The most important objective for any eCommerce site and business is to increase sales revenue. However, we all know that it can be easier said than done. There are certainly many eCommerce businesses that are doing absolutely everything but still fail in generating healthy revenue growth.
It’s important to know that efforts without the right direction are often meaningless. Using the right tactics and strategies to grow your eCommerce business is very important in achieving success and growth.
In this guide, we will discuss some of the awesome ways to grow your eCommerce business sales. Yet, before we begin, let us understand the factors that might affect how you should approach your eCommerce sales and marketing strategies.
Important Factors To Consider In Growing Your eCommerce Sales
There is no one-size-fits-all answer in getting more sales on your eCommerce site. It will ultimately depend on many different factors like your target audience, the type of eCommerce site you run, and how you run the business in the first place, among other factors.
In general, here are some of the most important factors to consider before we can plan a proper strategy to grow your eCommerce sales:
Targeting the right audience
One of the most important factors in growing your eCommerce sales is to pick the right market and understand their needs. It is very possible that your target audience might not be interested in what you sell, or you are not catering to their needs and pain points.
Execute proper market research, understand their needs and pain points, and develop marketing and sales strategies that can properly cater to these needs.
Not setting up the right funnel
Different target audiences can have different buyer’s journey and a huge aspect of a successful eCommerce business is to set up the right marketing/sales funnel to accommodate this buyer’s journey.
Here is how the typical buyer’s journey happens in an eCommerce site:
- Visitor searches for information or for a specific product, alternatively they might stumble upon an advertisement
- Visits the website to find the product/solution
- Searches for the product they need and cheks the price. They might also check online reviews, do minor research, etc.
- They place an order and purchase the product
If they don’t like something in any of the aforementioned steps (for example, if they can’t find the product on step 3), they might move on to another website.
They don’t trust your site’s security
Security is a very important factor for any eCommerce site, and here are some important factors that might affect your prospect’s and customer’s trust issues:
- SSL certificate/HTTPS is a very important factor to ensure that your website is safe for transactions
- The number of positive reviews about your site. Encourage your existing customers to leave you a review. You can also offer incentives if necessary
- Resolve customer’s concerns and questions as soon as you can.
- Make sure your product’s price is reasonable according to the product’s value
Ease of use
How easy it is to navigate your site, view your products, and make a purchase (the checkout process) will significantly affect conversion rates.
Make sure your site is properly optimized for user experience (UX). Prospects are more likely to pay more when they get flawless experience on your site. This will include mobile-friendliness and fast enough load speed according to today’s standards.
Top 6 Awesome Ways To Boost Your eCommerce Business Sales
Now that we’ve discussed the important factors that might affect your site’s conversion rate, here are some of the most effective ways to maximize your resources and optimize sales revenue:
Mobile-friendliness
It’s no secret that nowadays, more and more people are making their online purchases exclusively from their mobile devices (smartphones). On the other hand, a study by Status Labs suggested that 30% of mobile shoppers will abandon their purchase if the site is not properly optimized for mobile devices.
Thus, make sure your website is completely optimized for mobile devices. If your eCommerce site is WordPress-based, this can be as simple as updating to a mobile-responsive theme. Also, various popular eCommerce platforms (i.e. Shopify) are optimized for mobile.
Focus on optimizing for these factors:
- User Experience (UX) and convenience
- Page load speed
- Customer loyalty, benefits, and rewards
- Personalization and customization
- Entertainment factors
Make sure all of your content is readable on a smartphone, and make sure your forms are easily clickable (and don’t include too many fields). Also, test your eCommerce sites on as many devices as possible.
Create a sense of urgency
You’ve probably had a working advertising campaign or two, you’ve built enough awareness in your target market, and you’ve got a lot of traction with your content and social media posts. So, what’s missing?
Probably it’s because you haven’t created enough sense of urgency around your promotions. When there’s the right amount of urgency, prospects and buyers are going to respond quickly because they fear they are going to miss your promotions and will rush to buy your product.
Don’t underestimate the power of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). The most common example of this tactic is to create a limited-time offer, or limiting your promotions to just a certain quantity.
Another option is to apply a cross-selling technique to discount a price-sensitive item as a bundle with items that move slower. This creates a fear that if they don’t purchase this item immediately, they’ll end up spending more later.
Accept more payment options
Payment flexibility is no longer a luxury feature for eCommerce businesses, but a necessity.
The idea is to provide as much convenience as you can for as many customers as possible. Also, make sure to support as many types of credit cards as possible, and make sure to also accept debit cards.
On the other hand, online payment trends are still evolving rapidly. So, continue to monitor new trends, and adapt your site to support the latest platforms.
Ensure the checkout process is as simple as possible for all of these payment options. Remove checkout registration as it can severely affect your conversion rate.
Enhance trust and reputation
It’s no secret that competition is very tough in the eCommerce area. Trust and credibility are extremely important for any eCommerce site, and we can argue that trust is probably the most valuable commodity in eCommerce marketing.
The more reputable your site is, the more buyers you’ll get, period.
Focus your strategy on developing, promoting, and protecting your eCommerce business’s reputation. Regularly publish content to establish your position as an expert in your industry, and maintain it through regular feedback.
Eliminate as many perceived risks as you can from your audience: offer valid lowest price guarantee, no-questions-asked return policy, warranty, and so on. This can significantly reduce the bounce rate of your prospects. Make sure to mention these near your visible CTAs, for example, next to your “Buy Now!” button. And no, simply mentioning “free shipping” won’t cut it these days since everyone’s offering it these days.
Improve engagement through live chat and chatbots
Live chat is now a standard for any eCommerce site if you want to improve sales. Customer service is now one of the most important factors to maintain if you want to establish trust (as discussed above).
Adding a live chat option, or even better, a chatbot is something that might seem complicated to implement, but actually is fairly easy. A working chat option allows you or your customer service representative to directly engage with site visitors, while at the same time providing your prospects and buyers the ability to ask any questions and resolve any issues in real-time.
The idea is to eliminate potential obstacles: ensuring your prospects an easier time to get in contact with you, which can significantly boost the conversion rate. If you have a live chat feature implemented, you can let this prospect stay on your site while eliminating possible frictions.
Remarketing site visitors to maximize conversions
It’s very common that a first-time visitor on your eCommerce store will only browse a little then leave your site without making any purchase at all. In fact, this should be the norm and expected. However, this doesn’t change the fact that there are ways to leverage these bouncing visitors so they will visit your site again and finally make a purchase.
Remarketing (or retargeting) is essentially advertising that is only displayed for people that have visited your site in the past, and we can implement it through Google Ads and Facebook Ads, among other platforms.
There are many ways we can implement remarketing for your eCommerce site. For example, if a prospect left your site but has checked out a certain product, we can show an ad for this specific product with—for example—, Facebook Ads and probably offer them a limited-time discount to create a sense of urgency (as discussed above.)
End words
While running an eCommerce site is now very competitive and challenging, it doesn’t mean there aren’t ways we can maximize conversion rate and boost our eCommerce sales revenue. The six tactics we have discussed above are among the most effective ones we can try, and they are fairly easy to implement right away.
