Published on July 3, 2020
Surely, you learned by now that putting your products online is not enough to increase ecommerce sales. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be interested in reading this article, right?
Let’s face it: increasing ecommerce sales nowadays can be a pretty challenging feat in this digitally-competitive world, especially since the CoViD 19 pandemic sort of swept the whole world off its feet, and now, people are flocking online to buy stuff.
“Welcome to the era of contactless, safer, and easier shopping.” e commerce marketing experts often say.
Now, with tons of people capable of setting up a website and selling the same products that you sell, not to mention several online marketplaces that somehow compete with your site, you need to take the steps necessary to not just stay afloat in the sea of ecommerce competitors, but also thrive and build a bigger, stronger, and faster ship.
In essence, an e-commerce website that doesn't just sell items online, but also ranks better in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and converts faster as you build your empire.
So, today, let’s talk about a few powerful ways to increase your ecomm sales, and ultimately improve your ecommerce sales strategy.
Let’s get started.
The following list details how to increase ecommerce sales in 10 powerful and actionable ways.
Feel free to bookmark this page, so you can read on later if you’re quite busy right now, or just save it so that you can come back here whenever you need some useful info about increasing your online sales or if you want to improve your approach to marketing in e commerce generally.
As you may already know, your brand can impact buyer trust, repeat buyers, and even search engine optimization (SEO), and these factors thereby impact your ecommerce sales.
So, the more people are aware of your brand and put trust in it, the higher your online sales will grow. Hey, I know that is cliche, but it’s too crucial not to take it into account, right?
So, to increase your brand awareness, make sure that you focus on quality:
Creating and targeting specific buyer personas can mean the failure or success of your ecommerce marketing strategy, which massively impacts your ecommerce sales.
In fact, if you do not have detailed buyer personas, you won’t get to where you wanna go in terms of increasing your online sales.
So, to develop or improve your buster personas, get to know your customers better by doing customer research:
SEO for e-commerce is one of the vital steps that you need to take to ensure that your products and your ecommerce site, in general, get the visibility they deserve, especially when it comes to ranking on top of the SERPs on Google and Bing.
Search engine optimization can help you not only rank on top of your competitors but also improve the experience that your customers have when navigating your e-commerce store—give them such a trustworthy and pleasing experience so much that they buy your products on the spot (okay, this may not happen every time, but you get the point).
Now, ecommerce SEO can help you with tons of factors to increase sales in e-commerce, but I am sharing the top-most benefits when you perform SEO for e-commerce:
As you may already know, organic web traffic comes from search results that are not paid for. Meaning, someone decided to click on your web page without the influence of paid promotions.
Now, remember that every time your target audience lands on your e-commerce website from an organic search, you are saving a lot on paid ads. This alone is such an essential factor that makes SEO worthwhile.
To increase sales in e-commerce, you have to make sure that your online store looks good and works well on mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
Did you know that there are over 167 million mobile shoppers in the US alone? And mobile retail ecommerce sales in the United States has reached $338 billion in 2020. This goes to show that a mobile responsive online store is vital to boosting ecommerce sales.
You can check if your site is mobile responsive by running a Mobile-Friendly Test by Google.
Site speed is one of the ranking factors of Google. Therefore, your website must load fast enough to keep potential buyers engaging on your site.
Also, did you know that 53% of your customers will abandon your store if it takes more than 3 seconds to load? Even Amazon, the current largest e-commerce website globally, found that a mere one-second delay in load speed costs them $1.6 billion of sales every year!
You can check if your website is loading fast enough by running a test on PageSpeed Insights by Google.
So, if you have a slow loading online store like the one shown in the sample image, you better get it SEO’d by the experts.
How much does SEO cost? I’m glad you asked.
The truth is, the price of SEO is nothing compared to the value it will bring to your website, especially when it comes to increasing your ROI, which often exceeds the average SEO cost that typically ranges at $500 to $2,500 a month.
Let it be known that no one will ever buy from an e-commerce website if it looks sketchy. So, one of your top priorities must be making sure that your website is secure—a task for your ecommerce SEO team.
Typically, a secure website would display HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) in the URL.
It looks like this:
With lots of online marketplaces coming up everywhere around the globe, the competition can get really tough. So, aside from making sure that your site gets better each day, you can increase online sales by selling more of your products elsewhere.
The first thing you can do is think of better ways on how to sell your products, whether by piece or in bulk (e.g., a teeth whitening gel vs. a teeth whitening kit). If you give your potential customers great choices, such as a bulk discount, they will most likely buy them over single items.
Now, if you only sell your items within your comfort zone of existing customers, usually within your website visitors or social page followers, you are not really widening your market share.
Consider joining online marketplaces that are relevant to your business or the products that you sell. If you can’t beat them, join them. Most often than not, you will find a considerable number of buyers from popular online marketplaces.
There’s a saying in retail that goes, “people buy with their eyes.” That said, your product images are arguably the second thing that your potential customers will see on your web page. What’s the first, you ask? Your headline.
So, make sure that you invest in high-quality images because appearance is vital to how your buyers perceive your products and your brand in general.
Whatever you may sell, ensure that you include top-notch quality of your item images (hire a professional photographer and graphic artist if you must). Don’t settle on poorly lit shots and tiny thumbnails.
Also, remember that people would love to see every angle of your item, especially when it comes to gadgets and clothing. So, include a wide range of photos on your product page.
Consumers nowadays love videos—it’s a great way to educate them about what you sell while entertaining them.
Also, videos will help you keep a potential customer longer on your website, thereby reducing your bounce rate and increasing your site engagement as they click on your videos for product demos.
See this sample from SportDOG short video—featuring the features and benefits of their inground dog fence system.
Now, product demos on videos may not necessarily work for all products (e.g., making a video on how to put on a shirt does not make any sense).
However, if you can think of ways on how to showcase the features and benefits of your products, especially if there’s a unique functionality, a product video is a great way to convey your message easily.
Another way to increase online sales is to ensure that your sales funnel is driven by trust—when a buyer is about to make a purchase from your ecommerce store, that buyer’s journey will most likely look like this:
Now, making sure that each stage of the sales funnel is driven by trust, you’ll definitely increase sales.
So, how do you come up with a trust-driven sales funnel? Here are a few tips:
Email marketing for e commerce is a great way to stay engaged with your customers. You see, online marketplace and social business pages may get taken down, and you can’t do anything about it because you don’t own such platforms.
However, you always have control over your email list because you own it (as long as you use it responsibly, then you won’t have a problem).
So, seek to grow your email list continually with quality leads. You see, e-commerce sites are almost always at the mercy of Google, Facebook, and any other platforms. And once these platforms make significant changes to their algorithms and policies, you may often find your e-commerce store taking a toll on such changes.
Also, sending occasional promotions to the email address of your customers won’t only help you make them buy something from your site but also entice them to repeat similar purchases, especially if you have planned your email marketing very well.
Social media marketing is one of the surefire ways to drive more visitors to your store, especially new customers. Your social posts can warm them up to become paying customers. Then, you can use your social media pages to re-engage your buyers to buy even more.
Also, social media retargeting is surprisingly the lowest-hanging fruit that e-commerce brands are not leveraging.
Take Facebook Pixel, for example, it can help you bring back 98% of your target buyers. And yet, many ecommerce site owners do not have it completely set up in their online store.
Moreover, make sure that you add several elements on your social business pages, such as Add to Cart and Visit Online Shop buttons.
Providing many payment options can definitely help you with boosting your sales. A few years ago, online stores could only take credit cards for payment, but things have changed for the better, and there are a bunch of payment methods that your target market uses.
A few examples of these payment options besides credit and debit cards are the following:
By adding more payment methods, you are making it easier for your buyers to give you their money and for them to buy even more items from your store, thereby increasing your sales.
Most importantly, make your checkout process simple. Consider giving your customers an option to sign up or not (e.g., a check out page asking your buyers to either check out as a returning customer or a guest customer).
Most often than not, the “guest check out” option smoothens the checkout process and improves your conversion better than the “returning customer” sign in.
Do everything in your power to lessen the friction that your buyers encounter on your checkout process, so they don’t get tired and abandon your site. Remember that making a sale is more important than filling in a database for your site.
So, allow your customers to take a smooth route when buying your products.
If you think that marketing and SEO is not your strongest set of skills, if you want to focus on other essential aspects of your business, it’s time to get in touch with SEO and digital marketing experts and learn from them as they help you increase your sales and grow your business.
Increasing your online store sales is not easy, but with the right methods and tools, your ecommerce business will thrive. Just remember to follow through these actionable ways of boosting your sales (and improve them in any way possible):
