Business owners that manage an online storefront know that it can be difficult to make a noticeable impact on sales. This is especially true for business owners that have little traditional marketing experience, or their marketing experience is limited to print or media advertising. Online marketing in general is a turbulent landscape – things are always changing, algorithm updates are published almost daily, and there is a lot of signal loss within the cloud of the internet. Online sales go even deeper down the rabbit hole, you have all of the normal online marketing tactics to consider, as well as a whole slew of eCommerce specific tactics you can utilize to increase your footprint. Not everything has to be difficult though! Here are some easy, actionable tactics you can use to increase your online sales:
1) Reduce Abandoned Shopping Carts
As a small business that does online sales, abandoned shopping carts can be maddening. Most users don’t realize they can do things to entice some of these abandoned carts to check out. Studies show that 67.45% of online shopping cards are abandoned before they are completed. This is a staggering number when you considered the amount of online sales done every day.
What is the answer? Remove road blocks for your users. Make it as easy and painless as possible to complete your checkout process. Ensure that your checkout procedure doesn’t have any rough spots or broken elements. Prepare to offer incentives to users that abandon a cart, either with a shipping discount or coupon code. Finally you can use an email recovery campaign to remind your users of their abandoned carts.
2) Upsell Your Products
If you have ever purchased a product at a gas station or in a drive through, you are familiar with the upsell. “Do you want fries with that?” or “Interested in a drink today?” are classic upsells that you see employed constantly. Do you know why? Because they work.
Apply this logic to your online sales: find avenues to upsell your products. Do you have multiple variations of a single product? Offer them a discount on a better model when they go to checkout. On product pages, highlight versions of products that are slightly better than the product they are viewing. You can go even deeper by utilizing pop-ups to capture users as they navigate your site.
3) Capture More Email Subscribers
Business owners with an online presence are likely familiar with eMail marketing campaigns. These campaigns can provide tremendous value to your online storefront with a fraction of the cost of other marketing tactics.
Studies show that email marketing has an insanely high ROI (4,300%!) Use this to your advantage by promoting your mailing list and capturing users in your email funnel. Have additional entry points to your mailing list on product pages and category pages, and incentivize your users to share your mailing list page to their friends on social media.
4) Wishlist/Reminder Emails
If there is one thing we know about online consumers, it is that they like to feel special. Everyone loves seeing personalized emails offering them deals on their favorite goods or services. Offer users the ability to wishlist your inventory, and then send them email reminders when your product goes on sale or when you offer incentives for this product.
Take it a step further and send personalized emails on special occasions and birthdays. Offering a user 20% off on their favorite products with a personalized birthday email is a great way to build brand loyalty and increase your sales.
And there we go, 4 easy and actionable tactics you can use to help bolster your online sales right now. Feel like you are doing all this and still need some help? Give DirectiveGroup a call! We have years of experience in making your business shine online!
