Boost Your Sales Today With These Proven Strategies

December 7, 2017 - 12 minutes read

10 New Ways to Improve Your Online Sales Today

You’ve built your company, designed strong products, and have found a customer base. But do you know that you have fully maximized your sales? If this sounds like your company, then there is good news: you can make a significant positive impact on your bottom line just by following a few proven strategies. You don’t have to reinvent your brand or completely change your personnel in order to increase sales. In fact, you can increase sales by making a few small but noticeable changes to your e-commerce website.

Most of the strategies for increasing sales have nothing to do with your core business. So you won’t have to worry about things like finding a new supplier or hiring more skilled employees. Instead, the focus is on optimizing your e-commerce website itself, such as making sure that you showcase product reviews and display security logos. Security logos, for example, have been shown to increase a prospect’s level of trust with a website and make them more likely to buy your goods. If you miss out on these optimization opportunities, it is likely that you will be leaving sales on the table and failing to maximize your bottom line. Let’s take a look at 10 tips that you can use to start boosting online sales immediately:

Build your subscriber list with opt-ins and a newsletter

Building a relationship with your customers is the key to making sure that they become repeat business over time. And what’s a great way to establish a relationship with your customers and prospects? Starting a subscriber list. You can start an email list for your blog, for instance. You can have a newsletter where you share your latest blog pieces about your industry, and also share specific discounts and coupons for your customers. Over time, your customers will come to trust your brand and they will become more likely to purchase your goods and services. That is a major benefit of having a subscriber list.

Localization

Do you know enough about your customers? Are you targeting specific demographics with special offers? These days, more businesses are using CRMs and other software to learn more about customer behavior. With this information, they can learn the preferences of customers in certain locations. More e-commerce sites are doing business outside of the United States. An e-commerce business might learn that it has a large following in Mexico, with most of the buyers within this demographic coming from Mexico City. The business might learn from their CRM that these buyers also tend to be avid soccer fans. An example of localization would be the site offering discounts on soccer jerseys at specific times of the year to appeal to this demographic.

Make online checking out more convenient

If your checkout process is long and cumbersome your customers aren’t going to fight through it. They are simply going to leave your page. You can avoid this by reducing the length of your checkout forms and using a progress bar so your prospects can see exactly where they are in the process. Even better is autosaving your customer information when they shop so they can instantly come back without having to re-enter all of their information all over again.

Do you accept enough payment types?

One of the easiest fixes for optimizing your e-commerce page is providing more payment options. The fewer payment options offered, the less likely the shopper is going to make the purchase. There are several payment processors out there that will allow you to be more flexible. You want to be able to take Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, online check, bank transfer, and some vendors might even accept Bitcoin. The more payment types you can accept, the more likely you are going to be able to make the sale. Plenty of customers have gotten their products in their online cart and then left the page because their preferred payment option wasn’t available. Broaden the potential options and watch your sales rise.

Utilize product reviews

Social proof is one of those things that doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realize how big an impact it is having on your customers. Shoppers instinctively look towards products that other people have rated highly. It is the same reason that you are more likely to buy those shoes after you see that they have been rated five stars by other buyers. And that is why we are more likely to see movies that have high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. You can leverage social proof by placing product reviews on your checkout pages. When your prospects are checking out, they will see product reviews that indicate how much other people have liked the product they are buying. This can have a dramatic positive impact on sales.

Put live chat on your site

Your customers want their questions answered quickly. If you can’t answer your customers’ questions within the first few moments of them visiting your e-commerce page, they are likely to leave for a competitor’s site. To avoid that problem, you should invest in a live chat option. Having live chat on your website allows your customers to quickly get their questions answered without having to try to work their way through your entire site to find a price tag or warranty information. This is very valuable, because the more customers you keep on your website, the more likely you are to increase sales.

Display security logos

We talked about this before; it is important that your customers trust your brand. One key way of increasing trust is displaying security logos on your website. Security logos have proven to increase the level of trust that prospects have with your e-commerce site. And the more they trust you, the more likely they are to buy from you. Display security logos prominently on your checkout pages so that your customers see them right when they are about to make a purchase. That is the key moment where trust is necessary. Customers don’t want to have to worry about if their personal information will be compromised or if they will lose their credit card data to a hacker or third party.

Offer discounts and coupons to your visitors

If you haven’t noticed by now, customers love discounts. And since you’ve already started a subscriber list, you can send coupons and discounts for your products and services directly to your customers’ email inbox. Of course, you can also label special offers directly on your website to entice your visitors to buy as well. Special seasonal offers tend to work well, and emailing a special holiday or birthday discount can motivate a customer to make a purchase.

Optimize your checkout for mobile

If your e-commerce page (and especially your checkout) isn’t optimized for mobile, then you aren’t going to maximize your sales. About half of web traffic comes from mobile devices these days, and if your pages don’t work on mobile devices, or if the layout is difficult to navigate, your customers are going to leave for a competitor’s optimized website. Make sure that your e-commerce site is optimized for mobile and that your checkout is too.

Use re-targeting ads on Facebook

Another reason Facebook is important is that it is a prime spot for re-targeting ads. When your prospects view your e-commerce page and place items in their cart, almost half the shoppers don’t actually finish the purchase then and there. They’ll visit other websites, change devices, or even forget about the items in their cart altogether. That’s why re-targeting ads are a powerful tool for increasing sales. Re-targeting ads use cookies and then serve shoppers ads about the products they left in their cart. They see these ads around the web, but they are especially useful on Facebook. For example, if a shopper puts a blouse in her cart and doesn’t buy, you can serve her re-targeting ads with the same blouse on Facebook.

Boosting your online sales doesn’t have to be a difficult process. It doesn’t require you to make big changes to your core business. All you need to do is optimize your e-commerce website with some subtle changes that can have a major impact on your bottom line. Simplifying the checkout process and making sure it is optimized for mobile is a pretty good start. Using product reviews and security logos on your e-commerce page will also increase sales. And of course, you should offer your prospects discounts to make sure that they keep their items in the cart and actually follow through with the purchase. Building a newsletter and a subscriber list will also help, because you can send your customers special offers and interact with them even when they aren’t making a purchase. Newsletters help you build special relationships with your customers, and that makes them more likely to become repeat business. Make sure that you are putting these 10 tips into use so that you can start increasing your online sales. Implementing these tips doesn’t take much time or resources, so you can have your e-commerce site optimized in a period of several weeks.

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