14 Ways to Increase Your Online Sales
The popularity of online shopping continues to grow rapidly, triggered by the sudden emergence of COVID-19. The ongoing pandemic has forced buyers to shop from their homes. As a result, businesses around the world are looking to increase online sales. Are you one of them?
As customers move from the traditional brick-and-mortar stores to online stores, you have to prioritize building your brand’s online image. More than 90% of customers read reviews before buying a new product. That is why analysis of data and digital marketing campaigns is crucial to understanding and optimizing your customer’s buying journey. This way, you can make sure that your brand can stand out from the competition.
For starters, follow these tips to increase your online sales.
(1) Create A Simple Checkout Process
Make sure that your visitors don’t struggle to find their way to the finish line. Having too many distractions can keep them away from clicking the “buy” button. Here is what you need to do:
- Adopt a minimalist approach. Limit your website design to 2 or 3 colors and avoid the use of heavy graphics or background patterns.
- Provide an uncluttered and easy-to-spot checkout section. For example, you can use a shopping cart.
(2) Post Quality Content
One of the major areas to focus on when you want to increase your online sales is to work on the quality of the content you publish. The content quality you post on your social media platforms and web pages will influence how your customers perceive your brand. So, what should you publish on these pages?
Assess your write-ups on adverts, thumbnails, pictures, emails, text, and webpages of your store and gauge whether they fall in the category of average, good, or excellent content.
Remember, just because you post a variety of information does not always mean that you are making a positive impression. Your posts should be personalized to your brand and align with your philosophy.
Moreover, avoid posting adverts all the time. Post resourceful information such as manufacturer’s notes or research related to products. This way, you can shape the behavior and interests of your target audience towards your online store. Your potential customers like to be viewed as smart people.
Other ways to share useful content includes posting interesting facts on Instagram, listing gift ideas on Facebook and Twitter, and uploading product demonstration videos on YouTube.
Don’t rely on your previous reputation. Keep working on enhancing the quality of your online marketing campaigns.
(3) Excel On Social Media
On average, a person scrolls through 91 meters of content daily. Hence, their first interaction with your brand’s content is extremely important. Surveys indicate that the average consumer attention span is too low – they lose focus after eight seconds. Therefore, see to it that your content gets to the point instantly.
While creating your digital marketing campaigns, focus on modifying the attention span accordingly. Usually, people are more likely to read short paragraphs. In recent times, there is a higher engagement level with videos; they grab shopper’s attention quickly.
As such, you should implement the following:
- Use the carousel and the range of social ad formats.
- In videos, try hooking the viewers in the first five seconds.
- Create and publish videos that extend from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
- Adopt the 20% text rule.
(4) Invest In Quality Images
This is one of the things that might not seem necessary. However, this may be the step that changes your trajectory. Just think for yourself: do you like the presentation of your food? Does it have to look delicious? For most people, the visuals matter. That’s why you have to invest in ramping up the quality of your product images. Over time, you will notice an increase in purchases, repeat purchases, and unplanned purchases. Irrespective of the products you sell, the way your customers see your store in terms of images can massively influence the conversion rate. After all, perception is key.
(5) Incorporate Product Videos
Product photos do the job, particularly if you capture them through professional equipment. However, product images can tempt customers to add more products to their shopping carts.
According to a study, product videos can increase your online sales by 144 percent. Another company claims that product videos generate close to a 10-to-1 return on investment (ROI). This does not mean that you create videos for all of your products – just focus on the important ones. In addition, depending on your product niche, you can also create how-to, demo, explainer, or testimonial videos.
As per Switch Videos, you should not limit your videos to YouTube or your website. In fact, adding videos in emails can boost click-through rates by around 300 percent. On a similar note, 70 percent of marketers rated videos as the biggest reason behind their increased conversion rate.
Do keep in mind that you don’t have to buy movie-production-quality equipment. Modern smartphones come with terrific video capabilities – they would serve the purpose. But if you want the absolute best quality, then you might have to visit your local studio. For video editing, you can reach out to freelancers. Sites like Fiverr and Upwork have plenty of video editors who can do these jobs at low rates.
(6) Deploy Live Chat
Recent surveys show that customers like live chat. According to this survey, most consumers prefer live chat over social media and email.
Live chat empowers your customers, letting them talk directly with you or a chatbot. With live chat, they can ask questions about your products and receive answers in real-time. These chat boxes boast an interface that is not too dissimilar to those of traditional instant messengers.
(7) Offer A Range Of Payment Options
How many payment options does your online store provide? If you don’t already provide ApplePay, Google Wallet, and PayPal, it could put you behind your competitors as you miss out on potential customers who turn away to other sites.
Many customers dislike typing credit card details on e-commerce websites. Hence, it is a good time to adapt and invest in integrating the functionality of these payment methods. Modern customers trust these known payment services with their money, so you have to ensure that you have got all the popular ones on your site.
(8) Add A Countdown Timer
Online shopping is ideal for impulse buying, which has become a common attribute of consumer behavior these days. Placing products in the right position, coupled with the right promotions, and using the best timing, can promote impulse buying. A sense of urgency has a major impact on this behavior.
When customers think about buying a product, you can display a time-limited offer. For this purpose, you can use freebies, coupons, and especially free shipping – it is very popular among buyers. Add a running countdown timer to encourage them further.
(9) Limit Stock Availability
This approach helps to produce a sense of scarcity – something that plays on the minds of shoppers. Adding a sense of scarcity promotes impulse buying.
Often online shoppers search around or leave their shopping cart because they think they can return and purchase it after going through other online stores. However, they will act differently when you inform them that their favorite products will soon go out of stock.
Set your inventory number lower than the actual quantity. This builds up the impression that your products are high in demand and will be sold out soon.
(10) Show Off Customer Testimonials and Trust Signals
In this digital age, customer feedback wields a tremendous amount of power. Luckily, this means that your satisfied shoppers can help you with one of the strongest tools for an e-commerce brand – testimonials.
Dozens of satisfied customers are significantly more influential than the best-written sales copy. So, make sure to include positive reviews and testimonials from your loyal buyers gushing about how great your products are. You can use them on your product pages, the home page, pricing page, and landing pages.
In a similar vein, you can increase your online sales by including trust signals; they create a favorable perception of your business in the mind of potential shoppers and address certain hesitations. If your brand has any professional accreditations, such as membership to your local chamber of commerce or a Better Business Bureau certification, put them throughout your website. If you have an impressive list of customer-base, put them on display as well.
(11) Leverage The Power Of Remarketing
Have you considered the role and significance of remarketing in increasing product sales?
If you are yet to look into remarketing products, this means that you only depend on prospective shoppers to increase your conversion rates. With remarketing, you can shift the whole outlook of your product sales.
You can consider remarketing an item or use a specific time-sensitive sale offer (explained above). This will certainly increase your online sales.
Other than increasing sales, remarketing offers an excellent opportunity that you can use to establish your brand as a top priority for your customers and give several choices from which your prospective customers can pick from. Remarketing can be done via paid search or paid social media campaigns.
(12) Use A Personalized Call-To-Action
Since measuring conversion rate is vital to increasing your online sales, it is a good practice to optimize where the conversion takes place – calls-to-actions. These are elements on your webpages that inform the reader to take a particular step.
For instance, on product pages, buttons labeled “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” are the CTAs. Additionally, CTAs can be used to call visitors to do other things, such as share content, follow a social media page, or subscribe to a mailing list.
A personalized call-to-action is more specific. Although it does not always call visitors individually, it delves deeper into your sales funnel. HubSpot surveyed over 93,000 surveys and found that personalizing the CTA text in terms of user category (e.g., visitor, lead, or paying customers) increased the conversion rate by 42 percent.
(13) Declutter Your Website Navigation
If you want people to focus on your CTAs, it is necessary to declutter the navigation menus on your webpages. Minimize the navigation elements on your main pages so your visitors are directed to the CTA. This way, they are likely to follow through on CTAs, instead of switching randomly between pages.
MECLABS performed an experiment and found that eliminating the top and sidebar navigations from their checkout pages was quite profitable – checkout rates rose by 10 percent. Likewise, a babysitting business doubled its conversion rates by removing the main navigation from its website.
In no way, this means that you should remove all the navigational elements from your website – they are useful to your audience. Just make sure that these elements don’t distract the visitors from your primary offerings on the page.
(14) Offer A Money-Back Guarantee
Online shoppers are more inclined to buy when they know that they can send it back if the product fails to meet their expectations. For this reason, offer a money-back guarantee and ensure that your visitors notice this offer by making it prominent.
Final Thoughts
If you have already implemented some of the steps mentioned above, you can still expand on them or try the other ones – there is always some room for improvement.
All the top online stores have already implemented these strategies and continue to use them. By following these tips, you can be the next online giant.
If you have any queries regarding your online store, send a message to us.
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