The world of e-commerce has a lot of potential and opportunities for existing and new entrepreneurs across the world.
Although e-commerce growth has slowed down for a while due to the coronavirus outbreak, it has now returned with a bang with a growth rate like never before and that growth shows no signs of slowing down.
If you are planning to start a business, then opting for the ecommerce industry can be very rewarding.
The best part is that you don't have to take the risk of buying a property or opening a physical store. That is, you can do your business just from the comfort of your home and earn considerable income.
No, we are not talking about something that has been inside of you since you are born. We are talking about the skills that an online seller must acquire before venturing into selling goods, but also services online.
The success of an ecommerce store depends on the number of conversions you get.
You'll find dozens of ways to increase your conversion rates. However, most of these ideas can take weeks, months, or even years to successfully implement.
Some of the most common ideas you might come across would be A/B testing your website/ecommerce store landing pages, building a loyal customer base as well as the list goes on.
While these strategies are worthy and should certainly be part of your business plan, there are many other key factors that help you sell more.
In this article, we've included some tips as well as tricks to make your e-commerce sell more.
Management of existing customers
The first step to selling more is to focus on your existing customers.
The effort required to motivate a new customer to buy from you would go far beyond convincing your existing customers to make more purchases.
While customer acquisition is part of an ecommerce business plan, the impacts of working on your customer retention strategy would help you generate double revenue in minimal time.
If you compare customers who have purchased only once on your website with loyal ones, you will notice that the latter would add more products to their carts, contribute to higher conversion rates and thus help generate more revenue with each visit to your store of e-commerce.
Also, as an online seller, you should know that acquiring newer customers is more expensive than motivating your existing customers to buy more.
The reason we say that targeting your existing customers is more effective is that they are already familiar with your brand, products and services.
So there is no learning curve. All you have to do is focus on improving your experience.
Use social media platforms
Social media platforms are the sites where people of all ages are spending most of their time, especially the millennium.
Social media marketing is all about consistency; you need to post regularly (but don't overdo it) based on your customers' schedule.
This can help you reach the right customers for your online store and keep them engaged to add them to your loyal customer base. You don't need to use every social media platform that is out there on the market.
Instead, find the ones where your customers are spending most of their time. You need to focus on the social media channels your customers are using.
You can easily track which channels your customers are using data-driven tools like Google Analytics.
Choose the social media channels your customers love and post informative and engaging content to create useful space for your customers and get their attention.
Links
You must also be sure to share links to your website and products relevant to your posts.
However, make sure you don't saturate your customers with direct ads. Many promotions decrease the value of your social media account, resulting in lower conversion rates from the best marketing source available on the market.
Experts suggest that you should maintain an 80/20 ratio where 80% should include informative and engaging content and 20% should include promotional content with links to products and the e-commerce site.
Many social media management platforms can help you with constant monitoring and regular posting to your social media accounts.
Using these platforms, you can schedule posts that will automatically load your posts at the chosen time.
Also, you can track the performance of your posts using these management platforms.
Up-sell the products
Most of us have shopped online at least once and we might have often come across offers like "Would you like to compliment your order?" This is an example of an up-sell.
It's a way of approaching customers to motivate them to buy more premium products that they were already considering buying.
Many e-commerce giants accepted that up-selling significantly helped them sell more on their e-commerce site.
How it works: Sometimes your customers may not be aware that you are selling a premium product and would like to know what a better choice looks like, compare them and choose the one that best suits their needs.
And, most of the time, they are choosing premium products, looking at the benefits they offer than what they had previously selected.
Promote products
You can promote the products that might be the best choice for your customers on the shopping cart page or the checkout page.
However, you need to make sure that you are emphasizing the difference between the selected products and the premium you are suggesting they consider purchasing.
Two key elements to consider when they are on sale are that the suggested products must be relevant to the ones your customers have selected and you must be mindful of the price range chosen by your customers. The product you suggest must match the customers' original requirements.
Customers may not be interested in buying products with a higher price range if they decide to stick with the anchor price.
The anchor price is what the customer first saw for the product they want to buy. The newly suggested product should certainly be a better fit than those already selected, as customers are certainly comparing them to the former.
Endorse testimonials to make your e-commerce sell more
Customer ratings are the most underrated tool for optimizing an e-commerce site.
Surveys suggest that only 33% of e-commerce companies are actively looking for customer reviews.
Reviews allow e-commerce companies to add new and unique content to the e-commerce site and convince potential customers to convert and become their long-term loyal customers.
Furthermore, the testimonials resulted in increasing conversions by up to 50%.
Testimonials act as social proof for potential customers, as they are seeing that other customers love it after purchasing your brand's products.
As an ecommerce seller, you should encourage customers to leave comments for products they've purchased using follow-up emails.
You can automate emails sent to customers using easy-to-understand and attractive templates to help them submit the review.
You might also consider encouraging customers to their next purchase with a discount or coupon codes that should not only help you get a testimonial, but also get a customer to return to your ecommerce store.
There are many ways to use these testimonials, such as using them on your blog posts, Landing pages, home pages or even on your checkout page.
Consider PPC Advertising
PPC refers to Pay Per Click, which is a type of marketing where companies pay for every click their ad receives.
Investing in PPC ads will help you measure whether your marketing campaigns are working well for you and whether they are helping to generate more traffic to your online store.
The most used PPC advertising is Search Engine Advertising and the most popular PPC software is Google AdWords.
It allows you to create marketing ads that will be displayed on Google's Search Engine, as well as placing your ads in an auction procedure.
You'll need to bid on a keyword and the ads are chosen based on the bid amounts and ad quality score.
You can link your store analytics to Google AdWords to measure your customers' activity after they click your Google ad.
However, in PPC ads, you need to ensure continuous improvisation of your advertising campaigns by keeping a regular check on those campaigns and ensuring that the click money you spend is being used wisely to generate more traffic as well as boost your sales.
Now that you know the common reasons that contribute to decreasing online sales, here are some ways to increase ecommerce sales in your stores.
Build trust in your brand to make e-commerce sell more
Here are some of the tactics you can use to build trust among customers about your brand:
- Improve the quality of your products. Sell what your product description says. In this way, you are indicating that you are honest with your customers.
- Plus, keep customers engaged on your social media pages. You can hold webinars, record live videos from your warehouse/office and start sweepstakes. All of these activities help you engage your customers.
- Share user generated content on your blogs, social media pages, website. These can be testimonials of your products or tweets from your users who had a wonderful experience buying from your online store.
- Ask users to provide an honest review of your service on review sites as well as rating.
- Choose a reliable ecommerce hosting optimized for fast load times.
Set your prices right to make e-commerce sell more
Now that you've built some trust, people will visit your online store. It's time to set the right quotes so that these people can buy from your store.
Learn more about the cost that other stores are charging for the same product. Change your wholesaler if you are selling the product at a higher cost. You may have to research the market for this, but it will be worth it in the long run.
Consider lowering shipping prices or providing free shipping if people spend more than a specific amount in your store.
Create a Unique Selling Proposition
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What makes you stand out from the rest of online stores?
- What is the cost of your product?
- How is the product quality?
- What kind of customer service do you provide?
Now capitalize on these points. Sometimes you don't even realize what your difference is.
If that's the case, visit the review sites and see what your customers are writing about you and what keywords they're using.
These are the keywords that describe your service to your audience. Use them in your marketing materials as they are your business words.
Usability
You only have 15 seconds to get the user's attention. If you can't, you'll miss them. This is called the 15-second site usability rule.
The second most important conversion rate optimization (CRO) rule is the 3 clicks rule.
It says that a site user should only need three clicks to get to the checkout page. Make sure you optimize your website according to your needs.
Offer exceptional customer service to make e-commerce sell more
People are more likely to buy from companies that resolve user complaints efficiently. That's why your store must provide effective customer service to your customers. Do you have some work to do:
- Add the Live Chat option to your ecommerce store.
- Allow chatbots to answer most of the questions people ask. This will decrease the number of conversations you have to answer manually and increase the number of requests you receive.
- Send personalized email messages to your customers and respond immediately to complaints
- Use phone support 24 hours a day, 7 hours a day, 7 years as it can increase the trust factor for your store.
Decrease shipping times to make e-commerce sell more
What do people do when they don't get their orders on time? They have a few options.
They can cancel your orders, charge back your credit cards, as well as post a negative review about the ecommerce store.
In e-commerce, shipping times play an important role in your store rankings.
You must ensure that you ship orders in quick time. In addition, you can reduce the number of late deliveries by:
Free shipping provision. Your customers should have the option to choose the type of shipment they want. If they want faster shipping, they must pay more for it. Otherwise, they can always opt for the free shipping option.
Conclusion on how to make an e-commerce sell more
That's all you need to know about how to make your e-commerce sell more. We discussed everything, that is, from low traffic to the unique value proposition.
So, just remember that increasing the number of orders you receive at your e-commerce stores is a gradual process.
You won't see a change in a day or two. However, you will see a significant increase in your store's order volume if you follow the tips we mentioned in the article and stay dedicated to your store.
With Colors Agency, we guarantee much more than just an attractive look and a modern layout for your e-commerce.
Our main focus is to offer companies around the world effective solutions to generate visibility on the internet.
Our agency develops SEO strategies as well as brand positioning for multinational companies, large, medium and small, all projects are important to us.