We all want more sales for our business right?
More sales drive’s up the value of our brand, which in turn offers more growth opportunities.
So how do we create campaigns that drive up sales for our ecom store?
Let’s dive right in and take a look at ten ways you can boost sales today.
Create a Flash Sale
Flash sales are great for giving your brand a quick boost in sales. They function as a short sales period in which you provide a highly valuable offer such as a discount, a new product bundle, or something else that hasn’t been offered to your audience recently.
The fact that a flash sale is time bound and is usually promoted with limited stock, really help’s to entice your prospects to buy now, rather than waiting. It’s that FOMO effect (fear of missing out) that influences your prospects to take action now, or suffer the feeling of missing out on such a good offer.
If you have stock that’s out of season or is underperforming, try a flash sale to clear it out of storage and acquire some investment back from it.
Bundle Best Sellers
Another great way of boosting sales is through the use of bundles. All you do here is bundle some of your best sellers together and present it in a way where you are offering this bundle as a collective that is cheaper if the customer purchased these products separately.
Here are some of the characteristics of a great bundle offer:
– The products are complementary.
– Each individual product in the bundle is attractive as a standalone purchase.
– The bundle is cheaper than purchasing each of the individual products separately.
– The bundle includes at least one high-margin product so that you can make a profit from the reduced sale price.
Automate Your Recover Cart Abandonment’s
I have mentioned this before about the importance of cart abandonment’s and how according to the Baymard Institute, almost 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. That means almost 70% of people who are adding an item to their shopping cart on an eCommerce store are not actually completing the sale and landing on the order confirmation page. That’s pretty significant!
So in order to boost sales and recover some of that lost traffic, you can offer a discount to help convert this particular audience. You can automate this through the use of timed onsite pop ups or the ad platform you use to drive traffic will be able to segment this audience via the pixel. From there you can craft an offer and ad copy to encourage them back to purchase.
Personalise Your Product Recommendations
This can be a clever way of driving more revenue if your content management system can offer product recommendations to your visitors. Personalised product recommendations help to add more products to the visitors shopping cart as its able to identify what items they have purchased from the past, or clue into what they have been browsing and spending more time engaging with different categories or particular products in general.
These days its no longer good enough to send a broad “catch all” email campaign to your prospects and customers. A “catch all” email is too generic and not targeted to certain segments of your audience. You need to personalize the experience for your customers based on their behaviour.
Your goal with this type of marketing is to provide personalized product recommendations via email, on-site widgets or with remarketing ads.
Work With Influencer’s
Influencers are all the rage these days. This is especially true with ecommerce brands. A handful of good influencers that engage correctly and offer value to your target audience can be very beneficial to your sales in the long term.
The key to working with good influencers is to:
- Ensure they are speaking to your target audience
- They offer genuine value to their audience
- They receive good engagement from their audience
- They have the trust of their audience
- They value what you have to offer as a brand and believe that their audience will value your brand and offers
Research some influencers that speak to your target market. Follow them and get to know their content. Try to follow the above points and if they tick the boxes, reach out and start to build a relationship with them.
Influencer marketing can be great no matter what sort of establishment your brand is at currently. Whether you are a start up trying to find traction, or a heavy hitter looking to grab more attention in the marketplace you serve, the right influencers can certainly help you to boost sales for your brand. Think of it as another marketing channel, just like email, content marketing and even ads.
Use a Branded Hashtag
This is something you may not have thought about in the past, but a branded hashtag can be an effective way of driving traffic to your social media profile. This type of hashtag can improve your discoverability.
They also help avid followers deliberately associate themselves with your business. Something that is very common when an eCommerce store is positioned as a lifestyle choice, not just a seller of products.
One of the major brands I’ve noticed doing this in the past is the MVMT watch brand. They’ve used the hashtag #jointhemvmt, to engage with their followers and encourage user-generated photos of their product line.
Check out the hashtag #jointhemvmt and you’ll understand what I am on about.
Optimise Your Product Pages For Better Conversions
When I do audits for brands, the first thing I look at is their website. I want to know how well it’s converting and to see if there are ways in which the brand owner can optimise their product pages for better conversions.
As website traffic grows and your brand matures in the market, eCommerce becomes a game of optimization. Everything you do is an attempt to increase sales conversions, encourage repeat purchases, or increase the average order size of customers.
So what am I looking for when it comes to increasing conversions on product pages?
Here are a few things I look out for –
- Multiple high definition product images/video
- A compelling product description
- Clear pricing, shipping/delivery details and return policy
- Social proof in the form of reviews and testimonials about the product
Test these things out over time and you’ll see a noticeable increase from your visitors to hit the all important add to cart button.
Optimize Your Check Out Page For Better Conversions
When you have more visitors clicking your add to cart button, you want to make sure your check out page is doing its job of closing the sale. This is such an important page to get right, because as mentioned in a previous point in this post, 70% of your visitors abandon the checkout page.
There are a myriad of reasons why visitors abandon the checkout page. Your checkout process needs to be as easy-to-understand as possible. Look to remove any barriers to a customer completing the process and test each element to improve your conversion rate.
Below are some of the things I look for to improve conversion rate on the checkout page –
- Allow for guest checkout. No one wants to sign up and register for a website just to make a purchase. Abolish that step and make it easy for your visitors to complete the purchase
- Offer multiple payment processors for your visitors to checkout. I’m talking about Paypal, Google Pay etc
- Keep the page very simple, don’t have distracting elements such as navigation on the page. You want to funnel your visitors into closing the sale. The only option they should have is making a purchase and…
- Cross selling/Up selling – Can you offer other products that will deliver a more enhanced desired outcome? Present them as a cross/up sell. You have the potential to increase the average order value of your brand which is going to increase the transaction amount of the sale.
Do Regular Giveaways
Giveaways and contests are great ways to build brand awareness, engagement and even sales. This type of marketing is called gamification, which is basically applying gaming techniques to motivate consistent participation and long term engagement with your audience.
Giveaways are a great way to showcase your products in a fun, interactive way. There are various softwares in the market today that allow participants of the giveaway to send out a referral link to like minded people, so they can also participate in the giveaway. The more referrals the entrant gets to the giveaway, the more points they receive. This gives them a competitive edge on winning the giveaway.
Make sure your offer on the giveaway is irresistible to your audience. The more irresistible the offer, the more attention it will receive and the greater success it will have.
Selling Products That Need To Be Replenished
Last on the list is the concept of selling products that need to be replaced every so often. Cosmetics is a great example for this point. Every so often, beauty products need to be replenished and reordered.
Depending on the nature of your product line, there may be an opportunity to generate recurring sales. For example, if you sell a product such as lip stick and you know that your typical customer will need to replenish their lip stick in a certain timeframe, you can automate and schedule emails or remarketing ads to re-engage those customers and encourage them to purchase more lipstick.
Or how about including an automated subscription model where your customers are billed every so often to replenish the products they used from your brand? This is a popular trend in a number of industries. Birchbox, Amazon Prime, JustFab being a few examples.
Conclusion
As an ecom store owner, you most likely face stiff competition. The barrier to selling online is low and you have to come up with ways to nurture your audience, build “know, like and trust” and get creative when looking to increase sales for your online store.
I hope these points above can give you a heads up on your competition and help you boost more sales for your ecom brand.
