In today’s digitally-shifting world, online shopping has become a common thing, with 26.5% of all retail sales happening online in 2022, up from 19% in 2019. Its convenience and massive expansion of potential customers, combined with its ability to discount many logistical concerns (such as locale), make it a fantastic avenue for businesses from small to large to experience massive growth.
But how do we capitalise on online shoppers? In this article, Real Business will create an outline for how important online sales are for companies, as well as how to increase sales online naturally and rapidly grow your number of existing customers.
Why Incorporate Online Sales Into Your Business?
The best practices for increasing online sales have seen both cost savings of up to 30% and revenue increases as high as 20% for various companies in the UK, as found in the study “The Dividends of Digital Marketing Maturity” by BCG.com. This article details that adopting good digital marketing efforts, which is the official name of the practice of increasing online sales, can allow you to snatch away large portions of the market share for yourself.
This is because online sales provide the following benefits:
- Increased reach – Your pool of potential customers massively expands as you access a national or global audience, meaning you can engage with far more people than you would with a physical storefront. This may outright eliminate a need for a storefront at all, as well as the travel time for the consumer.
- Customer convenience – Online shoppers don’t have to rush to make it to the store before it closes, they can shop online at their leisure, weighing their options carefully and not having to worry about holding anyone else up.
- Competitive advantage – Proactive seeking of customers through online sales is what many companies are doing, and if you are not, you may find yourself losing your ability to compete properly.
- Data-driven insights – It is far easier to gather data on your customers via both customer feedback and tracking tools (such as Google Analytics) than it is in a physical store. This allows you to constantly tweak your marketing strategies and offers to better suit your potential customers.
- Boosted revenue – The art of online sales includes many strategies that have high returns on investment that are only available online, such as discounts, email marketing campaigns, social media promotions etc.
- Brand awareness – The increased reach that your online status will give will effectively make you more visible to all. Brand recognition garners trust and 59% of buyers prefer buying new products from familiar brands.
The Best Ways To Increase Online Sales
The following is a breakdown of the six best ways to increase online sales fast, and consistently.
1. Optimise Your Website For Conversions
In business terms, conversions happen when potential customers become an active part of your planned business goals, either by making a purchase, downloading a resource or inputting information of some kind. These steps generate value, and you want to optimise your online store or website to make them easy.
The following is how you make this happen:
- Attract customers – Using SEO, paid social campaigns, advertisements etc. to get customers to your website is how you begin the conversion process.
- Ensure a seamless experience – Most online sales happen through a phone, so make sure it’s accessible and easy to use via a mobile device as well as a desktop.
- Engage – Your website has to be engaging. This is a hard art to master, especially in an age where watching a movie is considered a test of patience. If you are to keep your customers interested your content has to keep them interested first and foremost. Keep things concise, visually pleasing, and simple.
- Persuade – To capture your target audience, you need to present them with a value proposition. Make it easy to understand the benefits of what you’re offering, and enhance trust by using social proof where possible.
- Simplify actions – Everything that makes using your website the slightest bit more complicated has to go. Make navigation easy, ensure you display call-to-action buttons prominently to begin the conversion and avoid a lengthy checkout process.
- Follow up – For the potential customers that didn’t convert, you can follow them up later by using email marketing and retargeting campaigns to re-engage and try again.
Use Google Analytics to track metrics that matter, such as bounce rate, time on page, cart abandonment etc. You can even use features like heat maps to identify areas of high engagement versus areas that fell off and make adjustments to heighten engagement in lacking areas.
2. Use Email Marketing Campaigns
People nowadays prefer to receive an email than physical paper the vast majority of the time, meaning it becomes a place where you can engage with potential customers via an email marketing campaign. These campaigns are inexpensive, and boast a return on investment of around £29 for every £1 spent, making them highly popular for businesses to utilise.
The best practices for good email marketing campaigns are as follows:
- Personalisation – Address your recipients by name. Customers like to feel as if they’re being looked at as a unique individual, rather than part of the market share. The name of your customer is called “dynamic content” in email marketing terms and can be automated using email software such as Mailchimp. You can then market to them using their own purchase history or browsing behaviour.
- Segmentation – The same email software you use to personalise can be used to filter based on behaviour that you’ve saved in your CRM systems, such as buying history and frequency. Try to craft targeted offers to reach each segment, which would be set up to target new customers, loyal customers, cart abandoners etc. Ensure you offer something that will make sense for each group.
- Automation – Automation is a great tool to use when you’re trying to be efficient, but only when it’s for actions that are either mundane or have highly predictable outcomes. For example, when new customers subscribe, set up an automated email to welcome them with a 10% discount code on their next offer.
- Content and design – Content and visual design should be created to prioritise engagement with your target audience. For example, using high-quality images and gifs whilst controlling for file size optimisation.
- Exclusivity for loyal customers – Part of ensuring more sales online is to retain as well as attract customers. Those who have shown loyalty to your brand can be kept in by including them in schemes which build up rewards over time or entering into VIP programmes such as early access. This fosters feelings of being appreciated and makes them more likely to stay.
3. Transparent Pricing And Discounting
There are several things to cover here surrounding being honest about your prices, and clever use of discounting to produce more sales.
- Free shipping – 80% of shopping online is more likely to go smoothly when retailers are upfront about their shipping costs. Whilst this doesn’t necessarily mean offering free shipping, it does mean that you shouldn’t hide the cost until it’s time to pay. These hidden fees are a very common reason why carts are abandoned.
- Discount code – Offering discount codes means making use of FOMO, most often. Discount codes always have an expiry date for this reason, some further, some closer. For products that have a high value but also a high interest, having a code that has a short-term expiry is very effective. People want these products but consider the price a barrier, so lowering it until midnight through a SAVE20 discount code can trigger FOMO, leading to your CTAs being clicked and more sales generated.
- Promotions – Having periods where you run promotions can see significant engagement spikes and more sales online. Ensure your promotions are comprehensive and easy to find. Display them prominently on your online store, to create no confusion about when or how the offers are available. Create engaging posts on your social media accounts, as well as use paid social ads, to target specific demographics.
4. Improve Customer Service And Experience
The fact is, good customer service sells. Amazon found this out by adopting a philosophy of ensuring smooth and high-quality customer satisfaction at every contact point, with the introduction of Prime overhauling the experience with free next-day delivery and the like.
- Promptness – Being prompt and addressing immediate customer inquiries is vital because most companies don’t do this at all. If, at the end of the day, you can right some wrongs the customer has faced, you are much more likely to retain these online sales simply by showing you care. A good CRM system is necessary for this, as it’s the main means by which you will be able to know a customer’s history almost immediately. Having to make the customer rehash their issues over and over only tells them you’re a cold husk of a company that cares purely about monetary gain.
- Chatbots and live support – Live support is becoming a standard for your existing customers. It used to be that you’d have to sit on the phone for a while waiting to speak to someone, only to go through security checks and frequent pauses. Live support connects instantly, whilst you’re logged in and have details at hand, making things go much faster and helping retain online sales.
- Customer insights – Having a relationship with your customers is the best way to get customer feedback and insights into how they use and like your products. This can not only help you change how it’s produced but also how it’s presented. For example, Netflix uses viewing history to inform recommendations, thereby driving up engagement.
5. Leverage Social Media Marketing
The massive reach that social media provides allows for targeted marketing opportunities to generate more online sales.
- Paid social campaigns – 72% of marketers find paid social advertising effective in achieving business goals, as it allows them to target specific buyer persona(s). This can be done using methods such as Facebook Ads Manager or Instagram Ads, which incorporates your best customers and a “lookalike audience” that is based on them to find compatibility.
- Engaging videos – Video content that shows helpful advice, guides or practices that are both high quality and interactive can generate massive engagement, approximately 49% more than other post types according to Social Media Examiner. Put a plan together and schedule these posts to stay relevant. Innovation and creativity win in this segment.
- Partnerships – Allying with influencers or affiliates gives you access to their markets. 71% of their audience tends to trust them and their recommendations. Many influencers with smaller numbers of followers, such as between 10,000 to 50,000 are considered cost-effective options due to pricing ranges.
6. Focus On SEO And Paid Advertising
SEO and paid advertising are both two sides of the same coin. One drives organic traffic, the other drives direct links:
- SEO optimisation – There are entire careers for people engaging in SEO. 68% of all online experiences begin with search engines, and optimising your page to be amongst the top results for keywords that show high intention. “How much is luxury vinyl tile flooring in Edinburgh?”, for example, are fantastic ways of increasing sales for the long term. Conduct an SEO audit on your website, and begin to create content that will bring the searches to your door.
- Google Ads – Google ads deliver an average ROI of £6 for every £1 spent. It skips over SEO by placing your business prominently at the top of the search results. From there, it’s your job to ensure your offers are good enough to boost online sales.
Conclusion
As you may have realised whilst reading this blog on how to increase sales online, these six ways are long-term efforts that require consistency. Each strike at different avenues has varying effects, but being able to leverage each one will put you far and away ahead of the competition. Keep at it, and when in doubt consult the professionals.
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