Do you urgently need to increase online sales in 2020’s tough market? Although it can be challenging, it’s not impossible. There is still a lot of room for your online store to become successful.
It is the primary goal of businesses to increase online sales and to turn site visitors into loyal customers. Whether you are a small start-up venturing into the eCommerce sales or a seasoned business owner, finding out how to increase online sales conversion rates will always be beneficial.
The online market for businesses and e-commerce sites is vast and growing. As the market continues to saturate, it can be very difficult to stand out from the many other businesses like yours.
In this case, educating yourself and taking advantage of online features and top tier marketing strategies is of the utmost importance. If you are reading this article you may be asking yourself ” How do I boost my online sales?”
Strategies to increase online sales are a mix of traditional business marketing strategies and maximizing digital marketing solutions.
To state a few, these online tools include Search Engine Optimization strategies, offering content upgrades, and ad extensions. Business ethics such as transparency, credibility, and accountability are still very important today to become successful.
However, being able to effectively communicate these values to your customers on an online platform is the real deal-breaker. Be updated to what is trending, implement customer-oriented strategies, and stay at the forefront of the online marketplace. Here is a list of tried and tested marketing tools to help you increase online sales in 2020.
An excellent way to start and introduce your company to potential buyers is through a sales copy. Essentially, it is a short and informative write-up that aims to encourage potential customers to purchase from your site. This works best with attractive web design.
Effective sales copies are concise, straightforward, and transparent about what your business can actually offer. Studies have shown that web users are hypersensitive to online marketing stents and can easily tell if you are simply lying about who you are as a business. Your goal, therefore, is to appear authentic and trustworthy in the eyes of your potential customer.
Being honest about your businesses’ branding, ownership, and reviews is actually beneficial to today’s online customers. Aside from protecting your brand’s credibility, being honest about business identity reel in more customers especially if you are a small start-up.
There is a growing trend of supporting local businesses in many countries all over the world. This is because small enterprises are perceived to be more personalized and customer friendly. Not to mention people today are highly motivated by the idea of helping others and supporting small businesses. Do not be afraid to ride that wave. Take pride in your business, be authentic in your sales copy, and deliver what you say you will.
A content upgrade offer is a lead or opt-in bribe you present your customers for a specific product or service. It is a ground-breaking online marketing strategy that can increase your sales and subscriptions by 50%. This is because it offers your customers and site visitors with a clear and easily accessible way to get the best content you have to offer.
Content upgrade offers may differ depending on the post or product you are encouraging your users to buy or use. It also depends on what products and services you offer as a company. Using the right content upgrade will definitely increase the sales of your online store.
Content upgrade offers can help funnel in new customers and subscribers to your site. Additionally, it boosts engagement and cultivates your relationship with existing customers. Content upgrades can also be customized to target specific untapped audience segments that you want to appeal to.
This means that if you are unable to reach through a specific type of audience, content upgrade offers can easily reel them into being your customers if they are used properly.
If you are concerned with how to increase online sales in 2020, you need to know what your visitors commonly search for in your site. It is important that your ustomers to be able to find what they are looking for with ease and efficiency.
Understanding how visitors use your website search feature can give you accurate leads on how to optimize your site’s design, content, and general interface. Most of the ways to increase online sales have something to do with ease and accessibility.
Making sure site visitors are able to find and maneuver through your website with ease is very important. Once you are aware of what your site visitors often search for on your website, you can easily optimize your content and website features to make them more accessible to your audiences.
For example, if there are certain types of products that are popularly searched for by your visitors, it is wise to consider dedicating a section for those products specifically. Understanding how your visitors use your site search can also give you leads on what ad extensions you might want to have in order to boost online market sales. (More information on Ad Extensions on hack number 8).
Intuitively, the faster a customer finds what they are looking for in your site, the less likely they will leave and the more likely they will purchase from you.
Customer testimonials are powerful tools to showcase your credibility as a business and the quality of your products. Additionally, you can maximize the effect of customer testimonials by featuring those with a name and photo of a real customer.
Pinning a name and photo to a customer review will increase trust and confidence from your customers and other prospects. This would ensure potential customers that these testimonials are honest and written by real customers and product users.
This can also increase the desire to purchase among potential customers as they see the product they are interested actually being used.
You can take it a step forward and include images of the actual product taken by real customers for all your future testimonials. This will entice potential buyers because of the relatability this fosters between your prospect and actual loyal customer.
Customer testimonials from experts or big names from your line of business are also effective in establishing credibility. If approved by your customer, including their profession or expertise can help give authority to their testimonial.
Everybody loves free stuff. Giveaways and promos are excellent ways to encourage more traffic to your online business. Heavily and strategically advertising your giveaways and promotions can also make customers feel that they have a winning chance thus encouraging more engagement with your brand.
This might mean using multiple platforms and social media to promote your giveaways. Encourage customers to share your promotional materials by making it part of your giveaway mechanics. This hack will make sure that your giveaways would also motivate customers to create user-generated content.
Studies have shown user-generated content increases audience engagement and your brand’s reach and impressions on online platforms. The trick is finding an item or product that is relevant and highly demanded by your current and potential customers.
Here are some effective suggestions for your next giveaway to help you increase online sales:
Customer service that is effective and efficient is key to retaining valuable customers. Open and efficient communication throughout the purchasing process can help increase your brand’s customer trust and loyalty.
It has been proven that loyal customers are more likely to purchase new products and support future business endeavors. As a growing business, developing an extensive customer service program and hiring amicable support is of the utmost importance.
A general rule of thumb is to be proactive, responsive, and comprehensive with your customer service process. Program an intuitive bot that can help troubleshoot simple issues and problems. Chats with real customer service professionals can also help increase trust prior to purchase among your customers.
Providing useful resources and information is also part of intuitive and effective customer service. Lastly, crowdsourcing ways on how to improve customer care is also a good idea to generate leads for improvement.
One of the simple marketing tools to increase online sales is making your customers feel secure when purchasing from your website. Risk aversion or the desire to avoid potential loss is a common primary reason for a customer to decide not to buy something. Potential financial loss is a common consideration made by prospective buyers.
The probability that a product may not be as desirable as advertised is also an influential factor people take into consideration before making a purchase. Hence, a safeguard or guarantee for financial returns and assurance is effective in mitigating these fears.
A clear money-back guarantee process can help reassure your customers and remove any hesitation they may have from purchasing from your site. Another thing to consider in terms of guarantees is to give your customers information about your website security and other precautionary measures you take to protect their data and information.
Provide any information or reassurance to make your customers trust you. Money-Back Guarantees is just one of many measures you can apply. It is a persuasive tool that helps your credibility as well.
Ad extensions will help funnel in potential customers to the products they are looking for. Essentially, these are additional links that appear on the search page under your website for specific information a customer might be interested in.
As mentioned in the third hack, it is important to make the purchasing process faster and easier for your customers to encourage them to buy. This tool is effective in giving your prospects extra details and information about what your brand has to offer.
How exactly does this generate more clicks? This just means that there are more clickable titles prospective customers can see when your website appears on the search page. There is more space dedicated to your site and more ways customers can be funneled into your online store.
Knowing which ad extensions are worth providing will come from analyzing how your visitors use your site search. If there are types of information or products that are commonly searched by your audiences, these are most likely the ideal sections you should be using ad extensions with.
Use informative and SEO’d titles for your ad extensions to make customers aware of what it is exactly you are selling.
Partnering with an influencer is another effective way you can increase online sales in 2020. The trick is to find a brand partner that is relevant and credible in your industry as they are figures that influence a huge number of your potential customers.
Another option is to partner with budding micro-influencers with a decent amount of following on social media. This option can be cost-effective since influencers that are just starting to build their following are more flexible with compensation arrangements.
An important thing to remember is that a high following and audience guarantee is not always the only factor worth considering when partnering with influencers. Say you are a company catering to a specific niche or community.
The ideal strategy for you would be to hire an influencer with millions of followers. With an influencer you can expand your sales tremendously because of their personal credibility and the audience guarantee they can offer from their pre-existing following. Influencers with a niche following have the ability to bring your product closer to your target market.
Part of creating your brand identity is finding out your buyer personas. These are essentially identifying the type of people that you want to convert into loyal customers. Finding your target audience on social networks will make it easier for you to sell your products as these groups would already be inclined to purchase what you offer.
Part of finding your target audience is identifying what social media platform they are most active in. Each generation has different inclinations in social media use. Knowing which communities your target audience are part of can help you streamline your marketing efforts.
For example, if you find out that a bulk of your customers are also part of the certain Facebook groups, then it would be strategic to use targeted ads for those audience members.
Looking into your competitor’s strategies is helpful in crafting the voice and persona your brand will embody. This can help you benchmark on strategies that are appealing and effective in capturing your target audience.
Having a flexible and including checkout process would speed up purchase for your customers. Part of reducing friction in the checkout process is simplifying the experience for your customer. Again, ease and accessibility is very important in boosting your market sales.
Offer several payment methods for your customers and eliminate unnecessary steps. Take into consideration that your customers shop through mobile devices. So offering methods like Apple Pay and other mobile-run payment methods can be a good idea to be more accommodating.
Lastly, consider having options to save information so that customers do not have to start over in filling out information. The last thing you want is a customer backing out because of impatience.
Streamlining your check out process means making sure your customer has everything they need in order to complete a purchase. As stated above, avoid unnecessary steps that might dissuade from your customers from buying.
If you are still looking for ways on how to boost online sales, here is a list of steps that indirectly cause friction that you can forgo:
Categorizing your products in terms of price range allows your potential customers to choose based on their budget with ease. However, not many people know that this is a psychological hack done to funnel customers into buying products in the “middle ground”.
Studies have shown that people are more likely to buy items that are priced and categorized between cheap and expensive. Tiered pricing will allow you to herd customers into viewing and purchasing specific items by placing them in the middle price range. This technique is called “decoy pricing” where you place expensive price tags on certain items to gently suggest that the item you really want them to purchase is the best economic choice.
A great way to increase online store sales is by getting referrals from real loyal customers. This is similar to a customer testimonial and the influencer partnership strategy in away. It is important that your referral program offers relevant incentives to those willing to share your company with their circle of friends and family.
Referral programs and incentives are excellent strategies to boost sign-ups and subscription rates since you can benefit from the personal credibility of your referring customer.
Referred customers are also proven to purchase faster and convert to loyal customers in a shorter amount of time. This is because of the trust and confidence you are able to obtain from them through referrals and testimonials.
Email Campaign is a tried and tested marketing tool for improving online sales. Having a newsletter, letting your subscribers know of promotions, or simply communicating with them would easily remind them that your company exists.
Promotional emails still yield the most effective results for customer conversion. Your emails can be customized per customer depending on how long they have been engaging with you.
For example, a welcome email can be sent out to new subscribers, and on the other hand, an announcement for a re-stocked product for a customer who frequents an item can be done as well.
Your customers can be categorized based on their customer journey and communication through email can help make their experience more personalized and informative.
Email marketing can be especially effective in communicating with your customers and with keeping them in the loop of new promotions and products. With this said, do use emails strategically. Do not send out too many in order to avoid spamming or annoying your customers.
The quality of your images and videos on your site plays an important role in making first impressions. It is in your best interest to upload only high-resolution images and videos to build credibility and to attract your customers into purchasing your product.
Providing multiple angles of your product for the audience to see is also a good idea since people like to view items from different perspectives before purchasing. Any additional information that can be provided to help a customer decide is also a good idea.
As mentioned previously, online shoppers have the tendency of feeling insecure about items or potential loss. Giving them the information they might need or might want to know before purchasing will give your customers a sense of transparency. High-quality videos and images of products in use give it a real-life and more authentic feel.
Another helpful hack in persuading customers to buy your product is providing them with video demonstrations. Believable clips of real people using your product can help boost customer confidence in what you offer.
Landing pages might have the tendency to prolong your customers’ time in trying to look for what they need or want. Getting rid of your landing page by means of providing intuitive ad extensions will help lessen the chances of this. This means that your customers would take fewer steps or view fewer pages before they find what they are looking for in your site.
Having a landing site dedicated to information about your company as an enterprise is a good idea. However, what if this is not what your site visitors are looking for. More often than not they are concerned for information like contact details, locations, and addresses or perhaps actual products you might be offering.
These types of information can be easily accessed by your site visitors and potential customers if you were to give them a direct link through ad extensions.
This is also helpful for your customer using small-screen devices such as mobile phones where navigation can be difficult. You can hire any professional web design company to do the job for you.
Maximize your content, products, and website based on your customer behaviors. Simply giving your content a title with popular keywords customers often search for can easily help boost your sales.
This is because your website would have more chances of being peddled up by search engines since you are using terms and words that are highly searched for. Additionally, this would allow your content to appear earlier in search pages.
In order to help boost your market sales, you need to be found everywhere. The more content and pages you have professionally SEO’d the higher your chances are to be seen by your target audience. Using keywords and secondary keywords all throughout your articles or content would help tremendously in boosting your online sales.
A great reminder is to utilize your titles by making them informative and updated with keywords people commonly search for. Updating old content by making minor keyword changes or by providing more relevant and updated information is also an effective strategy to rank highly on search engines.
Lastly, make sure your site is secure and safe from data breaches. SEO maintenance includes updating and fortifying the software your online business runs on. This can be done by simple software updates or by hiring a professional team of SEO experts.
A safe and secure website is valued in the online market that collects valuable customer data. Additionally, a secure and well-maintained website is favored by search engine algorithms. SEO maintenance is just some of the many strategies to increase online sales.
This is maybe considered a no-brainer by many but how fast your website is able to run plays a big factor in retaining your audience’s attention. Slow loading pages will discourage your users from purchasing because of the inconvenience this may cause them.
This only reiterates the importance of ensuring the ease and accessibility of your website to your customers. As part of website maintenance, you should already be regularly checking for your website’s speed. Do not let a slow loading speed rob you of potential sales.
This is all part of speeding up and improving your customer service for more customers to purchase from your website. Optimizing your website speed and making sure it runs fast enough compared to other websites would also affect your SEO ranking.
Slow loading times are one of several factors that bring websites rank down. Other things to look out for to maintain a good SEO ranking are broken links, unresponsive sections, and general site security.
In a nutshell, keep your website or apps well maintained and make sure everything is able to run smoothly at optimal speed. Doing so will reap benefits for your SEO ranking as well as boost your customers’ purchasing experience.
Nowadays, most people use their mobiles for online shopping. It is important that you design your online business site with the purpose of fitting multiple devices. Consider how your designs would translate when opened in a mobile design or in a tablet.
How would this affect customer navigation? Studies have shown that aside from depending on mobiles, online customers prefer using multiple devices throughout their shopping journey.
Make sure that your website design is intuitive and can easily be navigated using any device. As previously mentioned, you should optimize the loading speed in order to encourage customers to purchase from you.
If you are a long-standing business with an established following and profit, it might be wise to invest in having your own app developed. This will make sure that you are able to effectively translate all the features from your website into a mobile phone or tablet. Additionally, an app could increase your credibility as an established company.
Another simple way to increase online sales is by having a clear call-to-action. This can be provided in product descriptions, on your landing page, or in your sales copy. It should be able to showcase your brand’s unique selling points and effectively convert visitors into customers.
A good rule of thumb to stick to when creating your call-to-action is keeping it short and memorable. Strategically designing your calls to action with what is relevant to the times would also help more people get involved.
Additionally, using calls-to-action increases audience and customer engagement as well as user-generated content depending on the call-to-action you compose. For example, if you come up with an effective and relevant call-to-action for a competition or giveaway, this will encourage people to join or engage with your brand.
In an ideal situation participating customers would encourage their family and immediate circles to join your campaign. Make your calls to action, clear, relevant, and exciting.
People have a fear of missing out and generally would like to know or have what others do. Creating a sense of urgency in your posts and product advertisements through highlighting its limits would excite customers to purchase.
Creating a sense of urgency for your website would most likely encourage your customers and site visitors to impulsively purchase. Simply suggesting that stocks are limited or only available in a given time frame would make customers and prospects feel that they might miss out if they do not buy the item right away.
This can be done through special offers, live countdowns, limited stock features, contests, or limited time offers. However, if you do not have the capacity to host giveaways, you can use exciting calls-to-action on your advertising and marketing materials.
This can be seen in your website’s landing page, emails or other promotional materials to create a sense of urgency for your customers.
Creating a sense of urgency would also appeal to the intrinsic need for people to be in the loop of things. People have a fear of missing out. Letting them know of a great product but also suggesting that there is a limit to the offer will incite them to purchase or join whatever it is you are promoting.
By now you should have enough information to get your website optimized. If you still find yourself asking yourself, “How to increase sales on my online store?”, a very simple way to do so is by showcasing your best-selling items.
There are times your customers would not know exactly what to buy. Funneling them to view your bestsellers would help actualize them actually purchase.
Your authority over your products as well as the guarantee that a lot of people have purchased a certain item will increase their trust and confidence in that product. Quite similar to the effect of tiered pricing, categorizing your items as bestsellers would have a psychological effect on your customers.
As mentioned in previous hacks, customer testimonials, referrals and ratings matter to potential customers and site visitors. Additionally, people would want to go for what is popular because years of psychology has proven that people have a fear of missing out.
Tagging an item as a bestseller would automatically suggest that the product has been highly rated by many other customers. Hence, giving more reasons for people to purchase that item.
Another good strategy is to highlight your bestsellers through video demonstrations or through credible customer testimonials.
These are just some ways you can effectively utilize online platforms in boosting your sales. These 23 hacks and tweaks to help you boost online sales in 2020 can be summed up into five simple methods below. Here are some of the FAQs about how you can increase online sales.
A lot of the hacks on how to increase online sales 2020 revolve around the accessibility and efficiency of your customer’s purchasing journey.
Getting rid of unnecessary steps and friction in the purchasing experience as well as keeping an intuitive website are highly important. Make sure that your design is able to translate well on multiple devices and that they look and feel professional and trustworthy.
Aside from the goal of attracting more customers and visitors into your site, a secure and professional looking website will lessen the chances of your site being de-indexed by search engines like Google.
Keeping a well maintained and SEO’d website also plays an important role in boosting your sales. Going through your content and updating them with new information and sources will keep you up in the search result pages.
There are some aspects of traditional business strategies that are still very much important today in the online market. The most basic and primary aspect of your business you need to actively mantain is your values and how you come across to potential customers.
As stated above, online customers today are hypersensitive to false information or sites that are pretentious. This means that the average online customer can easily tell if you are being dishonest or if your site is insecure.
Being honest, transparent, and credible in your business transactions will help boost your customers. Being able to translate this in an online store through clear and truthful content, safe money-back guarantees and reliable customer service are some ways you can maintain loyal customers and boost online sales.
Additionally, on the aspect of your customer’s personal experience, customers value credible testimonials. Highlight testimonials from real customers or from clients that have a certain qualification that would make them appear authoritative of a certain topic relevant to your products.
Customer service that is effective, efficient, and intuitive is very important in retaining customers. Consider a customer service that can assist your customers all throughout the buying process.
Offering information about your products, company FAQs, and other resources that might be relevant to your customers is also a great way to be proactive in your customer service.
It should be the primary goal of any business to be able to retain loyal customers, maintain a steady inflow of visitors, and convert prospects into real purchasing customers. You can achieve these goals by keeping with the trends and being aware of the most current marketing strategies.
However, the bottom line of all of these hacks and tweaks is being knowledgeable of the behavior and personas of your customers.
This means for every marketing strategy you develop or for every website renovation you undergo, it is of utmost importance to keep your customers and their preference in mind.
Once a business is able to successfully understand their target audience’s motivators and preferences, they have all the information they need to maximize the benefits of all the hacks and tweaks in this article.