When you have an ecommerce website, your goal is to increase your ecommerce sales. A website with no visitors and, therefore, no conversions is really pointless. It is as if you have written a book, and it’s just lying there on the shelves at a bookstore, with nobody coming and picking it up to buy or read.
Many people are starting an ecommerce website these days, as it is an easy way to make money or at least generate a minimum amount of passive income. But these people are not equipped with the knowledge to increase ecommerce sales, so they get discouraged easily and lose their spirit to maintain the site properly.
Today, we will discuss the different tactics you can apply that will help you increase online sales. These tactics are easy to implement and do not even cost too much money. These are simply things that you can do over the internet as part of your business’s marketing strategy, and they will most likely cause a rise in your ecommerce sales.
1. Build Brand Awareness
A prerequisite for you to be found by potential customers on the internet is awareness that your brand exists. Therefore, before learning how to increase online sales, you need to know how to enhance your brand image. Make sure that people have heard about your brand and have little information about what you sell.
Brand awareness can be created by talking about your brand and your products with your personal and professional network. Once you have a few people mentioning your brand and your ecommerce site to others, you can expect word-of-mouth to have a snowball effect and get more people searching about your ecommerce site. This will increase online sales coming from your ecommerce site.
2. Work on Your Site’s SEO
Once a few people know your brand name, you can expect more and more people to search for it online. Now your job is to make sure that your website has good search rankings to increase online sales. You wouldn’t want someone to hear about your brand, but when they Google search it, they don’t find your ecommerce site on the first page of Google search results. (We all know that nobody ever checks the second page of search results)!
It is therefore important that you optimize ecommerce site for search engines. Having some basic knowledge about SEO and applying it to your site can go a long way in increasing your ecommerce sales. One way to do that is to add your website to Google analytics.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Build an Email List
Let’s say your audience has now heard about your brand and also started visiting your site. The next step for you is to keep track of your site visitors so that you can keep them reminded to browse your site again and again. Many people would need to visit your site a few times before they can get you any ecommerce sales.
An excellent way to keep in touch with your site’s visitors is to build an email list. This is usually done by inserting a subscription form on your website. Make sure the form is simple enough for anyone to fill out quickly. You just need to ask the site visitors for their names and email address. People who fill up and submit the form will be your subscribers. Once you gather a small list of subscribers, you can send out newsletters to them.
A newsletter is like an online magazine with the basic information and latest updates about your brand, your products, and your ecommerce sales offers. It is emailed to your subscribers to entice them to visit your site again and probably make a purchase. When customers like a brand, they like to be updated about it from time to time. Sending out newsletters can improve your chances to increase ecommerce sales.
4. Run Cost-Effective Marketing Campaigns
Depending upon your budget, you can choose to run small marketing campaigns to increase online sales. If you have substantial funding allocated to grow your ecommerce site, you can go for campaigns like running Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These kinds of campaigns can potentially cost you a good amount of money before you start seeing their results, even if your daily advertising expense is set at a small amount. Big companies that create an ecommerce site as their primary business often opt for such campaigns. By using effective website advertising tips, these businesses can generate good returns on their advertising expenses. But that usually takes time for that return to start showing up in your accounts.
However, if you seek to earn passive income through your ecommerce sales, it would be better to run more cost-effective and low-budget campaigns. One example of a low-budget campaign type is referral marketing. Referral marketing is a way of incentivizing your customers to recommend your site to others. The incentive is given by rewarding them every time a new customer buys from you through the existing customer’s reference. This is a great way to build up your ecommerce sales. It is very cost-effective because you only have to reward the existing customer after they bring in a new customer who makes a purchase from your site. So you do not have to spend any extra money upfront to get the new customer.
5. Promote Your Ecommerce Site on Social Media
Even if you are not running any paid ads on social media, you can promote your ecommerce site organically on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. Create a Facebook page to represent your brand. Regularly post updates about your products along with good quality product photos on the page. Link to your ecommerce site by adding social media buttons on your site’s footer. Build a good following for your page by interacting with other pages with similar content. This will give you organic reach for your site and potentially lead to more ecommerce sales. There are many benefits of integrating your social media with your website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
You can also create a YouTube channel for your brand. Talk about your products and user-friendliness of your ecommerce site in your YouTube videos. If you can get a good number of subscribers for your YouTube channel, your channel can become a free marketing source for your brand and growing your ecommerce sales. Drop the link to your ecommerce website in the description and comments section of each of your YouTube videos. This will help you to a great extent to increase ecommerce sales.
6. Choose an Appealing Web Design
It is needless to say that your ecommerce website should look appealing to increase online sales. The web design that you choose should be user-friendly, feature-rich, and easy to navigate, and attractive to look at. If you think creating a beautiful website would cost a lot of time and money, you’re wrong!
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
You can sign up for a free account at Strikingly and get access to hundreds of wonderful website templates to choose from. We also have many themes explicitly designed for an online store. Select one and install it, and go to your site’s editor. From there, you can add any text and images that you want to your web pages by using our drag-and-drop feature.
Strikingly is a website builder, with tools and features built-in it especially for those who want to develop a website without having to write a single line of code. Our features enable you to get a website up and running in just a few hours, knowing no programming language at all. It is convenient to build a site and set up a simple online store for your site when you know that you don’t have to get involved in any technicalities.
7. Provide Awesome Customer Support
The key to keeping your audience happy with your ecommerce store is to provide them with superb customer support. No matter how beautiful your ecommerce site and product photography is, if your customers cannot contact you for any inquiries they may have, they will feel uncomfortable making a purchase.
- There are many ways in which you can provide excellent customer support to your visitors. Make sure you have a support email that’s clearly stated on the site.
- It is also good to have phone call support and to state the phone number in your site’s contact details.
- Email support can also be built in the form of a contact form on your site. When visitors fill out the form and submit it, you will receive their inquiry in your email.
- The best way to offer customer support on an online store is through live chat.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
At Strikingly, we provide 24/7 live chat support to our users. Anytime any of our users have an issue, they can contact us instantly through our live chat feature. This helps us keep our users satisfied with our service and resolve technical errors if any when building their website.
Image taken from Strikingly
These were 7 different ways to increase your ecommerce sales and generate more revenue for your business. Once your business grows and you have access to more budget, you can scale up your marketing efforts and move towards paid advertisements as well. But now that you know how to increase ecommerce sales in a cost-effective way, it is best to implement them right away. This is because if you don’t make any sales at all from your site, you will lose your motivation to continue with the business, to begin with.
