Are you having trouble selling goods online and are pulling your hair out in frustration? Then, you’ve come to the right place for proven how to sell online solutions that will tilt the odds of success in your favor. We have created a list of the best online sales-boosting strategies any business can implement today.
Online sales are exploding with unprecedented growth. In fact, by 2023 online sales in the United States are expected to surpass $740 billion. Do you want to get your slice of the massive pie? Then read on for strategies that businesses can use in any marketplace and against the toughest competition.
8 Tips for grow your online ecommerce business
1. Chatbots for 24/7 conversions
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you might have noticed that almost every eCommerce website has live chat functionality. It’s typically accessed on the bottom right-hand side of the screen. However, it’s expensive to staff a big team of live chat agents at all hours of the day and night.
Utilizing a chatbot, you can save money and increase the conversion rate of every customer that visits your website. This is a viable strategy if you’ve been wondering how to make an online business run smoothly at a low budget. The good news is that chatbots don’t need to take a break or go to sleep – they work 24/7. Also, they will provide the same service level to each visitor allowing you to sell anything online around the clock.
Chatbots with powerful AI learning mechanisms will improve over time. They can figure out where they are going wrong and increase the quality of interactions. Therefore, it’s an investment that will pay off even more in the future.
Are you worried that chatbot interaction quality is not comparable to real humans? Then you’ll be pleasantly surprised that they have an average satisfaction rate of 87.58%, which is 2% higher than the rate for human interactions. It’s how to start an online retail business by impressing your customers from the beginning.
Finally, chatbots are a great way for smaller companies to compete with the established goliaths of a marketplace. That’s because chatbots can scale as companies grow. The chatbot doesn’t care if you suddenly receive an explosion of traffic – it will continue to serve every person without the conversion rate taking a hit.
2. Create a sense of urgency
The internet is a big place with so many options with so many companies selling a product online. Customers love to compare different services before pulling the trigger on the buy button. However, it’s problematic when they leave your website with the intention of coming back – but in most cases they won’t.
Therefore, you need to introduce website design elements that create a sense of urgency. Here are a few of the top strategies to increase online sales:
● Inventory levels: display the number of units left somewhere on the product page. When the inventory levels decrease, then potential customers will not want to miss out. You could highlight products that have low stock so that customers are aware when stocks are low.
● Sales end date: do you run discounts for particular products or categories? That’s an excellent online eCommerce business strategy that can be improved upon with an end date. Have a countdown timer that shares when the sale will end. Customers will feel that they have to act soon or lose out on a potentially good deal.
● Show out of stock products/sizes: it’s a smart idea to show off what products are currently out of stock. It’s a warning to customers that their desired product might not be available soon. Also, show information about when the product is expected to back, which allows customers to come back and buy.
Other selling products online strategies you could implement include last chance emails, limited free shipping offers and adding a shopping cart timeout. Don’t throw each of these strategies at your eCommerce website at once. Utilize A/B testing to determine the ones that are a good match for increasing online sales – more on this later.
3. Landing page must match the ad
When customers click on your ad, whether it’s on a YouTube video, social media post or search engine results page, they expect to be presented with a relevant offer. Let’s say a customer is looking for online sale sites and your ad says: “50% For All Winter Coats”, but the landing page displays only a few coats and mostly shorts. That would be confusing, which would lead to a high bounce rate. The ad quality would go down, thereby increasing the PPC bid price or lowering the ad position.
To ensure a complete match, you could include the ad headline in the landing page title. The title is one of the first things visitors look at before navigating down the page. It should reinforce that they have arrived at the right place.
When deploying ads with images or themes, consider adding the same ones to the landing page. Using the same digital assets is good branding practice that helps increase sales and allows your online store to be more memorable.
4. Overhaul your website design for best online sales
When was the last time you updated the website design? If it’s been more than a few years, then perhaps you are behind the curve. Websites are constantly evolving as technology improves. You need to keep up because it’s what the average consumer expects.
A staggering 54% of online shoppers abandon websites they feel have a poor website design. Worried that some of your visitors are feeling the same way? Here are a few website design tips on how to increase online sales.
● Reduce image size: your webpages might be taking too long to load because of large image file sizes. It’s a problem because nowadays website visitors expect pages to load within a few seconds. Otherwise, they will hit the back button before ever laying eyes on your offer.
● Clean up coding: it’s worthwhile to periodically check coding quality to ensure no errors are causing havoc with performance. Clean code increases website loading speeds and reduces the chances of downtime.
● Dedicated hosting server: make sure to store your website data on a dedicated server. It will cost you extra, but the investment is worth the cost. Shared servers mean other websites will be housed. If they receive a spike in traffic, then it could lead to a lower bandwidth capacity for your website.
Other strategies for the best ways to sell online include streamlining your HTML, minifying CCS and JavaScript, reducing the number of HTTP requests, and using a Content Delivery Network. A competent programmer will know what these are and give you suggestions for more strategies.
5. Testimonials and reviews
Social proofing is a concept that works in all walks of life, and exceptionally well to boost online sales. The idea is to display evidence of a product or service being liked and recommended by others. This includes the use of testimonials, customer reviews, case studies, social media, trust icons and data.
The tactic you implement should depend on the nature of your business. For example, if you’re offering basic products, then the bog-standard 5 star review score system will work. However, for more complicated services, you may want to elaborate with a case study. Mention the details of the case study on what your business did to achieve a good outcome. Potential clients will read the case study and imagine their needs being met in the same way.
In recent years, influencers have become a huge source of online retail businesses. Hijack a loyal audience for a reasonable fee to get your message out. Surpassingly, the best bang for your buck is micro-influencers – defined as having an audience of 5K-100K followers. In fact, 90% of marketers are interested in working with micro-influencers in 2021.
6. Follow up emails
The average cart abandonment rate is just under 70% across all industries, which is very high. People leaving the checkout process might be because of distractions, better offers elsewhere or website errors. Most people that abandon the cart will not return in the future to complete the checkout unless you get proactive with emails.
Here are a few email types that will boost online sales:
● Cart abandonment email: this is a friendly reminder that the visitor’s cart is left stranded in digital space. Nudge them in the direction of their cart to complete the process. To increase sales, consider creating an incentive such as free shipping or offering a discount. Also, a sense of urgency will help convert buyers that don’t want to miss out.
● Product based email: remind customers that you have a particular product in stock and ready to ship. Ideally, it should be a product the receiver has shown an interest in before. You’ll need to execute a targeted email campaign to achieve this level of precision – the online sales increase will be worth the investment when selling anything online.
● Promotional emails: do you have a special offer or discount running? Then send out an email showing off your latest deals. Customers that love your products will be waiting for these types of emails. It means they don’t have to spend time researching to figure out where the best deals can be found.
You can also send welcome, feedback and stock replenishment emails. Respect your client’s inbox by not spamming daily. Instead, craft an offer that represents excellent value before sending. Emails are one of the easiest ways to sell online, so it could be one of the first strategies to try.
7. Remove distractions to sell goods online
The average online shopper has a short attention span and most likely has multiple tabs open to compare your offer. Therefore, you need to provide an environment that speeds up the checkout process by reducing the number of distractions.
Remove pictures and other page elements that don’t contribute to achieving the sale. For instance, on the product page don’t share links to articles on your blog. Instead, only share the information that describes the product and the buy button.
Once the user arrives at the checkout process you could remove the navigation menu. It reduces the chances that users will leave the checkout process because they got distracted. However, this strategy may decrease the number of items bought. That’s because users might hesitate to press the back button to find a product they forget.
Your website should have a clean user interface that looks pleasing to the eye. Too many offers and a lack of a coherent navigation menu is confusing, which leads to leaving your website. Think of the biggest website online: Google, Amazon, eBay. They all have a simple user interface, which is one of the reasons why they are successful selling online businesses.
8. A/B split testing
There are many decisions to make while building a successful eCommerce website. What colors do you choose? How many pictures per page and what should their size be? You need a formulaic way of making decisions that leads to the best way to sell products online.
Using data gathered from A/B testing is one of the best strategies on how to make online businesses succeed. The idea is to create 2 versions of a page, where everything is the same apart from one element. This might be the sizing of the buy button or its placement.
Next, you’ll throw a large amount of traffic at each page (upwards of 10,000) and track the conversion rate of each. The better-performing one is kept while the other one is discarded, thereby learning the best ways to sell online. You’ll keep going through this process until your website is a highly converting beast that competitors will look at in jealousy.
A/B split testing is an investment of time and money. However, the boost in online sales will make up for the cost in the long term. You’ll also develop an intuition of what to test next. Overall, making a decision based on data is the best approach to ensure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
Final thoughts
The 8 strategies to increase online sales outlined above will get you ahead of most online eCommerce businesses. Some are easier to implement than others, but now you have a roadmap for your business. Start with one strategy and implement it to full functionality before moving into the next. This will avoid spreading yourself too thin with your online business marketing.
However, the proven tactics above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more out there that will allow your business to skyrocket sales and help your business grow. So what are you waiting for? Choose one sales-boosting strategy and begin your journey to become a successful online business.
