How to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Store?
Are you thinking of specific methods to boost your sales on your eCommerce website? There are some unique ways to increase online sales. Whether you have begun your journey with an online sales website or have been in the eCommerce industry for many years, generating more eCommerce sales will increase your profits. Unfortunately, all eCommerce businesses pass through ups and downs since their start. Though any kind of failure happens to you, don’t get disappointed. Everyone in this industry is constantly looking for solutions to the question: how to boost eCommerce sales? If you are stuck with the brand new methods of increasing eCommerce traffic for getting more customers, I can give you some specific points to develop your own eCommerce promotion strategy and to boost eCommerce sales.
Why Ecommerce Sales Not Increasing?
Suppose you own a boutique and looking for ways to increase online boutique sales.
If your sales have become static, first you have a look at these points to check whether it is really affecting your eCommerce strategy in order to increase eCommerce sales.
1. You Tried to Target the Wrong People
2. Your Funnel Set up not Done in the Right Way
3. Ecommerce Website Visitors Don’t Trust Your Website
4. The website has not Been Optimized for Speed
5. You did not Set up Email Subscription
6. Your Customer Service for the boutique is not up to the Level
7. Shipping Time is way Ahead of Customer’s Expectation
8. You do not Try Techniques to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Store
Quick Tricks – How to Improve E-commerce Business
As part of the eCommerce sales process, you may have to pay attention to the following key tips to find unique ways for increasing online sales (not only limited to increasing online boutique sales)
1. Always Increase Your Brand Awareness Through an eCommerce Promotion Strategy
2. Prioritize Your Online Sales Prices Getting Right
3. Make a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) for Your Website
4. Always Try to Optimize the Online Store & Create Split Tests on Each Product or Service
5. Get Your Website Known for Exceptional Customer Service
6. Try Reduce Shipping Time and Increase Online Sales Fast
Expert Opinion on Why Ecommerce Website Don’t Get Sales
There are newbies in the eCommerce industry and each day more and more online stores are launched in the internet arena. All these guys are asking the same typical question: how do I make my first sale?
1. Your online Store Not Offering Exceptional Products
2. Your Ecommerce Website do Not Get Traffic
3. Website Hanging Issues Along With Bad User Experience
4. Not Targeting The Right Market and in Turn, it Does not Result in Driving Traffic to Your eCommerce Store
5. Site Contents Not Optimized
6. Not Making The Visual Presentations Easy to Decide for Customers
There are a lot of things you need to know about how to improve the e-commerce business. We will discuss everything from reasons of low traffic to a unique selling proposition to increase your online boutique sales or any other product that you sell. Always be certain that increasing online sales from your eCommerce stores is a gradual process. You might not be able to see a hike in traffic to your eCommerce store in a day or two. However, you can be in a better position to see a significant increase in your eCommerce website’s sales volume, if you follow the tips which we will disclose in this post and remain focused on your customer satisfaction.
Let us look at your e-commerce business from the customer’s point of view to know the unique ways to increase sales. Here is an infographic shared by the team from Go Globe, that can show you the stats you need to know before making the first sale and for your future online journey.
They have covered the following fears of online consumers in a fantastic way:
- Is this online business for real?
- Will I be able to shop safely
- Will I like any product in the online store?
- Will there be any customer care available I can talk to before making the first sale?
- Will I be allowed to return any product?
Check out the colorful infographic for more details and to know how to drive traffic to your eCommerce store and increase online sales fast.
infographic, courtesy : Red Website Design blog.
How to Get Your First Sale and Increase Online Sales Fast?
Let us know more about eCommerce Promotion Strategy
If you are in a hurry to address the questions ‘how to boost eCommerce sales’, then you should be patient enough to know about the in-out of Ecommerce marketing. Ecommerce marketing is the way of adopting a promotional strategy to increase eCommerce traffic to your store, converting that traffic into paying customers and retaining those first-time buyers for subsequent purchases.
A comprehensive eCommerce sales idea comprises marketing tactics that to be applied both on and off your website. A solid eCommerce marketing strategy can easily build a website’s brand, uplift customer trust, increase online sales through social media, and ultimately increase eCommerce sales.
You can use eCommerce marketing to promote your website as a whole or to promote some specific products. Below is an overview of a few practical ideas to try to get your first sale and drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
Ecommerce Marketing Strategy to Increase Online Sales
1. Try For Upsell and Cross-Sell – eCommerce Sales Process
How to boost eCommerce sales? Have you heard the same or some variation of the saying “Would you like to supersize your order?” It’s a perfect analogy of up-selling or the method of selling a slightly costlier product than the one the customer was originally thinking to buy.
You should understand that many times upselling is more effective than trying to get a net new customer on your online store and to improve e-commerce business in a unique way for increasing online sales. When your customers don’t know that a premium product is also on sale, they should be informed of it. Or they may be provided with testimonials to understand how an upgrade of an item is a better fit for their needs.
How to increase online boutique sales by driving traffic to your eCommerce store/online boutique?
If your e-commerce website’s sales are falling down, think of more creative ideas to boost your sales on your online store. Instead of putting efforts to get new customers, find out ways to resell products to your existing customer base. Make sure you have used SSL certificates on your online store with some trustable seals to make online customers comfortable entering their financial information as well as card numbers. It is always good to use testimonial videos and how to do videos to show customers how to use them.
For example, is one of your boutique product models made of slightly better leather? Or does one carry a special component that’s handmade? Make sure to emphasize the difference and ask, in the right places, if the customer might want to upgrade before making the first sale.
As an example, if one of the products sold by your boutique has got a better physical feature on its new model, communicate the difference and inform in the right places on the online boutique store to check if the customer would need to try an upgrade.
Whenever you try to upsell a product or service on your e-commerce store, think of these unique ways to increase sales:
- Consider your upsells for the original product bought by a customer and that will eventually improve your e-commerce business
- Adopt an eCommerce promotion strategy considering the price range related to the purchasing power of your customer to effectively drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
All the upsells should fit your customer’s basic needs and they should not be pushed back with its price tag as soon as they get an anchor price in their mind. An anchor price is the first idea coming to customer’s minds after seeing the product and it’s used for comparing with other price points. At any cost, the new feature of your upsell product should be more than satisfying the customer’s requirements.
Anyone who’s ever purchased fashion wear from an online boutique is familiar with this situation, once you’ve selected a particular model, companies will usually highlight upgrades for performance (upselling) or additional accessories (cross-selling) for you to consider.
As an example of the right upsell process, once you decide to purchase a specific dress from a offline boutique store, the salesman will take you to some other premium models or accessories that will enhance the fashion wear’s appearance.
2. Engage on Instagram as a part of the eCommerce Promotion Strategy
How to increase online sales through social media?
You should always seek unique ways to increase sales and need to be conscious of using social media platforms like Instagram for promoting the online store and drive traffic to your eCommerce store. With millions of daily users, Instagram is one of the right social media platforms you need to highlight your products as it is one of the fastest-growing social apps, connecting buyers, influencers, and businesses. In my opinion, the new online store owners’ social media platform will help them make their first sale.
You can take aesthetically good looking photos of your products and post on Instagram at the right time using well-researched hashtags and build a large following of people who are interested in your online store and its products. The key to mastering Instagram for e-commerce marketing is the way you engage with users through unique ways to increase your online sales.
You can think of various ways to boost sales on your e-commerce website by closely engaging with followers on Instagram. Conduct a contest on the platform or post a video showcasing the ‘behind the scenes’ of some premium products and provide the direct link in your Instagram posts so that your followers get a direct path to purchase, which is the strategy for increasing your online sales.
Instagram can be considered as an eCommerce marketplace in its own right. Check out various options of promoting online sales on Instagram and increase online sales leveraging social media:
3. Recover Abandoned Carts – Unique Way to Increase Sales
You should be aware of the harsh truth that any abandoned cart is losing your money invested in online marketing to boost e-commerce sales even before trying hard to make the first sale.
This happened when the visitors add products to their shopping carts and abandon them at some point towards the checkout process. As per stats, 69.23% of shopping carts get abandoned in an online store.
In many cases, if you could remind the customers after a few hours via emails, most of them come back to complete the checkout process. Sometimes you may need to consider an additional discount to persuade them to finish the purchase if you really want to drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
One effective way to recover the abandoned cart is opting for an automated email campaign to bring back the customer to store and complete their original purchase. Many successful online businesses use such email recovery campaigns with quirky subject lines and substitute product suggestions to try to get customers back to their abandoned carts. Hire copywriters to get your email contents that entice your visitors to return to their carts by offering special discounts and highlighting product features
4. Launch a Facebook store
Facebook serves as a viable platform for social media and online marketing.
Another unique way to increase sales is through your Facebook store. In addition, your Facebook store can integrate directly with Woocommerce and Shopify, so you don’t need to keep a separate inventory.
5. Increase Email Subscribers
Email marketing has proved it as one of the most efficient channels that you can use to make your sales easily and get repeat customers from the day number one of getting the first sale. As per stats done in 2015, 17% of the digital marketing budget is for email marketing and it adds 24% of revenue to the commerce business.
The advantage of email over any social media usage/posts is that it can keep your business more intimate with customers. People feel more personal of messages received in their inboxes versus any social media feeds. Plus, email marketing provides the space to say about the product features and discounts that can’t typically fit into a social media post.
To get started with the eCommerce sales process, actively promote your newsletter, blog, and any other email capture efforts to get as many subscribers as you can. Some successful online stores makes signing up for its email list at the central focus when you first visit their site and it is their unique way to increase sales.
To keep your email marketing at the forefront, you should be actively involved in sending occasional newsletters and posting blogs and showcasing an email capturing form at the central focus when your website visitor land on the site. These methods will help you drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
6. Focus on Your Email Campaigns
Capturing the emails and building the list is not enough, you need to concentrate on sending useful emails to your potential buyers regularly as a part of an effective eCommerce marketing strategy.
Consider any good opportunities as possible that they think are perfect for receiving an email from your eCommerce store. Subscribers will actually appreciate the following kind of email marketing on occasions like:
- Shoot a welcome email as soon as a customer makes his first sale.
- Send exclusive promo codes including free gifts.
- Inform your customers via regular newsletters of new discount offers and new product features.
- Send a catalog to help customers get the most out of the products purchased by them.
- Send an email with a personal note expressing your appreciation for their business to your highest-value customers.
- Collect feedback from the website visitors who doesn’t make a purchase, request them to share their experience, and constantly improve traffic to your eCommerce store.
7. Send Wishlist Reminder Emails
Another type of eCommerce promotion strategy is to add wishlist reminder emails to your checklist. The wishlist reminder emails work almost in the same way as cart emails to convince buyers to go to the checkout process for purchasing the products they wished to own and it increases eCommerce traffic.
If the visitors are not following up with their wishlist or they have piled up with items on their list and they are all selling out, plan to send an email reminder that can be a trigger to push them to action. Some eCommerce businesses adopt unique ways to increase online sales by alerting potential buyers when products are nearly sold off. This way you can ensure that no regular buyers are accidentally missing out products they’ve been wishing to get.
8. Design Your Ecommerce Stores For Customers to Buy
Make sure your eCommerce website is rightly designed and optimized for speed not to lose any customers. You should be clear what a poorly designed eCommerce store looks like before trying to drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
A poor online store could be lacking a clear value proposition, illegible fonts, or frustrating navigation and eventually, you won’t be making your first sale. Your theme for the online store needs to be selected so that you can properly categorize the products in separate pages and text contents balancing with images. And in any case, you feel that your website theme is responsible for the poor conversion, then better take action to change the theme.
9. Engage Ecommerce Website visitors via Live Chat
One of the valuable ways of engaging with the website visitors is via live chat apps. Many live chat tools provide the option to focus on specific pages after your buyers have been on the page for a certain length of time. Through Live Chat, you can conduct direct conversations with your buyers so that they can clear their concerns right away while they’re planning to make their first sale. They may understand your unique ways to increase online sales, however, they will be immersed in the intimate engagements.
10. Evaluate Product Demand
If you have got any plans to extend your product line, then the market demand needs to be evaluated to check if it’s worth the cost. There are some unique ways to evaluate your product demand and increase sales before you actually launch it on your online store. You can pre-sell the products to see how many orders are placed and use social media trends, keyword research, etc. And try to increase online sales through social media also.
You can also check the most viable product on the store out of the available products in the market place by creating pages for all those products with sale status as out of stock. Check which of them gets the most attention and traffic from the back-end to decide which one of them needs to be live on-site for sale soon.
11. Start Blogs for Content Marketing to Increase eCommerce Sales
An effective eCommerce promotion strategy should consider starting blogs and regularly posting articles on it to connect with customers and to rank better in search engines. If you’re already posting blogs consistently, make sure your blog is featured on your eCommerce website and that will definitely drive traffic to your online store.
There are many eCommerce sales ideas by which you can do content marketing than posting blogs:
- Highlight your expertise through regular podcasts and build a stronger audience from the day you make your first sale.
- Check the possibilities of guest posting on other websites to build awareness and generate backlinks.
- Create epic contents and user guides to help customers get more of their products effectively
12. Embrace Personalization
By doing personalization for trending products, you can increase sales by up to 10%. By analyzing behavioral data, the personalized product range is displayed to the visitor matching with their past actions and preferences.
By including a location in personalization based on where your customers are located in the world, you can serve them one step ahead by providing the products they really wanted as per their current location which in turn will drive more traffic to your e-commerce store.
13. Prioritize User-Generated Content to Improve Your E-commerce Business
UGC is a unique way to generate social proof and increase sales. When potential buyers see that visitors just like them are regularly buying your products, they’ll be more inclined in doing the same and start making their first sale. It is interesting to note that 54% of consumers depend on reviews and recommendations from their peers.
Apart from product reviews, another most effective types of UGC is images of customers who actually use your products. Some online store that sells undergarments, encourage their customers to post their pictures with the products in their social media accounts.
14. Think of Local Promotions
You can also explore the ways of launching local promotions. Think of many ways on how to increase online sales through social media. Some of the ways to check the options of local promotions for your product are:
- Locate the areas where you have a large customer base and launch a promotion for that location. Analyze the products those customers are purchasing and conduct local events to appropriately execute the local promotion.
- If you own warehouse in multiple locations, go for a promotion with discounted or expedited shipping to customers in the area.
All these techniques will help you increase online sales fast.
15. Optimize the Website Pages and Product Images During the eCommerce Sales Process
By adopting conversion rate optimization (CRO), you can optimize your eCommerce site for conversions. Through effective CRO, you can easily identify problem areas on your website.
What checkpoints result in losing sales? Who abandons the cart and why? What actions can you do to bring back those customers? Through qualitative and quantitative research, we can have a comprehensive view of current conversion status on the site.
Once you have done enough research to understand challenges and opportunities, you can form hypotheses and split tests to see which design modifications result in more sales that will contribute to enhancing your eCommerce sales ideas. As you become successful in website optimization, it can drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
16. Optimize the Ecommerce Website for Mobile
Your e-commerce website needs to be developed with mobile visitors in mind and so it should be mobile responsive. Optimize the website speed and performance for both mobile and desktop. As per Statista, by 2021, more than 50% of online shopping is expected to occur via mobile phones.
The responsive design should take care of sufficiently sized cart icons to facilitate mobile shopping super easy. Also, the product images need to be resized or optimized for mobile devices for easy loading and quick zoom in/out.
17. Initiate Customer Retention Programs and Rewards
A decision to work on customer retention will be a unique way to increase eCommerce sales. As per stats by Stitch Labs, return customers are contributing towards 22% of the online seller’s revenue standing on the fact that they are just 11% of the total customer base.
The loyalty program will provide customers extra benefits for making purchases from your online store and they will be forced to remind your brand through the various messages they receive.
Your customer loyalty programs via an efficient eCommerce promotion strategy will decide when to reward your customer, for what actions, and how often. As an example, it can be a point-based system where the points will be equivalent to currency and can be redeemed at some point for discounts and free gifts.
Never Give up and Move Forward Till You Make Your First Sale
If you want to boost e-commerce sales further, work towards developing a mobile application. Focus on your top-selling products. Create a unique value proposition. These techniques will further boost the sales on your website.
The Best Ways to Increase eCommerce Traffic
I have developed my own e-commerce website and I am successfully running over a year. I have got the opportunity to learn a lot of eCommerce sales ideas from my own trial and error methods and my vast reading on the topic of online sales.
You have to create an effective eCommerce strategy that should be refined as your online business grow and your customers change.
Keep in mind that the growth in eCommerce is not always consistent. Although consumers spend more money on online shopping, they need not be spending it on your online store and you need to start finding their own unique ways to increase online sales.
If you want more success than downfalls, you should go for data-driven decisions. If you need to drive traffic to your online business, you always pay attention to the requirements of your customers over the needs of your e-commerce store.
You may have to share a lot of free content to grow your brand, spread brand awareness, gain trust, and build relationships with potential customers.
Build Trust
If you plan to reap trust with your website customers through various engagement programs seeking unique ways to increase e-commerce sales, you need to keep your word, and publish credible content, not to lose trust.
How can you build trust in e-commerce business? There are a few best practices you can adopt.
- Stick to your word: Make promises that you can keep.
- Display trust badges: Show SSL certificate badges and similar signs of trust on the footer of your website and make your first sale.
- Be Transparent: Reveal how your team works inside the company and their unique ways to increase stores’ sales
- Quick Response: Extend your helping hand and attend customers’ questions.
- Admit mistakes: Accept your mistakes and tell them how you’ll fix it.
- Prepare case studies: Publish a report on how you’ve achieved success through your eCommerce sales process and it skyrockets your online sales fast.
Focus on these best eCommerce sales ideas to build trust between your eCommerce business and your customers. You will see soon see a jump in traffic to your eCommerce store and your revenue will be climbing up.
How to Boost eCommerce Sales
Pay Attention to Your Target Audience
Are you looking for making more sales online considering your target markets?
You need to create a buyer persona to start with. A buyer persona represents a target consumer taking into consideration his/her demographics, likes, dislikes, income, and other personal details.
The more details you incorporate with the buyer persona, the better it becomes by targeting your audience more accurately. For example, if you are aware that your buyer persona is a housewife, you can communicate with her through email marketing and online advertising.
Let’s assume that you sell cleaning cloths. Housewives might have requirements for cleaning clothes in the kitchen. If you have a special type of cleaning equipment and clothes that take up less storage space, you could easily reach that buyer persona.
Unique eCommerce sales ideas to increase sales – Include Product and Testimonial Videos
We know well-photographed product photos will be looking great on the e-commerce website. However, well-edited product videos can entice your customers to make your first sale and then persuade them in buying more products.
According to one case study, incorporating product videos increased the likelihood of a purchase by 144 percent by driving more traffic to their eCommerce store.
Some studies released by ecom companies shows that displaying product videos in online stores has increased the chance of a purchase by 144 percent.
You don’t need to post a video for all products you showcase in your boutique. You just need to focus on one or two premium products/best sellers.
Additionally, You can create explainer, how-to, or testimonial videos for the products/services you offer on your store.
As per stats, it is known that including videos in emails will give an uplift of click-through rates by 300 %. In fact, incorporating video in emails can drive click-through rates up by as much as 300 percent, and 70 percent of online sellers who have these practiced unique ways to increase e-commerce sales have disclosed in a survey that including video in websites was the number-one factor that attributed to increased sales.
You don’t have to search for movie-production-quality equipment to respond and act to the question of how to increase online boutique sales. In fact, you can produce a product video using your smartphone’s camera.
However, if you are very strict on quality, better search for a local studio in which you can arrange recording as per your eCommerce sales ideas.
Be Generous in Offering Guarantee
Make your eCommerce promotion strategy clear that customer satisfaction is your first priority from the very beginning of making the first sale of your product. You can offer guarantees to your products as several e-commerce businesses use guarantees to drive traffic to their eCommerce store and generate more conversion.
If you offer a guarantee to your products, that will be a unique method to increase store’ sales as it helps eliminate the customer’s risk of purchasing the items. Your buyers don’t have to think about whether or not they’ll like it.
Another eCommerce sales idea is that a guarantee being offered is a proposition that can send a strong message that you believe in its efficacy.
And, customers often do not think of returning the products even if they’re not happy with it because It consumes their time and effort to pack a product, arrange a courier and bear the charges of return.
Even if you had to bear a product return for your first sale, you will be able to create goodwill and it will surely cause an increase in eCommerce traffic. As per records, nearly 70 percent of online customers won’t purchase a product without referring to the returns page. So by offering a guarantee that can be a unique strategy to increase online sales, you’ll be able to generate immediate trust and a sale.
Remove Unnecessary Elements on Checkout Pages
When a buyer is moving towards the checkout page, you should not keep any elements on his way. Those distracting elements can include navigation menus, sidebars, and calls to action. If the potential buyer gets distracted or confused, he might leave your store and you lose a sale.
For example, if your site makes it mandatory for the buyers to create an account before they can purchase a product, it might result in cart abandonment. It is a good practice to wait until the customer makes a sale and then invite them to create an account.
If you keep too many form fields to be filled up before purchase, your customers might leave your site because they simply don’t have time to fill out all those details. Experts say that a fully optimized checkout flow need to be having as short as 7 form fields.
In order to drive more traffic to your store, redesign and optimize your checkout pages to eliminate friction and distraction so that the user stays focused on purchasing what he or she wants.
Reply to Your Followers
Engagement is considered as one of the valuable metrics to analyze when it comes to increasing eCommerce sales. Your engagement with your subscribers, followers, and fans will decide your success as far as online sales are concerned.
The engagement can be through any of these channels:
- Blog
- Email replies
- Polls and surveys
As per statistics, nearly 80 percent of online buyers opines that the experience an eCommerce store offers is as important as its products and services. So if you could offer a positive experience when making the first sale of your product through unique ways, that can definitely increase sales for the rest of the online journey.
Conclusion
As mentioned in the above post, there are some specific ways to increase online sales and it is mainly a catch of getting to know your target market and creating a relation with them. If you own a great product or service and you offer outstanding customer service, that can definitely help you make the first sale and later boost your e-commerce traffic.
I’ve already mentioned several useful methods that can help you drive traffic to your eCommerce website and grow your store sales. In a snapshot, we can emphasize the key points such as posting product videos, using live chat services, offering loyalty programs and guarantee, making sure purchasing experience in online stores is as quick and smooth as possible.
When you are practicing these eCommerce sales ideas, it will help to increase your email list. In the end, you need to collect and analyze as much as the website visitor’s data as possible and make data-driven decisions.
In the end, your question on boosting eCommerce sales will be cleared if you’re consistent with these e-commerce sales techniques, and then it is certain that those tips will increase your online sales fast
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