Increase Online Sales for Your Ecommerce:
Increasing sales, especially online, is a pretty constant marketing objective but the competition can get tough. When consumers have thousands upon thousands of products just a few clicks away, how can you differentiate your brand and stand out?
We’ve gathered 10 tips to help your ecommerce stand out from the rest. These tactics will help present your product in a more appealing way, reach your ideal audience, and make it easier for your customers to buy again and again. Let’s jump in!
1. Know Your Buyer Persona
To reach your ideal customers, you first need to know who they are.Creating a buyer persona is an essential sales technique and should be one of the first steps in developing your brand’s marketing strategy. If you don’t already have one, it’s never too late to get your team together and get to work.
A good buyer persona should include at least the following information
- Who is your customer? Information about the customer’s general demographic profile, job, family situation, identifiers (personality, how he or she prefers to be contacted, etc) are all essential pieces of information.
- How can your company help the buyer? What are their primary and secondary objectives and challenges?
- Why are they interested? What are their motivations when choosing your products and services?
- How will you reach them? What are the best marketing and sales messages to use and what are the best platforms to contact them on?
If you already have an active website, a very useful hack to start building your buyer persona is to check your Google Analytics. Here you can find information about your users’ age, the gender they identify with, their main interests and the profiles that convert the most.
2. Optimize Your Online Store
Online sellers can adapt to different channels, such as distributor stores or Amazon-type sites. However, investing in your own online store puts you in direct contact with customers and allows you to get a lot of valuable information about them.
For your ecommerce to be successful, your site must be well designed and optimized. A cumbersome page that takes a long time to load and has unclear information will negatively impact your conversions. Conversely, a site where the user can clearly find what they’re looking for and buy in a few clicks will cause the conversion rate to multiply.
In order not to waste the qualified traffic that comes to your store, take into account these key aspects.
- Accessibility from mobile devices: Today, users are increasingly making purchases directly from their phones. Ensure that your website generates a good experience on all devices.Your website should have a responsive design and loading times that are as short as possible.
- User experience (UX): Good UX makes for good interactions with a system (in this case, your website) and optimizes the buying processes for the consumer. This type of experience not only improves conversion rates, but is also impacts the image people have of your brand .
- SEO and SEM: If you want to sell more online, users must be able to find you easily, so search engine advertising (both organic and paid) is a necessity.
3. Create Differentiated Landing Pages
Landing pages are crucial for ecommerce success. A landing page is the page on your website that a visitor sees when they arrive.
To create effective landing pages, the first step is to find a structure that works. In general, the simpler and clearer a landing page is, the better. Create separate landing pages for each of your star products, or at least, one page for each range of related products. This way, it will be much easier for you to analyze what is going on and understand how to optimize your online marketing.
4. Make It Easy For Your Customers
As you know, users are accustomed to getting what they want with just a few clicks. If your purchasing process has any obstacles, users are more likely to abandon the sale and go to the competition. To avoid this trajectory, follow these tips.
- Have an easy purchase process. In general, the fewer clicks the better, but always provide the user with the information they need at each step. A star example in the industry is Amazon, which has designed a system where users can buy a product with just one click, making resisting more difficult than ever.
- Make a variety of payment methods available. Often, users has their own preferences in this regard, so you need to have all your bases covered. Include options like credit cards, PayPal, transfers, or even cash on delivery.
- Avoid additional charges. Nothing annoys a buyer more than going to pay for a product online and realizing that the price is higher than they thought. If you are going to apply extra charges to the price of a product, always indicate it as clearly and early as possible.
- Low shipping costs. Whenever possible, shipping should be free.
- Good return policy. A leader in the industry who does this well is ASOS, which offers the possibility of making free returns (without the need to give a specific reason) for 28 days after receiving the order. Whatever the conditions are, it is always important to make them clear and to keep to the promises you made.
- Fast delivery. Clearly indicate when the order should arrive at the customer’s home.
5. Take Care of Your Image
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words and nowhere is this more true than in online sales. Since users will not be able to see, touch, or try on your product, it is necessary to give them as much visual information as possible.
Have clear pictures of the products from different angles, taking care that they fit with the general aesthetics of your website. If you want to go further, 3D videos and product demonstrations can be a great help in convincing potential buyers.
6. Provide Added Value
To stand out from the competition, you need to add something extra to your products and services. One of the best ways to do this is through content creation.
Creating content related to your brand will help increase the visibility and SEO positioning of your website, as well as positioning you as an expert in the market. One of the most common and effective ways to do this is through a brand blog, in which content can be disseminated through different social channels. To get off to a good start, follow these two tips.
- Develop a content plan: Like any other sales technique, your blog must correspond with the general objectives of the company and have a well thought out strategy behind it. Before launching yourself into the pool, you need to have a content plan that includes the frequency, the types of publications, and even a calendar.
- Alternate between different formats: Videos, infographics, downloads, image galleries etc. There are many options that go beyond simple written text posts. Be sure to include a variety of formats in your content plan and discuss which ones work best for your audience.
7. Use Recommendations
Word of mouth marketing is still one of the most effective sales techniques. Naturally, buyers tend to trust other users more than brands, so recommendations play a very important role when selling online.
When designing your website, there are two basic techniques you can implement to make the most of this.
- Include clearly visible sharing buttons. This way, you will encourage users to post your content or your products on their social networks, which will naturally attract more visitors.
- Have testimonials and recommendations on your website. Seeing other people’s stories helps visitors connect with your products and services and see how they could benefit from them. In the case of B2B marketing, you can also include the logos of brands that have already worked with you.
8. Harness the Power of Email Marketing
Email marketing is a classic tool for increasing ecommerce sales, and it continues to be effective year after year.
Email offers you a direct and personal way to communicate with your audience, which can be adapted to different strategies and points in the purchase cycle. Take note of these tips to get you started.
- Segment your database. As part of your strategy, you should make sure you have at least basic data on your subscribers. From there, you can use their behavior to further expand information about their interests and personalize communication with them as much as possible.
- Be responsive. As with your website, your emails need to be viewable from all kinds of devices. Some of them will be able to display the latest interactive elements, while on others you may need to have a text and image based version B to make sure the message gets through.
- Design different buyer journeys through email marketing. Once a user subscribes, you should welcome them and send them an initial email that introduces them to your content. If they have already made a purchase, you can build this loyalty. In short, it is a matter of understanding what stage they are at in order to offer them a journey that makes sense.
9. Use Social Ads to Promote Your Brand
Social ads are an excellent way to implement many sales techniques such as attracting subscribers, encouraging people to download an application, remarketing or even displaying a customized product catalog.
Another advantage is that Social Ads have a lot of targeting options that you can’t find on other platforms. Since social networks have a lot of information about their users, you can take advantage of it to launch very specific campaigns.
If you combine the power of segmentation with a variety of formats and types of campaigns, you’ll see that this type of advertising allows you to increase your online sales.
10. Create a Sense of Urgency
Another classic and useful marketing trick is to notify the user that they only have a limited time to take advantage of a particular offer or that stocks are limited. This is a very common copywriting tool. This way, the visitor is encouraged to take advantage of the offer as soon as possible.
If you decide to use this, display the limited offers prominently on the homepage of your website and in your advertising campaigns on social networks and search engines. It is also a very good idea to create a specific landing page for each of these offers.