Increasing sales is the goal for all for-profit businesses, whether they are new or have existed for some years. The main challenge of growing online sales is that it often sounds a lot easier than it actually is as it ends up being a lot of work for businesses that want to see great results. Fortunately, there are dozens of strategies that businesses can use to increase their online sales. In this article, we will look at specific and generalised strategies for growing online sales.
Make Your Website and Business Easy to Find
One of the best ways to increase sales on your ecommerce website is to increase the number of people landing on your website. To increase traffic, you must make it easy for people to find you. There are several ways people can find your website and business, and the main ones are through search engines and social media.
Ranking higher on search engines is done through proper SEO, both on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is the most pertinent and it includes optimising your website through the use of keywords, proper content structure for ease of indexing, proper navigation through content and more.
Getting found on social media, on the other hand, is always a factor in putting yourself in as many relevant places as possible. This can be through creating social media profiles on various sites, creating pages, paid advertising, influencer marketing and more. Because almost everyone who has internet access has at least one social media account this is an avenue that every business should be keen to explore.
Let Customers Compare Products
One of the main reasons why people do not buy from products is not being sure whether they are purchasing the right products. People want to avoid post-purchase regret and so they will not purchase products if they are not sure if they are right for them. One of the best ways to remove this doubt is to allow customers to compare products.
Comparisons can be done between products on your website or by letting customers compare products on your store against products on other stores. For two or more products in your store, allow customers to compare their different attributes. For products in other stores, let the good attributes of the other store’s products come through and then explain why your products are better or would serve a customer better. Always avoid bashing another store’s products as your customers might see you in a negative light.
Create a Sense of Urgency
Although this strategy has been misused somewhat, it is still a great way to increase sales on your online store. Many people respond to urgency. This is often due to the fear of missing out on a product launch, a sale or a promotion. There are too many ways to create urgency to cover here so we will look at the most effective ones.
The first one is making limited-edition products where sales are limited to the number of products you have available. The second is offering a financial incentive such as free shipping or a discount for customers who make a purchase right away. The last way is using a countdown timer to showcase the end of an offer or a sale to urge customers to make purchases before the timer runs out.
It is very important that you do not misuse limited product runs and countdown timers by restarting them when the first sale or offer ends. Customers mistrust businesses that do this and that might have the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve.
Use 3D Designs
There are a lot of different ways to present your products online. Businesses can use photographs as they have been doing for years or try to be more innovative by using videos to showcase these products. However, if you want to take your online sales to the next level by presenting your products in a way that many businesses are not taking advantage of yet, use 3D designs.
Computers and graphic design have become so powerful that it is now possible to design anything on a computer. 3D designs seek to recreate picture-perfect iterations of products and bring products to life through the careful use of lighting, different effects and colours. Some applications can also provide shading to better highlight the physical nature of your products.
Businesses that want to increase their sales by using 3D designs should use a digital sales tool that takes their CAD models and turns them into a sales tool. This digital sales tool takes this even further by using CAD models to produce a 3D product configurator. This tool allows consumers to configure different products and include infinite variations of different products including watches, jewellery, cosmetics and clothing. This digital sales tool was developed by Apviz and is aimed at helping businesses with high-end product highlighting, better touch and feel visualisation, as well as better overall product display.
Offer a Money-back Guarantee
One very important part of the decision-making process when it comes to purchases is risk aversion. People want to avoid potential losses as much as possible, especially when they are not sure if they will like a product. To remove this risk, you can offer a money-back guarantee. When you do so, you remove all doubt and make sure they are not thinking about risk when making a purchasing decision.
Offer Fewer Choices
It is perfectly understandable to want to offer your customers as many choices as possible. It is, therefore, counterintuitive to say that offering fewer choices can lead to sales. In many instances, customers are overwhelmed by a large number of products unless they are completely sure about what they want from your store. For people who get overwhelmed by having too many choices, reducing the number of options available can help them make a purchase.
One of the best ways to do this is to structure your online store to offer narrower product categories. Doing so means you end up with lots of smaller niche categories that make it easier for customers to find what they need easily. You could also structure your website to give prominence to only a few of your best or best-selling products to incentivise visitors to choose from those options.
Automate Upselling and Cross-selling
Upselling is where you incentivise customers to purchase products of a higher value or additional products. Cross-selling, on the other hand, is urging customers to purchase useful products that are related to the first product they added to their cart. Amazon does this a lot by recommending a mouse and keyboard when you purchase a computer for example.
Upselling and cross-selling can be done through email marketing, with businesses that have an email list and who use email marketing consistently generating a lot of revenue from their mailing lists. If you have a mailing list, you can automate upselling and cross-selling by setting up systems in place to send emails with relevant product recommendations a few days after a customer completes a purchase.
Every business that runs an ecommerce website should try to find ways to increase sales, considering the fact that sales in physical stores are falling as people move to online stores. There are many strategies to use and businesses are urged to pick and use the ones most relevant to their businesses and those that can be implemented without too much fuss.