Creating an eCommerce business is easy; you only need products to sell and a website. However, building a website doesn’t mean you’re going to start making tons of sales. Improving your eCommerce sales is all about marketing and advertising; if you’re not doing anything to get your business in front of the public, you can’t expect new customers to find you online. eCommerce business owners have tons of competition, so it’s no wonder many are struggling to find new ways to boost sales. Luckily, there are many ways you can start attracting new customers, building loyalty, and improving your sales.
Build Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is something you should never stop building. If you’re not getting your business’ name out there, you can’t expect people to go looking for it. Additionally, the more people know and trust your brand, the more sales you can bring in. Ultimately, one of the best ways to boost brand awareness is by improving the quality of your content.
You really don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on television ads, instead, you can partner with influencers and other businesses or create content to help people learn more about your business online. Additionally, you should consider paid advertising solutions because they can help you reach more people in a short amount of time, which can help your business grow much more quickly than using organic methods alone.
Build Email Lists
Building email lists is a great way to establish brand loyalty, especially if you give your customers something in return for their information, such as a free gift or deals on products. Email marketing truly isn’t spam, and it allows you to build effective relationships with all your unique customers. Growing your email list should be one of your top priorities if you want to keep existing customers coming back because it can help you to get more repeat sales by letting subscribers know about deals. As you may already know, it’s much cheaper to keep existing customers coming back than it is to find new ones.
Email marketing can also help you remind people of their abandoned carts. People abandon carts for many reasons; maybe they’re simply not ready to buy, or they got distracted during the checkout process. Whatever the reason someone has abandoned their cart, email marketing gives you one last chance to remind customers who have left items behind that they can still place an order.
Use Social Media
Unfortunately, organic reach on social media networks like Facebook and Instagram has decreased for brands, so you may not be able to reach as many new customers as you were able to ten years ago using these platforms. With targeting features, you can use ads to find more customers interested in what your eCommerce store has to offer, helping you earn more customers for a fraction of the cost of other types of advertising.
Test Your Website
If you’ve checked your website analytics to see that you’re getting tons of traffic, but few people are converting, your website might be to blame for low sales. So instead of trying to build a whole new website from scratch, hoping you get it right the second time, you can begin testing everything on your website, including headlines, product photos, and different design elements, to find what improves conversions.
Using Google Analytics to learn more about your website performance helps you determine where you’re losing customers and what specific customers. For example, you might find that people are exiting your website on product pages, which would tell you it’s time to start testing different versions of the same pages to see what can help people finally decide to add an item to their carts.
Understand Your Customers
Many businesses believe they know who their customers are but are actually wrong. While it might be fairly obvious to you who you’re trying to target, your analytics can tell you another story completely. Use any analytics you have on your current customers to help you understand who your true customers are, and start building out customer personas based on real data.
Consider Your Customer Service
One of the best ways to set your eCommerce business apart from the competition is to provide an even better customer experience than they do. For example, instead of providing your customers with a phone number, you can give them different ways to contact you, including email, phone, and instant messaging. By being able to support your customers as soon as possible, you can improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, which will keep old customers coming back.
Gather Reviews
Social proof is an important part of the buyer’s journey because modern consumers want to read reviews from real people before they decide to spend their hard-earned money. Instead of asking customers to take your word for it that your products are high quality, let your real customers tell your story instead.
Set and Track Goals
Setting realistic goals is important when trying to increase sales because you need to reach certain milestones. If you aren’t setting and tracking your goals, you won’t know if your eCommerce website is effective. A few key performance indicators every website owner needs to track include:
- Traffic
- New users
- Conversion rate
- Top performing pages
If you’re not tracking your conversion rates, you can’t determine which products are your top sellers or start thinking of ways to improve those conversion rates. Tracking your goals is a great way to determine whether or not you’re making any progress, allowing you to adapt to different situations quickly.
Final Thoughts
Improving your eCommerce sales sometimes takes trial and error to help you determine what you’re doing right versus wrong. Without data, you can’t determine if your sustainable clothes site or marketing techniques are successful. Additionally, never stop testing. Once you’ve reached your goals, set new goals and keep looking for ways to improve your sales.
