Energizing your ecommerce: 10 effective ways to boost online sales
If creating a profitable ecommerce site is the vision, what does it take to get there? While it may look different for every company, it’s doable if you focus on the fundamentals first.
Here are 10 effective ways to boost your sales and energize your brand online.
1.) Don’t neglect digital marketing
Digital marketing should be an essential part of your ecommerce strategy. Marketing your online store can help you gain customers, increase brand awareness and expand your product reach.
Utilizing social media can be a beneficial way to market your products and engage with new and existing customers on a more personal platform.
Email marketing on the other hand is a great way to interact with customers more intentionally.
You can send promotions, create personalized messages, and set up flows to catch those customers that are in purchase purgatory – leaving items in their cart without completing the transaction.
Whatever channels you choose to target for your ecommerce website and whichever types of content you choose to do – organic or paid – it’s important to remember to ‘sell the click’.
Anyone can create a post on social media or an ad for a product, but it doesn’t mean your target audience is going to click on that link and complete the transaction.
You have to make sure you have an attention-grabbing ad, clear calls to action and a perceived value to the customer in order to pique their interest and make them want to learn more.
2.) Analytics are your friends
To track analytics is to understand your customer, their buying patterns, behavior and other variables that lead into their purchase.
If you’re not reviewing your analytics, then you could be missing out on untapped potential.
Not only do you get a better idea of who your customers are, but you can identify which of your products is selling the best, how customers are discovering your product – or getting to your website in the first place, and how many are completing a purchase.
Long story short… analytics are your friends and if you’re not using them, you could be losing customers and sales! And if you don’t understand them, talk to the experts!
3.) Utilize integrations for streamlining processes
Connecting CMS or ERP systems will allow you to manage your customers and inventory to provide accurate product levels and consistent communication.
Nothing is worse than wanting a product just to find out it’s out of stock. Stay on top of your inventory so you can make sure the customer can complete their purchase every time.
Web applications allow you to get real-time information from your customers and provide unique experiences for them on your site. From work order forms to product customization features, applications are a great way to expand your customer’s interaction with your site and even allow them to tailor products to their desired specifications.
Oh hey, we may know someone who builds custom applications…
4.) Enhance your products offerings
Enhancing your product offerings through complementary products and bundles can positively impact your ecommerce sales.
Calling out complementary goods helps increase order values which in turn will boost your sales volume. Customers are more likely to add an item if it compliments or enhances the original product they are purchasing.
You can use phrases like “Commonly Purchased With”, “People Also Buy” or “Related Products” to help draw user’s attention to other products.
While bundling items increases the overall value of the order, it simultaneously offers some cost savings back to the customer.
Using your analytics to determine items frequently purchased together can give you insight into which products would be beneficial to bundle or market alongside another product.
5.) Optimize for search engines
SEO game is everything! Get your ecommerce site higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) by
- Optimizing your metadata (including image alt text)
- Identifying quality keywords
- Using high quality images
- Setting up your site for search (Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools).
- Ensuring your site provides a well-rounded user experience
Having the right SEO foundation and processes in place will allow you to grow your website’s authority and improve your ranking.
Product pages and descriptions should be thoroughly completed and made available for search engines to crawl and index as soon as possible. Utilizing multiple, high quality images with detailed, keyword rich descriptions will help users find your page and encourage them to take action.
These are just a few ways in which you can start to optimize your ecommerce website for search engines. For a comprehensive guide to SEO for ecommerce, check out this list.
6.) UX, UX, UX! (User Experience)
User experience describes the overall interaction that users have with a website. It includes some technical factors but also the basics such as look, feel, efficiency and reaction (hopefully positive) that a user has when interacting with a site.
Creating a well-rounded user experience is important for retaining and drawing in new customers. An ecommerce website that has a clean layout with quick load times will perform exponentially better than a website with a poor user experience.
In fact, quick page load time can contribute to an increase in conversions. A 2022 study found that “a site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.”
Interactive buttons motivate customers to engage with your products and take desired actions. Buttons for checking out, adding quantities, selecting size, etc., are all clear calls to action that help guide the user on the path towards the checkout.
Optimizing your ecommerce website is an effective way to improve overall user experience so you can keep your customers coming back and converting.
7.) Introduce loyalty programs
Offering loyalty programs to customers is an easy way to turn them into repeat buyers, which helps boost your average sales volume. Loyalty programs are great because they can be tailored to your business and your capabilities, meaning what you offer is totally up to you!
Identify a solid value proposition that will make your loyalty program worthy of your customer’s attention and you’ve got the groundwork for a fruitful relationship!
8.) Offer free shipping
Offering free shipping is an effective way to get customers to spend a little bit more than they were originally planning to. How?
Customers are more likely to purchase an additional item in order to reach the threshold and receive free shipping.
Dr. Alain Samson, a behavioral economist believes that “we [consumers] may have an emotional reaction to zero cost, evident in the word ‘free'”.
This explains why customers would spend a few extra dollars to receive the perceived deal of free shipping.
9.) Run limited-time promotions
Piggy-backing on the psychology behind consumer behavior is the way in which consumers make purchases when they feel a subconscious pressure to do so.
We see this through promotions utilizing urgency or scarcity tactics to appeal to customer’s emotions, especially during the holidays.
An ecommerce customer is more likely to go through with a transaction if they know after a period of time the product price will increase again or won’t be offered any longer.
What do these sound like?
- Limited time only
- Limited edition
- Don’t miss out
- Save XX now through the end of the month
- Offer ends soon
10.) Don’t forget featured product feeds
Showcasing best-selling items, new products or trending goods on a featured product feed is a great way to draw your customer’s attention to valuable products right when they land on your home page.
You should utilize featured product feeds on your ecommerce website because the products are proven to sell! These are what your current customers are buying, so why not show them to new customers who have just discovered your site?
These feeds can be a great way to highlight trending items as well, and you don’t want to be behind the times!
Boosting your online sales may seem like a daunting task, but these 10 effective tips will help you set the foundation for the sustainable growth of your ecommerce website.