The mushroom growth of E-commerce Stores has given rise to extreme competition in the online selling industry. Nice online stores from selling sunglasses to soaps have forced the marketers to think about tactics that can generate better sales. This post will explore the top 10 ways ecommerce site owners can increase their online sales.
1. Upsell and Cross Sell Your Products
As per Forrester,
Upselling means providing your customers with alternative choices of highly priced products and cross selling means providing your customers with complementary product choices that can go well with the existing product chosen by the customer.
2. Cohort Analysis for Increased User Retention
Cohort Analysis is a great way to accurately judge the performance of user's overtime.
It is looking at a group of people who are segmented based on a defined time period and who share a common set of characteristics. The best metric available under this form of analysis is user retention.
With the help of Cohort Analysis, you can easily find out how many customers are interested in repeat visits in order to purchase more products. It also helps to find the first point of purchase, what is causing the customers to undertake repeat purchases, what is causing them to remain active on the site, what is causing them to refer other people on the site etc.
This report can be accessed under the Audience section in the Google Analytics
3. A/B Testing For Further Optimizing Your Landing Pages
A/B Testing is an easy yet effective way to increase conversions on the site.
First identify the pages that are causing conversion funnel exits. Then create 2 separate versions of those pages and start experimenting with them. This helps to further optimize your main landing pages which in turn help to increase conversions.
4. Use E-Mail Marketing Effectively
Email marketing is one of the most effective internet marketing channels. As per DMI,
Brands have found email marketing as an effective medium of driving sales. Email marketing software like Mail Chimp is particularly useful in carrying out bigger campaigns. The eCommerce360 feature provided by Mail Chimp helps you to connect MailChimp to e-commerce carts like Shopify, Magento, MivaMerchant, osCommerce, and more. Moreover, you can connect it with GA and see all the stats easily.
5. In-Page Analytics to Measure User Behaviour
In-Page Analytics offered by Google Analytics is an awesome way to identify the areas which the customers are particularly interested in.
You can see the exact design elements that are clicked the most. You can also locate the areas like header, right sidebar, left sidebar, footer etc that are viewed the most. You can then place the highest revenue generating products in those areas.
6. Multiple Sources of Leads - Get an APP!
Use all channels of digital marketing namely SEO, SMO, PPC, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing and Affiliate Marketing.
Think about creating an app and ask the users to download it. The world is going mobile and soon, websites will be the thing of the past as most of the online transactions will happen on the phone. It is better to get an app and start marketing it with the help of App Store Optimization (ASO). Customers retention using app will give you a stable increase in conversion rates.
(To learn more about App Store Optimization, click here)
7. Coupons to Reward Your Most Loyal Customers
People love discounts and if you provide coupons as a referral medium to generate more sales then your conversions are bound to improve. I recommend you to list your coupons on coupon sites like Groupon in order to receive more sales.
As per Abdul Sattar, CEO of CouponMachine (which received funding of $140K from UK based Angel Investors against a stake of 11.5%)- "We update the site every hour. On an average we update about 200 articles every day which contains coupons and deals." We can simply assume how much the customers are genuinely interested in shopping with coupons.
Strengthen your branding so people start searching for coupons related to your brand. A search query like "Coupons for..." returns many results and give us an idea about the coupons the customers are most interested.
8. Prepare For Seasonal Fluctuations in Advance
Seasonal fluctuations are one of the major factors that play a role in taking conversions up and down.
You should prepare for seasonal fluctuations in advance because a little delay might cause a major dropdown a revenue.
(To learn how and when to start seasonal SEO, read this)
9. Don't Return Empty Search Result
Some e-commerce sites return an empty search result for site search queries. This is one of the biggest mistakes that can cost damage worth thousands of dollars. The site search option is the most used option by the customers on any e-commerce site.
"0 Results" pages are not only a money losers; they're a drain on your Google crawl budget.
Instead, create a page which returns helpful alternatives and suggestions for other searches or categories.
10. Add A "What's New" Category
Surveys show that stores that have a "What's New" category generate more sales as compared to those who don't have. So, it is strongly recommended to have a new products category so that it becomes easier for the user to locate the new products that were just added on the site.
Hope you get an idea here as to how you can easily increase the sales of your Ecommerce website. Remember, having a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is the first thing to have because customers are attracted towards it. Once you have your USP all the above listed strategies will revolve around that.
Do you have any special Ecommerce marketing strategy that you has given you some extraordinary results? Please share with us in the comments below.
First … Why are you letting GoogleBot access your internal Search Result pages?
Ideally, your “normal” search URLs should be blocked.
Google generally doesn’t want to point searchers to another page of search results (normally!).
What you can do (as there are some benefits, if done well/right), is have things like “latest searches” and “popular searches” pages (and/or a block of such links on your main pages).
Other ideas?
1) Free Shipping (still a killer!)
2) Multi-buy discounts (BOGOF/BT-CF etc.)
3) Minimum Spend discounts
4) Popular/Recent Searches pages (or blocks)
5) Clearance page(s)
6) Coming Soon / Product pre-launch pages
7) Down-sell (often replica/compatible products have more margin – so point to the cheaper ones as well as up-selling)
8) Credit for spend (give 5% credit/store voucher if they spend X amount – increase purchase value, and get repeat custom/loyalty)
9) Offers/Discounts page (run specials every week/fortnight/month)
10) Advanced offers (reward members with advanced access to upcoming offers – increase loyalty)
More advanced ideas include …
a) Monitor your Internal Search – popular searches should be on your homepage
b) Checkout offers – get your cart to show a couple of very related products (such as batteries for electronic toys, or leather cleaning stuff when they buy a leather sofa).
c) Reminder – it’s a little creepy – but if you track sessions – you can point to things they looked at earlier but didn’t put in the basket.
There’s more than a few tips/tricks to be picked up from actual shops. Saves re-inventing the commerce-wheel 😀