We often get asked during presentations and webinars about how to increase online sales fast. With eCommerce sales growing over 15% in 2018, it’s a very valid question. In this blog, we are going to break down 10 ways you can begin to increase your online sales.
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- Understand your ideal buyer profile and buyer personas
- Use automation to email while you sleep
- Provide as many payment options as humanly possible
- Match your social ads to your email creative
- Leverage on-demand postcards to spread your offer
- Use trust seals on your checkout page
- Consider your site’s speed
- Leverage modifier words on your product detail page
- Have a bulletproof retargeting plan
- Prune your catalog
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How to Increase Online Sales
1. Understand Buyer Profiles Personas
First, understanding the difference between ideal buyer profiles and buyer personas will help you leverage each to increase online sales.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on market research and real data about your existing customers. If your business does not yet have any customers, be sure to create your buyer personas based on the demographics that best align with your product or service. Consider age, income, position, job, experience, goals and more.
On the other hand, the ideal buyer profiles include the qualities of users who you are highly compatible to do business with. When identifying ideal buyer profiles, consider company size, budget, geography, demographics and more.
According to HubSpot, websites that used marketing personas were 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users. Additionally, understanding what your customers buy and conducting research about company history, trends, products and cycles will help you better market to your target audience.
2. Use Automation to Email While You Sleep
Did you know that personalized emails improve click-through-rates by 14%, conversion rates by 10% and even drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails? Implementing email automation allows you to focus on more important tasks by saving you time. Additionally, it can increase your business’ sales.
Email marketing automation happens when brands set up workflows that automatically send email messages to prospects. This saves you time from smaller tasks like preparing email lists and sending generic messages.
Marketing automation software, like HubSpot, allows you to personalize emails to different segmented lists. By segmenting email lists, you can clearly define users’ needs and target towards those needs to increase your site’s online sales.
3. Provide as Many Payment Options as Possible
Authorizing customers to pay with credit and debit cards is customary nowadays. However, when it comes to eCommerce checkout best practices, it’s better to have more payment options. If your business sells internationally, be sure to conduct research on the top payment methods for your targeted demographics and make changes to your site as needed.
A study by Baymard shows that 6% of users abandoned their shopping carts because the site did not offer enough payment options. Completing the checkout process should be the easiest part of the customer journey, and assisting your customers in experiencing the quickest and most painless checkout will increase online sales.
4. Match Your Social Ads to Your Email Creative
To increase conversions and customer awareness of your brand, match your social media ads to the automated emails that you’re sending to your targeted email list.
To expand reach, try directly uploading your email contact list into the social media platform when creating social media ads. This custom audience retargeting will create a consistent brand experience across all platforms and strengthen your overall message.
5. Leverage On-Demand Postcards to Spread Your Offer
Don’t get us wrong – digital marketing is critical to a business’ success. However, direct mail isn’t totally obsolete. In fact, direct mail’s average household response rate is 5.1%. Compare this to 0.4% for social media and 0.6% for email and paid search.
Postcard marketing helps to make your brand stand out, builds trust with customers, and improves eCommerce website traffic. Sending customers postcards directly to their homes provides them with an intrinsic emotional value that will empower them to trust your brand. Furthermore, reaching customers offline will help your business compete in the digital space.
6. Use Trust Seals on Checkout Page
A trust badge is a symbol on a website that guarantees visitors that their data is collected through a third-party service provider. This means that the website is authentic, safe and secure.
That same study from Baymard shows that 17% of people abandoned their carts because they did not trust the website with their credit card information. Displaying a trust badge on your checkout page is likely to increase customer conversations.
7. Consider Your Site’s Speed
More than 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Additionally, 79% of customers who report dissatisfaction with website performance are less likely to buy from that same site again. By making a site’s loading time 2 seconds faster, you can expect a 66% increase in conversions.
Your site’s slow speed can have a detrimental effect on SEO as well. Paid and organic search engines penalize sites with slow loading speeds because slow landing pages. In paid campaigns, slow speeds can lower your Google AdWords Quality Score, resulting in you paying a higher cost-per-click. Page speed is also a ranking factor in Google’s newest speed update.
8. Leverage Modifier Words on Product Detail Pages
Modifiers are words that people add to keywords when trying to find specific search results most relevant to them. They can be adjectives, slang, verbs, questions or anything that would narrow the search results to what they’re looking for.
Look at the sentences below to view some examples of how people can use modifier words in searches:
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- The best hotels near me
- Top hotels in Baltimore
- Coolest photography spots on the east coast
- iPhone 11 pro reviews
- Legit Gucci items on sales
- Cheap home-delivery groceries
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9. Have a Bulletproof Retargeting Plan
It’s not often that first-time site visitors make a purchase. In fact, studies have shown that up to 98% of visitors leave your website without converting. Retargeting uses ads to attract interested prospects back to your website so they can complete a purchase.
Retargeting keeps your brand in front of prospects. Additionally, it builds familiarity with your target audience and increases the chances of an organic site visit. ComScore found that after four weeks of a retargeting campaign, there was a 1046% increase in branded search and 726% lift in site visitation. Retargeting is also a great direct response tactic to maximize ROI because it provides you with the means to reconnect with your highest value targets, recapture their attention and move them further down the sales funnel.
10. Prune Your Catalog
Catalog optimization is the process of analyzing, optimizing, and streamlining the products you offer to maximize revenue for your business. When running an eCommerce site, it’s common to analyze which products are selling and those that are not. Categorize your products using the following matrix that compares website traffic and conversion rate:
First, let’s consider your top-selling products. These are the products with high traffic, high conversion and sell everyday. Next, let’s find the products with lower traffic but high conversion. These are the products that may need more promotion to drive more traffic to your site.
On the other side of our matrix are the products with high website traffic but low conversion. Experiment with product page content and try to refine the user experience to improve this category.Finally, let’s consider the products with low traffic and low conversions. These products are wasting space on your site and should be taken down.
For more information, refer to our Inbound Marketing for eCommerce Guide.
Conclusion
We hope these 10 killer ideas have inspired you to optimize your site to increase online sales. If you’re looking for help implementing them for your business or have any questions, feel free to reach out through the form below.
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