— E-Commerce
Increase ecommerce sales
Ecommerce is a large and varied sector. This is why it takes a deeper level of detail to pick apart each tactic to improve your ecommerce sales! Here we will take a deeper dive into the main 10 methods commonly used.
At a top level, these include: brand awareness, email marketing, social media, conversion rate, data analysis, customer personas, customer service and loyalty, competitive advantage (shipping), strategic promotions and a structured creative marketing strategy.
Audio 12.53 Minutes
— Brand
Your brand awareness
In growing a credible brand, your business will automatically be more trustworthy to customers. This in turn will largely impact sales, regular buyers and even your overall SEO validity. The more customers that know and trust in your brand name, the more sales you will make and the more reliable your brand will become.
The crux is improving your businesses brand awareness is generating content that is high quality. This could lead you to oppertunties partnerships with influencer and other industry relevant businesses. In addition to this, paid ads should not be neglected in brand awareness campaigns coupled with a large presence on social media.
Your email marketing campaigns
Another important step in increasing your ecommerce sales is creating and effectively managing email marketing campaigns and top level strategies. The first stage here is to grow your email list and become proficient in this marketing channel. Some platforms such as social media will have channels that come and go, but with a an email list, you will always own this data. As you can imagine, this is an opportunity not to be taken lightly.
This is a fantastic opportunity that requires dedicated time and attention. Here at Growthlytics, our top piece of advice is to be continuous in looking for new contacts and customer information. By growing this email list you will in turn develop a high quality list of leads, of both potential and existing customers.
This email list also benefits your business in that customers can carry out repeat purchases with little prompting. Price is a consideration factor that potential customer place high value on in their decision of whether or not to purchase. This means that you can contact your customers directly when you are having a sale or a lowered price event. Because you have already built an email list, you be be able to enhance repeat purchases further.
By qualifying each email lead, you also have the opportunity to send ‘abandoned cart’ emails. This is where an email is sent encouraging potential buyers to complete their purchase is they have abandoned their cart before checking out. This is beneficial firstly as it minimises revenue lost in this way and secondly it allows you to take advantage of opportunities to upsell.
Bear in mind throughout your email marketing strategy that most companies are in the hands of Facebook and Google, in that if these tech giant’s companies update their policies, your business could suffer.
— Social Media:
Your social media presence
In our mobile first world, Facebook allows you to drive more visitors to your website through advertising. Introducing new potential customers to your site in this way is often one of the most effective. This is because, Facebook allows you to drive new visitors, induce a higher conversion rate as each ad is highly targeted and then re-engage them through re-marketing.
Studies done recently suggest that ecommerce ads on Facebook provide a 152% return on investment (ROI). In addition to this, the tech giant is also the largest social referrer for ecomerce websites.
By avoiding paid social media advertising in the ecommerce industry, your business is missing out on an invaluable opportunity. It is also even better that there are many tools available for your to use to help this process. Such tools allow you to build and launch effective Facebook ads that increase revenue.
Social media adverts for ecommerce brands often works most successfully when their owners do not rely on the algorithms of Facebook. By using customer audiences in the platform you can monitor your results more closely in turn only benefitting your ecommerce sales.
Most ecommerce companies fall down here as many don’t have an optimised Facebook pixel set up correctly for their website. Additionally, further parameters are not set up on site to track ‘events’ such as ‘Add to Cart’. This means that neither you nor Facebook can understand which of your audiences has the highest conversion rate.
By segmenting each audience as a custom set of potential customers, you will be able to use this as a powerful marketing tool. These audiences with a high conversion rate, allows you to generate a higher ROI through Facebook paid advertising. Also, you can understand which audiences are ‘cold’ to understand where your media spend is not best spent.
What to Expect
Growthlytics strength is in his knowledge and processes of digital tasks – there’s not a question you can ask them that they doesn’t know the answer to. Focused and driven by passion for the industry, they truly are Subject Matter Experts, from whom I’ve learned a lot. First, they gains depth of insight from business owners to determine “What does success look like for you?”, then they create a strategy that best supports the business goals bespoke to that business, to help accelerate growth.
They been in the industry for many years, and covered a wide variety of industries”
MATTHEW FOWELL
MNA DIGITAL (MIDLAND NEWS ASSOCIATION)
How can I increase my online sales quickly?
How can I increase sales in 2020?
How can I expand my ecommerce business?
What is e commerce business strategies?
What are the e commerce strategies?
— Conversion
Your conversion rate
It may seem tedious, but testing your online store tirelessly will help bosot your conversion rate so it is working at an optimal level. When you reach around 50+ changes, improvements and small tweaks to your website, then you have experimented sufficiently, until then keep testing.
After this, you should trial A/B tests. This will allow your business to pin point exactly what is happening. It is important to create a habit of testing regularly. Each aspect of your ecommerce website could be improved, this is why it is so important to test each and every functionality.
By making each purchase and checkout as streamlined as posible you will in turn increase your ecommerce revenue.Your ecommerce website will be most effective if the potential customer is provided will no reason not to buy. When even 1 reason not to buy is introduced, customers may start looking elsewhere.
This should encourage you as a business owner to anlayse each aspect of your site and ask yourself the following questions:
- Is there anything this site could be doing better?
- Is there anything our competitors are doing that we aren’t?
- How does this website look on a smartphone or tablet?
- What is the loading speed of this website, is it quick?
- What do your customers think of this website?
Ensure that when you’re answering these questions you aim to give an unbiased opinion. Ask others for their unbiased opinion as well. Opinions are a great way to get a detailed view on new projects but there is a better way to understand what is most effective. Testing. This will provide objective data on the most popular opinions. Improvements must be continuously made to continue the increase of conversion rates, particularly in the industry of ecommerce.
Your data analysis
By becoming more familiar with your numbers, it means you’re more likely to stick to them. You will be able to grow and scale your ecommerce business much quicker if your analytic tracking is locked down to a fine science. Once you’re selling more than a few items, it will come to your attention that you’re still not making money… why is this?
There are certain items which simply provide you will minimal profit. Once these items are identified, you will be able to alter their price or remove them completely allowing you to make more money with less work.
Here at Growthlytics, we regularly help clients to remove some (approximately 40% of) items from their online catalogues to further increase their profits. Our number 1 strategy involves deep segmentation of ecommerce products. This provides the buyer with a more targeted buying experience, particularly when dynamic segmentation is introduced.
Dynamic segmentation involces tracking the pages a user visits and clicks on, then targeting your offers around this activity specifically.
Your customer personas
An important aspects of increasing your ecommerce sales is connecting with and understanding each of your customers on a deeper level. This is based on a relationship you will build with each customer. By communicating with your customers you will most definitely increase your ecommerce sales for a number of reasons.
Understanding your customers and their personas allows you to generate better advertisements and product launches. It is crucial that you think from the point of view of a customer. Typical questions would include:
- What are my customers pain points?
- Where do my customers face friction?
- Where do my customers hang out online?
Answering questions such as these can grow sales simply as you have all 3 required components: what, where and how to sell.
— Custoemr Service:
Your customer service and loyalty
Whilst excellent customer service may not seem like one of the most predominant factors in increasing ecommerce sales, it should not be underestimated. By investing in customer service technology, you will be more successful and engage more happy shoppers. Whilst traditionally customer service didn’t fall into the lap of your marketing team, nowadays, excellent customer is an extremely valuable marketing tool.
Customers leave happier and more satisfied if they have been able to chat to a member of staff. In addition to this, automating engagement allows your business to push further promotional content.
Whilst many businesses focus on gaining new customers, the real winners in the ecommerce industry focus on returning customers. This is because customers are cheaper to retain than they are to acquire, providing you with a lower marketing spend overall and a more efficient ROI. By listening to customers and their reviews of your product/service, this means your company can be continually improving.
Your competitive advantage (shipping)
Following the insight into aiming for customer retention over acquisition, you can use shipping costs to your competitive advantage after a customer has made their first purchase. Once this customer has completed their first order, you can use shipping offers as a way to encourage them to purchase again. Marketing emails containing shipping offers are opened on average 1.5x. This suggests it to be one of the easiest ways to re-engage a customer.
These types of marketing emails can be further increased in effectiveness by including your bran name within the subject line. This has consistently demonstrated an increased open rate of 7% comparatively to emails not containing this information. Free shipping marketing emails are more effective than % off emails, even when that % off equates to more than the price of postage!
This tendency to buy on the pretense of free shipping has been noted to give a customer the ‘Amazon Prime’ satisfaction. It is also a particularly effective offer when given to international customers also. Customers regularly purchased 2-3x more as they have ‘free shipping’ in the back of their mind.
In the UK, more than 80% of online shoppers abandon their carts! This figure suggests a particular need of this customer is not being met. If you want to provide complete customer satisfaction you must first fulfil the needs of each customer. By providing this individual with what they’re looking for increases conversion rate exponentially.
— Advantage:
— strategy:
Your strategic promotions
Offers are only as effective as their strategy. By running offers that operate on a limited time basis work significantly more effective. Even more so when offers are promoted on social media.
With this tactic, there will be an initial spend on marketing, but this cost per sale will still be less that would you would to a third party such as Amazon for example. Then, once you have acquired this customer, your business will use the previously discussed methods to retain them and convert them into a regular customer.
Your business can leverage deal sites and coupon platforms to promote these sales and offers further. This will also boost your brand awareness. This will be successful as you’re promoting to a wider and larger audience as opposed to the audience on your website alone.
Your structured creative marketing strategy
Lastly, structure is an important component your business must bear in mind. There are several factors which businesses can commonly miss, such as:
- Errors within the website’s architecture
- Overall URL structure not being optimised effectively
- Titles and descriptions missing and duplicated
- Improper sitemap and robots.txt structure
- Opportunities of unique search are not taken advantage of
- Additional on page elements are not optimised e.g. headers, images, keywords, alt text
— Marketing Strategy:
In summary
The main way in which your business can increase sales on an ecommerce platform is to build a relationship with your potential customers first. Companies that only focus inwards will never be the most successful as they will miss clear signals from loyal customers.
Many businesses will completely miss out on opportunities as they’re only focusing inwards. Instead, position your business as market leader, even if you’re not the biggest noise in the industry. This ensures that your audience will respect your brand overall.
Creating high quality content and telling a story that engages your audience is the crux of ecommerce success. Because this type of content is high in demand, your brand credibility will be increased in turn generating more loyal customers.
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