4 Effective Tips to Increase Your Ecommerce Sales
Ecommerce marketing is an incredibly crowded and competitive field, and it can feel impossible to find ways to stand out from the competition in almost any niche. That said, generating more ecommerce sales doesn’t have to be complicated, and there are a few reliable ways to build audience interest.
In this article, we’ll talk about some of the most effective ecommerce marketing strategies to boost audience interest and overall revenue for your ecommerce business. While there aren’t any shortcuts to success in ecommerce, these tips will give you the foundation you need for sustainable growth in both traffic and sales and help you get your online shop fully off the ground.
Convert More Abandoned Carts
It can take time to move a lead through each stage of the customer journey, and nothing is more frustrating than cart abandonment. In fact, most online shopping carts are abandoned before the sale, making them one of the key sources of lost sales for ecommerce brands.
There are two tactics to making more money on abandoned carts: you can either stop the cart from being abandoned in the first place or follow up after the user leaves your site. An effective cart abandonment strategy utilizes both of these tactics to generate as many sales as possible.
Exit-intent popups are one of the most powerful ways to decrease your cart abandonment rate. While popups are often considered intrusive and distracting, they can be extremely powerful tools when used correctly.
As the name implies, exit-intent popups are designed to display when a user starts to leave your site. It does not matter if user is browsing your site on mobile or desktop. Both desktop and mobile exit-intent popups often appear with a gift such as free shipping, a small discount, or a PDF guide or other lead magnet. The goal is to draw the visitor’s attention back to your site and get them to reconsider—even if they don’t make a purchase immediately, you’ll still have a chance to extend the interaction.
On the other hand, there’ll always be a certain percentage of abandoned carts, regardless of how much you focus on eliminating them. With that in mind, it’s just as important to follow up after cart abandonment as it is to prevent abandoned carts in advance.
A simple cart abandonment email sequence can go a long way toward recovering more abandoned carts. You can send the initial message as little as an hour after they leave your site while the products they were looking at are still fresh in their mind. At that point, a simple reminder is often all it takes to bring them back.
If they don’t respond to the first message, it’s usually a good idea to wait at least 24 hours before following up again. Sending too many emails too close together will only turn users away and increase your unsubscribe rate.
The second message is also the perfect time to include another small gift for an additional incentive. Just ten percent off could be enough to get them to reconsider, especially if they think they’re getting an exclusive deal. This is particularly true for new leads—ten percent off a single order is an extremely small price to pay for customer acquisition.
Improve Your Checkout Page
Marketers often focus on brand messaging and other aspects of ecommerce campaigns, but a functional online store is just as relevant. Too many brands are held back by problems with their websites and stores that could easily be fixed with a little work and some new plugins.
The first thing to consider when improving your checkout page is whether you accept a wide enough range of payment methods. Along with credit and debit cards, some of your users may also be interested in paying through PayPal or even using cryptocurrencies. Keep in mind that every payment method you fail to support has the potential to lose sales.
Very important to select a good shipping app and provide a seamless buying experience. Businesses should avoid adding any unexpected fees later on in the checkout process. For example, if a customer selects an item for $19.99 and then sees an $8 shipping charge during checkout, there’s a good chance that they’ll reconsider. It’s better to tell customers about shipping fees and other charges early on in order to avoid any surprises.
Work with Affiliates
Ecommerce marketers have more choices than ever when it comes to outreach, and affiliate marketing is an exciting opportunity for brands in almost any field. Affiliates typically work on a commission, which means you won’t spend any money unless they successfully attract leads to your site or store.
With that in mind, affiliate marketing is highly scalable. If you offer a certain commission based on clicks or sales, affiliates with authority in your niche will naturally be attracted to the opportunity as long as there’s an audience for your products. Again, you won’t have to incur any unnecessary risk or worry about your efficiency—those are all up to the affiliate rather than your in-house marketing team.
Of course, it’s still good to work with a relevant affiliate whenever possible. For example, someone with an existing following in your field is more likely to generate interest than someone who focuses on another audience or demographic. Fortunately, affiliate marketing requires much less active management than most other ecommerce campaigns.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you can also work with an affiliate network rather than reaching out to affiliates on your own. Affiliate networks connect brands with particular audiences to affiliates who are more likely to help them succeed. Affiliate networks seem to get more popular every year, so ecommerce marketers can choose from a wide range of options.
Upsell and Cross-sell Products
Most of the tips on this list focus on generating a greater number of sales, but you can also generate more revenue by increasing the value of those sales. Upselling and cross-selling opportunities capitalize on audience interest by getting them to consider more products and eventually spend more money on each order.
Upselling and cross-selling are closely linked, but there’s also an important distinction between the two strategies. While upselling involves advertising more expensive versions or variants of a similar product, cross-selling is all about recommending products that complement whatever a customer has in their cart.
If you’re buying an iPhone 12, for example, Apple will most likely try to convince you to upgrade to the 12 Pro in order to increase the value of your order. They also offer perks like additional hard drive space for an extra charge. These are classic upselling strategies, and customers are often willing to pay a little more for premium features when they’re already investing in an expensive product.
On the other hand, cross-selling might involve selling you a case or another accessory for your new phone. This example demonstrates the difference between the two tactics along with their intuitive appeal. Keep in mind that Apple has also dropped charging cables and headphones from the iPhone package, which has now opened them up for even more cross-selling opportunities.
Conclusion
Ecommerce marketing is all about staying ahead of the competition and moving as many customers as possible through the sales cycle. Experimenting and testing various sales strategies is an ongoing process - a marketer’s job is never done!
However, while technology, innovation, and out-of-the-box thinking are all important elements of success, sometimes it’s the simpler solutions that are best. Incorporate these four tried-and-tested tactics into your marketing strategy to attract more traffic, reduce friction during checkout, and gain a higher turnover on your orders, guaranteed.
Author: Laura Narusyte
Laura Narusyte is an experienced digital marketing and SEO specialist at Omnisend- Ecommerce Marketing Automation platform. When not blogging, she likes to read about SEO, digital marketing and ecommerce trends, technology, and personal productivity. Follow on LinkedIn.