Grow Your Ecommerce Business By Making More Sales

In the e-commerce world, it’s common advice that the way to grow your online business is to get more traffic to your website.

Make sure that your store is organized well, it’s fast, gives a great user experience, you offer live chat, deliver personalized and thoughtful after sale emails, invest in great photography and use testimonials to deliver trust.

While this is true for 90% of businesses, the truth is that you are probably not converting the existing traffic on your website to the fullest of its potential.

Below are some of the strategies you can use to make more sales. These solutions will not only generate more revenue for your business, but also allow you to make more money when more traffic comes to see your amazing offerings on your website.

Website Optimization

When we talk about website optimization we are referring to organizing your store in the best possible manner to give the visitor the best possible experience.

What does that mean exactly? Glad you asked. There are a few concepts to this.

Organization and User Experience

This may not sound like a big deal, but think about the last time you went to the grocery store. If the food items were placed in and among baby products, you may struggle to navigate the store in a logical manner. You walk down one isle and you see chocolate bars next to diapers then beer, then cooking oil. In your mind this makes no sense at all. The store has not grouped products in a way that makes logical sense to the shopper.

Your store may have just a single product type, such as backpacks for nomadic millennials, but you may have products with similar features, price points, sizes and use cases. No backpack is made equal and making it easy for the user to see those differences is important.

Saas (Software As A Service) companies show these differences very well on their pricing pages. For example, Hubspot has a few different packages for companies or individuals looking for a CRM, Sales and Marketing solution. On their website, they make it very clear which features are included at each tier, the price and comparisons.

Website Performance And Speed

Website speed is one of those topics that is discussed on the internet, but is often overlooked because it can be difficult to accomplish.

Google has said that “sites loading within 5 seconds had 70% longer sessions, 35% lower bounce rates, and 25% higher ad viewability than sites taking nearly four times longer at 19 seconds.”

This comes at a trade off. Much like cars, the faster you want your website to be, the more expensive hosting and tools become. But these investments may be worth it. Not only does a fast loading website give a better user experience, but it also build trust with your customers. Websites, just like cars, sell more products if they are reliable.

Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel is a way of giving your users a way to easily select and pay for your products in the fastest, there’s that word again, possible way. Marketing funnels generally focus in on one product initially, and then offer additional upsell or down sell products depending on the users behavior as they go through the funnel.

Single product offerings also eliminate the guess work in your marketing strategies. From an advertising point of view, people will see a single product on the platform or website you are advertising and make a decision, a micro commitment, to click the ad to see more.

When they land on the landing page for the product, if the site is designed well, there are little to no distractions. The product is laid out from and center, product information is clear, concise and easy to understand and call to action buttons are bright, easy and easy to see. Customers can easily make a decision about whether they want to buy or not.

Barry Schwartz wrote in his book, The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less, that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. By eliminating that choice at the entrance of the marketing funnel, we reduce anxiety and increase conversions in the process.

Build Trust Through Testimonials

Testimonials and product reviews give people a feeling of comfort. They think to themselves “Because Jim bought this product and he says it’s good, then it must be good.” They may not know who Jim from Connecticut is, but because he looks similar to me and comes from the same location and took the time to leave a review, then what the product promises to deliver might be true.

Display your testimonials and reviews across pages and social media where necessary. Some businesses create a dedicated testimonial page to show the hordes of satisfied product users. If you collect video testimonials it may be worth providing your customers with a guideline or questions to answer when they record the video for you.

Extend Customer Service With Live Chat

While giving people a great user experience may be enough to convert 1-2% of your website visitors on the front end, I advise extending customer service using live chat before the customer even buys your product.

How many times did you visit a website and just wished you could ask a question that would help you make a decision about the product or service that you were seeing? Unfortunately, most e-commerce business owners want to automate their business as much as possible. This comes with the trade off of lower conversions.

Live chat can be hugely beneficial to gain insights on what your customers questions and concerns are. Over time, this information can help you make amendments to The website which may help answer people’s questions as part of the buying process. Live chat agents who are also trained to make sales may help increase trust, thereby increasing conversions and generate better reviews.

Tools like Manychat, Drift and Live Chat provide great solutions to add live chat support at an affordable rate.

Invest In Great Photography And Video

Probably one of the most important aspects of running an online business is the use of great photography and product images. If people are willing to risk giving up their hard earned money on a business or product which they have never heard of, they are expecting to see great images on the website.

We live in a visual world, which you may have heard a thousand times before, but the truth of the matter is that if your website uses a ton of stock images and generic product shots which come from the manufacturer then you are not making an effort to give your customers a reason to trust the business in the first place. Take the time and invest in great photography and video for the website, social media, YouTube and ad platforms. Make the first impression of your business a lasting one.

Go The Extra Mile With Email Marketing

Up to now we have focused on driving sales on the front end of the business. Email marketing can be used on the back on of the sale to make more sales too. Adding related products to your welcome emails or transactional emails may be a great way to show your customers related products which they may not have considered or knew about when they bought. For example, people who bought a 34 lt rain proof backpack may also be in the market for a rain proof coat, jacket and hoodie. It could be that they are planning as trip to a very wet area of the world. These are assumptions, yes, but they are logical assumptions based on their intent.

These assertions can be used to personalize your emails to them in future marketing or newsletters. These emails can be written to cater for a very specific type of customer who frequents your store. We always love the attention we get when the beautiful and handsome real estate agent or car sales person uses our name or congratulates us on the recent engagement or baby shower that just happened in our lives. We can use a similar approach when sending emails to our customers and subscribers. If we take the time to organize and understand our customers, then they will notice, become loyal customers and tell their friends.

Klayvio is a great email marketing solution to provide personalization and integration with all major e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Woocommerce.

Conclusion

Based on the advice you have just read, implementation of each of these items may help to increase your conversion rate from 0.5% to 2%. This may not seem like much, but for every 1000 people visiting your site, that could mean 50 to 200 more customers. More traffic will certainly help you generate more sales, but I suggest you combine your traffic strategy with the advice I have mentioned above to exponentially generate more sales and build a true and loyal customer base.

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