Did you know that more than 500 new websites are created every single minute? As an e-commerce store owner, how can you stand out from the crowd so you can increase sales?
While there are lots of ideas out there about growing your bottom line, it can be hard to know which sources to trust. That’s why we put this guide together outlining some helpful tips.
After all, learning how to grow sales during the holiday season is great, but these 8 tips will help you increase sales all year round.
1. Invest Time in Brand Awareness
Your goal with brand awareness should be to make sure your customers associate your brand with quality and reliability. Those two characteristics are what drive repeat sales.
Evaluate your customers’ experience with your product or service by spending time on your product reviews.
If you have a collection of positive reviews, then make sure they are displayed and readily available on your website. If you have mostly bad reviews, then set aside the time to respond individually to and resolve as many as you can. If you don’t have any reviews then make an opportunity for your customers to leave reviews through emails, webpage widgets, etc.
Ideally, you’ll have an employee who can be responsible for managing brand awareness. But if not then schedule a few hours at a set time each week that is devoted to responding to reviews and fostering the growth of brand awareness.
2. Update Your Website
One of the simplest and most effective ways to boost sales is to evaluate your website traffic and customer journey and then update your website.
Consider these questions:
- How do customers reach my website?
- How much time do they spend on the homepage?
- Which page do they travel to next?
- How long does it take a customer to reach a product page?
- What’s the total amount of time a customer spends on my site?
Through site mapping, you can answer these questions and determine some areas of improvement.
Simply evaluating your customers’ journey through your website can help you determine if certain pages, links, etc. are confusing, distracting, ignored, and more.
This will likely prompt some changes to the design and flow of your site. This practice will make it easier for customers to be directed to product pages, and spend more time overall on your website.
This is a practice that should be repeated often.
3. Social Media Marketing
Who is your target customer? How old are they? Where do they live? And most importantly, which social media platform do they use most?
These questions will help you know how to market to your target customer the most effective.
If your market is 15-30-year-olds then Instagram should be your focus for social media ads. 25 years+ target customers spend most of their social media time on Facebook.
Consider Twitter, Snapchat, and any other relevant social media platforms and devote a portion of your marketing budget to ads on your target platform.
4. Grow Sales Through Email Marketing
Grow that email list and then use it! Social media platforms have varying stamina and popularity, but email is forever.
If you need to grow your email list, consider creating a popup window that offers email subscribers a free eBook, a discount off their first purchase, or a month free for a subscription service.
Make sure the employee responsible for marketing has a calendar scheduled out in advance of emails that go out on a regular basis.
5. Improve Customer Service
No matter how much you already spend in time and money, customer service can always be improved. Take some time to evaluate your customer service standards.
You should devote time and budget to ensure that each customer who contacts you for help receives it. You can also begin evaluating what your most common customer service issues are and spend time preventing those issues with future clients.
You should have a devoted customer service representative who is responsible for responding to and resolving client complaints in a timely and respectful manner.
Remember that customers are likely to spend more money just to get a product from a brand they like and have good experiences with.
6. Make Sure Sellers Are Abiding by Contracts
If you have outside sellers marketing and selling your service or product, then it’s important to make sure that you have a clear and direct contract that protects and benefits both parties.
Most entrepreneurs don’t have time to monitor contracts or minimum advertised price agreements. You can use FrigginYeah MAP Monitoring to make sure no one is undercutting your prices and stealing sales.
Some sellers might be violating MAP guidelines which could be funneling sales away from you. Maintaining and monitoring your contracts is key to driving sales and growing your business.
7. Create a Secure Shopping Environment
Displaying security icons is a key opportunity to making your clients feel more comfortable spending money and time on your website. You can make sure the web hosting site provides a lock icon next to your URL.
Display security badges for services you provide to ensure cybersecurity.
8. Make Shipping an Advantage
Free shipping is often more motivating than a percentage off. That’s part of the reason that Amazon Prime has had the success it enjoys.
Use shipping confirmation emails to your advantage. Make sure an automated email confirmation with shipping details is sent within a minute of purchase. Provide tracking details and send other emails when packages ship and are delivered. Send a follow-up email to ask for a review.
These shipping related interactions will create positive associations and experiences for your customers as they look forward to their package.
Now What?
Now that you have the best 8 tips to grow sales in the coming year, it’s time to get started.
Choose some of these tips to start implementing immediately and visit our business feed for more on business tricks.