As an eCommerce marketer, you’re always looking for new ways to generate traffic and more leads to your online store.
While some sales channels are profitable, others aren’t, and the truth is you need to test and refine your eCommerce marketing strategy to learn which channels are the most effective for your business.
To grow your business online, you must find ways to encourage prospects to buy from you. But it’s not that easy, even when you have what a customer needs and exactly when they need it. As it turns out, generating leads is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today.
So, how do you plan to boost your sales?
Well, there are several ways you can increase your eCommerce traffic and sales in 2019.
For those selling on Amazon, optimized product listings lead to dramatic increases in conversion rates. In fact, some users have seen it go from 1 in 100 to 1 in 4. You can further use Amazon Brand Protection to get access to tools that help you represent your business more accurately, eliminate listings infringing on your IP/trademarks, and recoup those sales—it’s the best of both worlds.
Another important thing to consider is customer satisfaction if you plan to start an online store and generate sales from it. Customers these days are extremely savvy. While you can use targeted marketing strategies to reach out to them in “unique” ways, if you cannot deliver, they’ll not stick around.
For every complaint you receive from a client, odds are many others are also not happy with your product or service but choose not to complain about it. These are customers you will most likely lose if you don’t take quick action; thus, tracking customer satisfaction metrics is crucial.
Remember, low customer satisfaction levels hurt your brand image.
That said, in this article, we’ve compiled a list of top-notch ways to increase your eCommerce traffic and sales so that you can start competing with the big guys.
#1: Target Your Existing Customers
When companies have trouble growing, they automatically assume it’s because they don’t have enough clients.This is a very common misconception, therefore, don’t jump to conclusions.
Instead of focusing solely on customer acquisition, consider improving your customer retention strategy.
Take a look at the impact loyal consumers have on an eCommerce store:
Compared to new clients and customers who only made one purchase on your store, loyal customers:
- Have a significantly higher conversion rate.
- Add more items to their shopping carts.
- Generate more revenue every time they visit your store.
It’s definitely great for your company if you can keep gaining new clients. But that’s a rather expensive marketing tactic. It’s much more cost effective to go after your existing consumer base because these people are already familiar with your business, and they know how to use your product, so there’s no learning curve.
Focus on ways to enhance your customer experience. Try to implement a customer loyalty program that provides them with an incentive to spend more bucks each time they shop.
Each dollar spent will translate to a rewards point, so when a customer accumulates a specific number of points, they can redeem those for special discounts or other promotions.
#2: Capture Email Addresses
Email marketing remains an actionable method of digital marketing and is able to produce one of the top ROI among all marketing tactics.
However, you need email addresses to do email marketing.
By putting different strategies to work, you can capture your visitors’ email addresses. And once captured, it allows you to invite those visitors back to your website via email marketing campaigns.
Remember, the best way to capture a visitor’s email is to offer them something of value. For example, you can offer a free tutorial, but in exchange, you can ask for some information like an email address, the first and last name, etc.
#3: Add Videos to Conversion Pages
Including videos to your top landing pages will increase conversions.
The human brain processes visual information about 60,000 times faster than text, meaning your visitors will absorb information in videos better compared to what they would through reading in text format.
Learning about your product will be much more effective via video content than text.
Videos also make your homepage appealing and having large, high-resolution videos are sure to draw in any visitor to your website.
#4: State Your Value Proposition Clearly on Landing Pages
A value proposition is a sentence or two that indicates the value of your services or products. Any good value proposition must have the following three qualities:
- It should describe how your product or service can solve a consumer’s problem.
- It should explain what kind of benefits your product or service will deliver.
- It should make things clear about why a customer should buy from you instead of your competitors.
#5: Address Objections
A great way to enhance your website’s quality is to address any questions or objections that may not be answered directly through the content already available.
According to research, it’s more crucial to focus on keeping up with your clients—not your competitors.
Take some time to go through your website and create a list of any hesitations you think your visitors may have depending on the information already available. Evaluate your website critically in this step—don’t assume that your visitors will be able to find all the answers.
You need to make sure that everything is easily accessible. And once you’ve done that, provide the right solution to the issues you uncovered. This will help to increase conversions across your website, as well as make it more user-friendly.
#6: Use a Live Chat Tool
Live chat tools are a new, effective way to generate sales. However, you can also use them to address any queries your visitors may have.
Live chat generates an immediate response, so it’s more likely to be used by a website than a contact form. According to LinkedIn, every type of business site can benefit from this nifty tool, even those who don’t make sales through their website.
Another great advantage of this tool is that you can actually use it to gather email addresses. So, if you want to increase your website sales, consider installing a live chat system.
#7: Incorporate Upselling
How often do you see a salesperson at a shop trying to upsell a product? If they’re doing what their management asked them to do, then the answer would be 100% of the time.
If a person can upsell inside of a business, there’s no reason why he or she cannot upsell online as well. Upselling, in fact, can be more effective than cross-selling online, although we see the latter more often.
#8: Perform A/B Testing
Every brand is unique, and so are their customers. Different tactics work for different businesses. By A/B testing, you’ll be able to determine what works best for your site.
Below are a few tests you can perform across your website right now:
- Test different headlines. You can have pages leap from a 1% conversion rate to 4.5% just by testing out different headlines at the top of your traffic-heavy landing pages.
- Change the text in your call-to-action buttons. This simple change may result in a 2- 3% percent boost in conversions.
- Test using fewer fields in your contact form. This will produce a positive result.
- Try replacing the stock photos you have across your site with more candid photos of your employees or business.
Wrapping Up
So these were some of the best ways to increase your eCommerce traffic and sales. The methods explained above are the most effective and proven strategies applied by many big and small businesses that drive real results.
Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me
