenue goals.
