Ask ecommerce business owners what their dream goal is. Most of them will tell you they want to reach a point where they can stop worrying about the sales coming in and have enough money to live comfortably, maybe even own a farm.
The only thing stopping them is that increasing ecommerce sales isn’t easy.
Fierce competition! Short customer attention span! Constantly evolving market trends!
These are just a few hurdles you’re going to face. As someone with more than seven years of ecommerce experience, I wanted to share a few actionable strategies that you could implement to increase your online sales.
In this guide, I’ve put together eight powerful strategies that have proven to be effective in increasing ecommerce sales.
#cta-paragraph-pb#As someone with more than seven years of ecommerce experience, I wanted to share a few actionable strategies that you could implement to increase your online sales. I’ve worked closely with dozens of ecommerce founders and marketers, helping them increase their conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and scale up their operations, among other things.
Let’s dive straight into them.
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Here are a few powerful ecommerce strategies that you can implement to increase your online sales.
SMS marketing is all about sending promotional messages directly to prospects’ or customers’ mobile devices via text.
In the past few years, there’s been a surge in this type of marketing, not just for transactional notifications but also for marketing campaigns.
Why does it make sense to invest in SMS marketing right now?
Here are a few statistics that illustrate the use of SMS:
When implemented right, SMS marketing can deliver some serious results.
However, one thing that you must take care of is not to bombard your customers with dozens of messages every single day.
Limit promotional messages to once or twice a week.
Also, it’s good practice to segment your SMS list. Otherwise, you risk sending irrelevant messages to customers.
This can result in higher opt-out rates and negative brand perception.
To build a solid SMS marketing strategy, consider setting up the following SMS sequences:
However, these are just a few basic SMS sequences.
Depending on your specific needs, you can set up different SMS workflows to engage customers at different stages of their journeys and drive more sales.
Here’s an example from Kodiak Cakes that triggers urgency:
SMS marketing platforms like Recart make it super-easy to set up and run SMS marketing campaigns.
With Recart’s AI, ecommerce brands can leverage personalized SMS messages to target specific customer segments, leading to increased engagement and conversions.
SMS marketing, when implemented right, has a very high potential to increase sales and grow your business.
But it’s important to test and optimize SMS marketing campaigns based on what works for your business and what doesn’t.
Pro-tip: Create dedicated landing pages for your best-selling products and redirect your SMS recipients to these pages to provide a seamless and targeted shopping experience.
Shogun lets you create custom landing pages with ease, helping you showcase your products in a visually appealing way to drive more sales.
Shoppable videos are interactive videos that let viewers purchase the products featured in the video from within the video itself.
For instance, if you run an online leather bags store, you can let your customers purchase leather bags directly from within shoppable videos.
Kaleigh Moore, an ecommerce writer with bylines in Forbes, Fast Company, and many other publications, stresses how powerful shoppable videos are:
“Shoppable videos give buyers the chance to see a product in action, rather than as a static, un-engaging image. That’s a game-changer.”
Here’s an example of a dog shoe brand, RIFRUF, that drove more than $50k in six months of implementing shoppable videos on their online store.
What’s so special about shoppable videos? Let’s see:
However, it’s important to note that implementing shoppable videos on your online store is a HUGE decision.
For years, ecommerce stores have struggled to host videos on their website. That’s because adding videos to your online store can slow it down.
On top of this, choosing the wrong video platform can result in a poor user experience. Hence, it’s important to use a video platform designed for scale and performance.
Here are a few things you should look for in a shoppable video platform:
Over the last few years, there’s been a spike in the number of people turning to influencers for purchasing decisions.
That’s especially the case with Gen-Z.
More than 40% of Gen-Zers have purchased at least one product based on influencer recommendations.
Collaborating with influencers is a great way to increase exposure, as you’ll be tapping into their already-engaged follower base.
But make sure you’re really picky about the influencers you work with. After all, you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a failed campaign.
While vetting influencers, focus on the ones:
However, it’s important to point out that finding the right influencers is no easy feat.
Brands can choose to do it manually by performing a Google search or looking them up on social media using hashtags.
The problem is, these methods can take up a huge chunk of your time.
Most importantly, it’s very hard to track an influencer’s engagement rate and authenticity manually.
Here are a few influencer marketing tools that you can use:
Once you’ve found the right influencers, here are a few influencer marketing strategies you can consider implementing to drive results:
Pro-tip: Build product landing pages that you can drive traffic to from your influencer marketing efforts. This way, you can not only personalize your campaigns but also better track your influencer marketing efforts.
For example, if you sell globally and want to run a Diwali sale for your Indian customers, you have two options: update your existing listings to match the Diwali sale theme or create a dedicated landing page specifically for the Diwali sale.
In my opinion, the latter option is a better choice. By creating a dedicated landing page using Shogun Page Builder, you can offer a more personalized experience for Indian customers during the Diwali sale.
Moreover, if you collaborate with Indian influencers to promote your Diwali sale, it makes sense to direct the traffic from their campaigns to this specific landing page.
You can measure the effectiveness of your influencer marketing efforts more accurately and track the return on investment (ROI) of your campaigns.
Acquiring new customers is important.
However, retaining your existing ones is equally important.
That’s because it costs up to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an old one.
Running a customer loyalty program can help increase your retention rate and increase their lifetime value by offering rewards to the ones who frequently make purchases.
These rewards can be in the form of discounts, points, or other benefits that motivate them to stick to your brand.
Having a customer loyalty program in place can also help motivate customers to make even more purchases.
Another benefit is that it helps build an emotional connection with your customers. By offering rewards and incentives to your customers for repeat purchases, you’re creating an emotional connection with them.
This can, in time, result in an increase in brand loyalty and advocacy.
While implementing a customer loyalty program, here are a few things to consider:
Implementing a customer loyalty program helped Unique Vintage, a clothing brand, increase their customer lifetime value (for program members) by more than 58%.
To build an effective loyalty program, you can use loyalty apps like Smile.io, Yotpo, Zinrelo.
These platforms make it super-easy for ecommerce brands to build and manage a customer loyalty program.
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How many times have you wished for instant assistance while browsing an online store? If you’re like me, you’ve probably lost count.
Adding live chat functionality to your online store can be a game-changer for your ecommerce brand.
Live chat delivers 73% satisfaction, a higher number when compared with email (61%) and phone support (44%).
A few reasons live chat works:
However, there are barriers to implementing live chat on your store.
Operating a live chat system requires human resources to handle customer service inquiries in real time.
If you don’t have enough trained staff to handle chat support, it can lead to delayed responses and frustrate customers. And let’s not overlook the time zone differences.
In such cases, a good solution is to use a chatbot.
You connect it with your knowledge base and train it to address common customer queries and issues in real-time.
Based on customer questions in the chat, you can connect people to a human support team when necessary, guaranteeing a seamless customer experience.
Just like SMS, email is another owned communication channel that you can use to boost ecommerce sales.
When implemented well, email marketing can deliver some serious results. The only problem is that most ecommerce brands don’t do it right.
To build a solid email marketing strategy, here are a few email sequences you should use:
Here’s a brilliant example of a welcome series by DTC mattress company Casper:
Here’s an example of a product recommendation email from bookseller Barnes & Noble that’s helpful and relevant.
Essential reading: 10 Ecommerce Email Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Next Newsletter
A good practice after you build your email list is to segment it into several smaller, more targeted lists.
This way, you can offer your customers a more personalized marketing experience based on their interests and specific needs.
Note: Just like any other marketing strategy in the world, you need to test and optimize your email marketing campaigns to achieve good results.
You’ll see the internet flooded with stats like “for every $1 you spend on email marketing, it can help generate $45”. While I’m not saying there’s no truth to it, not all ecommerce companies are generating a positive ROI.
Hence, it’s important to optimize your campaigns so you know what works best for your business and what doesn’t.
For years, ecommerce stores have invested in paid ads to drive more sales. The ones that do it right have seen significant returns on investment.
On the other hand, there are also ecommerce brands that have invested a lot of money in paid ads yet have seen very poor results.
Here’s the thing: Paid ad campaigns work when you implement them right.
However, the success of your paid ads campaigns will depend on several factors like industry, customers, ad platform you choose, and product value, among other things.
Most importantly, it’ll depend on how good your strategy is and how well you execute it.
At the end of the day, it’s about testing what works for your customers and what doesn’t.
There’s always a risk involved. But it’s one worth taking.
When it comes to ecommerce advertising, here are a few best practices:
If you’re in the initial stages of running paid ads campaigns (want to try them out), it’s better to first test out different types of ads across different platforms where your customers hang out.
If a specific ad type and/or ad platform generate a good ROI, maybe you can consider scaling it up.
User-generated content (UGC) is any form of content published by your customers about your brand or product.
It’s the social proof that shows you are as cool as you say you are.
76% of customers believe that user-generated content is trusted more than content created by brands. That’s because it is authentic and has been created by real customers.
You can leverage user-generated content by your customers across different mediums like your website, social media channels, and email newsletters, among others.
You can also add it to your dedicated landing pages to deliver a personalized and authentic experience to your audience.
Ava Estell, an all-natural skincare brand, has added UGC videos on their homepage and across different product pages.
This helped them generate 4x more on-site engagement and generate more than £743K in added revenue.
UGC is powerful.
But the only problem is you can’t use it if your customers aren’t posting about your products or brand online.
To get user-generated content for your brand:
You can also collaborate with UGC creators.
This involves sending them your preferred product and asking them to try it out, so they can create content around it and share it on their social media channels.
When implemented right, these eight tactics can deliver some serious results.
However, it’s important to test them out to understand what works for your business and what doesn’t.
No matter what strategy you implement, it’s good practice to build dedicated landing pages to handle all the traffic your campaigns yield.
That’s how you’ll be able to deliver a personalized experience to your customers.
Using Shogun Page Builder, you can design custom landing pages with ease, helping you show off your products in a visually stunning way that converts visitors into customers.
Shogun empowers ecommerce businesses to build landing pages without coding, allowing anyone on your team to customize and launch campaigns quickly and efficiently.
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