3 Ways To Increase Your Online Sales and start improving your revenue!
If you have any business, e-commerce, or even otherwise your main goal will be to increase your online sales. Increasing sales online is different, and often times a little more complicated than increasing offline sales. In the online space, the same things are being sold by thousands of sellers, and all of it is available to the consumer with only a few clicks.
The biggest challenge, therefore, is to stand out and do something that at the moment your competitors aren’t doing. It might be a little intimidating to do something that so many others are doing. But at the same time, once you are an established e-commerce business there is no stopping you.
Your customers are your key to success
It might seem pretty simple. If you want more sales, you need more customers. But in reality, it is not as simple as that. To begin with, you don’t only need customers, you need those customers to come back to you too. But how do you get new customers and keep those customers coming back to you?
The first trick is to know your audience. You need to know who your audience is. Their demography, their jobs, their preferences, and other basic information that might be relevant to you. Once you know your audience, you need to figure out how your company can help them.
Everyone buys a product or a service to make their lives a little better. So you need to know how your product or service can help them. This basic portfolio about your audience can help you identify other potential buyers, and also keep the current customers loyal to your company.
Google Analytics can be a great tool to build this customer profile with accuracy. Once you have your customer, you need to make sure that they have a good experience on your online platform.
If your platform glitches crash or gives the buyer a hard time, chances are that they will go to some other website to buy the same thing. You can keep a few things in mind to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Keep it simple when trying to increase your online sales.
Make sure that the customer doesn’t have to go through a whole process to buy one thing. Make the entire process as simple as you can. The steps from selecting a product to buying it should be covered in just a few clicks. Each step should have proper information about what to do next. The simpler your purchasing process, the more irresistible your items become to your customers.
Give the customer enough payment options
There are many payment options now. Starting from good old-fashioned credit and debit cards to UPI transfers and Cash on Delivery. The more options you provide, the more purchases you can expect. Different people use different methods of payment, or they may prefer one over the other. If you have all the options available, you can expect your sales to go up.
Keep your shipping charges low and don’t add additional charges later.
If you have shopped online, you know that the most irritating thing is when additional charges are added just before checkout. Most of the times people don’t buy it because they get so annoyed.
It doesn’t even matter to them how much or how little the additional charge is. Knowing that they now have to pay more than what they thought is enough to put them off. So mention all charges clearly along with the product to avoid this.
Shipping charges are another big obstacle. If you keep a high shipping charge it can put off customers easily. If possible, keep your shipping charges minimal. Nothing makes a customer happier than free shipping.
Good delivery services and return policy
Imagine having to wait for a month before you receive your product. No one likes that. The main reason why the online space has developed in the first place is because of its speed and efficiency.
Ensure that you can deliver the products to your consumers as fast as you can. Once the delivery process is taken care of, you also have to look after the exchange and return policies.
Most people still take online shopping as a risk. So it really helps if you can assure them the products can be returned or exchanged in case of dissatisfaction or other issues.
Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing
Marketing is really important if you want your sales to go up. Two very effective ways of online marketing that work really well are Email Marketing and Social Media marketing.
No matter how good your products are, and how excellent your online platform and services are. If you can’t reach out to your target audience, your sales can’t really go up.
So if you want your sales to go up then you have to spend some time and resources in developing a proper strategy for marketing. Before you start marketing, you have to make sure that you know what platforms your target audience uses.
The customer portfolio, that we spoke about in the first part can be of great help here. When you design the advertisements or write your narrative, make sure that your audience can relate to them.
For example, if your online business is for people in the age group of 13-18 years, you have to use bright colors, pop culture references, and maybe some emojis. Your narrative also needs to be full of life and hope.
You can’t possibly get a teenager’s attention with muted colors and a narrative that talks about financial responsibilities and life struggles. Let us look at the two most effective marketing tools in some detail.
E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing is really effective, as everyone who uses the internet has an e-mail ID. So it is a great idea to invest in the best e-mail marketing tools for your marketing.
To get your e-mail campaign started, choose a catchy subject line. The more creative you are with this, the more people will read on.
Now that you have your reader’s attention, you have to make sure that the content of the e-mail is engaging and compels them to buy your products or service. You can add appealing visuals to give the reader a better experience.
Another way by which you can engage with your audience is through an automated e-mail marketing campaign. The automated e-mail campaign sends an e-mail to the customer based on the actions that they take on your website.
Suppose, a customer adds an item to the cart but doesn’t proceed to buy it. An automated email would be sent to the customer’s email ID reminding them of the product, and trying to get them to buy it.
An optimized automated email is one of the best e-mail marketing tools that you can use to increase your online sales.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing doesn’t take a lot of money and has a very wide reach. If you can identify the correct social media platforms or platforms that your customers use, then even a single advertisement can show you results.
But if you choose the wrong social media platform, no matter how many ads you post, nothing will happen. Study your customer demography and behavior to find an accurate platform for you.
What works better than advertisements on social media is a collaboration with social media influencers. Social media influencers generally have millions of followers, and if they promote your product, you can effortlessly reach that many people.
Work closely with influencers. You can tell them how you want them to display your products and what story about your brand do you want them to promote. The most effective way of social media marketing however is generating discount codes exclusive to the influencer.
For this, you will have to develop a discount code specifically for them. So the influencer will then provide that code to their followers. This exclusive discount can get your sales up in a matter of hours.
Push the average order size up
In the first point, we spoke about growing your audience base. This point covers the third and final tip that you can use to increase your online sales, increasing the order size. Order size basically talks about the number of items that a buyer purchases from your website in one order.
So, in basic mathematical terms, order size is directly proportionate to your online sales. Even if new people are limited on your website, larger orders can make up for the loss.
But how do you convince your customer to buy more things than they were planning to?
Let us take a quick glance at a few tips and tricks that you can use to push up your average order size and hence your sale.
Give your customers quantity discounts
Quantity discounts basically mean that if a customer buys more, they get additional discounts.
For example, offers like ‘Buy 3 for $20’. These are the easiest way of getting your customer to buy more than what they were initially planning to buy.
Another way by which you can do this is by offering free shipping for orders above a certain amount. It is a well-known fact that buyers hate shipping charges, and so they choose to buy products worth the mentioned amount to save on shipping charges.
Bundle your products together
This is yet another way of selling more things. You can make a combo offer or a hamper with goods that are somewhat related.
The trick is to get the combo right. You can’t just put random items together and expect your customers to buy them. Be thoughtful and smart when creating the combos. Ideally, combos should be very niche-specific.
Put complementary products in one place
This is a very subtle trick that works really well. Suppose you are getting formal pants. On the same page, you see a formal blazer that is an exact match with the pants you want. It is highly possible that you might end up buying both.
But had they been in two completely different parts of the website, you would have never bought the blazer.
This is how putting complementary products together works. When a buyer tries to get one piece of clothing, you sell them an entire outfit instead.
Offering loyalty programs
Loyalty programs are a great way to increase order value and to get your customers to return to you again and again. In the loyalty program, you offer points to your customers for shopping with you. These points can be later redeemed as discounts.
This can increase your online sales in two ways. One, people tend to buy more products to get more points. Two, they tend to come back to your website to buy things because of the discount that the points from their previous purchase promise.
Conclusion
If your online business has been stagnant, and your sales have been rather unsatisfactory, you can use these three ways to boost up your scale. Some of these might give you quick results and some others may take a little more time to show up on your sales data.
But the main thing is to not give up. Apart from these three techniques, you can also keep a few other things in mind to boost your sale.
One, try and have an active social media presence, and interact with your buyers. Most businesses have social media accounts where they constantly post interactive content for their customers.
By engaging with people on a personal level, you can form a connection with your buyers and get to know them better.
Two, maintain your brand reputation. Make sure that your brand stands for good and genuine causes, and is politically correct. People care about things like this.
More and more people are moving towards brands that use no plastic, are cruelty-free, or care about social causes. When you promote your business, make sure to mention these things clearly.
Now, you are all set to see a steep rise in your online sales!