15 Ways to Increase Sales on an E-commerce Site
#1. Sell a more expensive product
The idea is to try to sell a product that costs more than the one the customer is considering, within a sensible price range. You have to be careful here, because it should not be far more expensive than what the customer had in mind to spend. For instance, if a customer is looking at a pair of trainers, there may be similar trainers in a different material that they might want to buy but do not know exist.
#2. Use Instagram
With the right visuals, the right hashtags and the right posting times, you can use Instagram to promote your e-commerce site and lift sales. You can post time-limited discounts on particular products.
#3. Email people who abandoned their cart
Statistics show that as many as 69% of people put an item in the cart and never buy it. Some of them would buy if you reminded them to, by sending an email. You can add to the incentive with a discount or free delivery.
#4. Collect visitors' email addresses
Collecting email addresses lets you try to sell particular items to a visitor through a channel that is somewhat more personal than social media. One good way of getting a visitor to leave their address is to offer something in return — free delivery on their first order, say, or a discount.
#5. Build a relationship with the people who leave you their address
Collecting the address is not enough on its own; you need activities that build a relationship with the person who gave it to you. Some ideas you could apply:
- Sending a welcome message when they register
- Sending a coupon with a special discount
- Sending information that helps the customer get the most out of what they bought. How to care for a particular type of trainer, for instance
- Sending a question about how the experience on your site could be improved, so that next time it feels even better
#6. Email people about the things on their wish list
When a customer adds something to a wish list, they often forget about it. So it is worth reminding them about what they saved, particularly if those things are now discounted or about to sell out. This is in a sense similar to the abandoned cart situation.
#7. Make it easy for visitors to find their way around and find what they need.
If your e-commerce site is not well designed, you will probably lose some of your customers. Some hallmarks of a poorly designed shop are: confusing navigation, a font that is hard to read, and too much or too little information on particular pages. You need to do everything you can to help visitors find their way around easily and find what they need.
#8. Bring visitors into a conversation with live chat
Live chat lets you answer customers' questions there and then, at the moment they are deciding whether to buy, and clear up any doubts about your products. There are inexpensive chat tools that can open automatically with a particular question once a customer has been on a page for a while.
#9. Anticipate future sales
One good way to anticipate future sales is to let customers be notified when a product that is currently out of stock comes back in.
#10. Produce good content you can use for marketing
Start writing a blog about healthy lifestyles, choosing sportswear and so on. Producing content like this consistently will make your e-commerce site more visible in search and therefore more visible to prospective and existing customers.
#11. Use content created by your visitors
An excellent way to build trust in your products and in you generally is to use content created by visitors themselves, in the form of recommendations, ratings and comments. According to the statistics, more than 50% of visitors trust another visitor's comment more than the product description on the site.
#12. Run offline campaigns
You can promote your online shop in places where you have no physical stores. You can also do it in your own stores, by offering discounts on purchases made through the e-commerce site.
#13. Optimise your product pages
Analyse how your customers behave on the site and adjust the content accordingly.
#14. Optimise your e-commerce site so it is easy to search on mobile devices
A great many searches are done on mobile phones today, and it is extremely important that all your content works on mobile devices.
#15. Build a loyalty scheme for your customers
One way to reward customers who buy from you often is to build a loyalty scheme giving them certain benefits when they purchase. A loyalty scheme can be structured in several ways, one of which is collecting points on purchases and rewarding customers with a discount once they pass a certain total. Loyal customers often buy repeatedly, and are then a stable source of revenue.