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Increasing your online sales is the goal of every eCommerce store, it doesn’t matter if you have just launched or if you are running a multi-million dollar business. Sales growth is always one of your top priorities.

Are you struggling to see the growth that you were hoping for, maybe your sales have reached a plateau?

Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Increasing your sales is not easy, otherwise, you would have even greater competition!

There’s no magic to easily boost your sales.

If you’re a new store owner, don’t worry if you don’t have visitors on your site. It may take a while to get people to a point where they spend money to purchase from your site. According to Shopify, on average, you may take 20 days to get your first sale.

But there are methods and ideas that have been proven to increase sales for others. Take a look below as we list 19 simple (and actionable) ways to increase your sales online.

Let’s get started now.

1) Add product videos to your site

Video is becoming a must-have aspect of any eCommerce store. The trend has been driven primarily by Social Media, but now the video is becoming the defacto expectation among consumers.

Videos are a great way to explain the features of a product. When a customer watches a video that shows the product he intends to buy, he will get a clear picture of the product and its function.

Did you know?

Including product videos on your website can increase the chance of a purchase by 144 percent. But we know that every WooCommerce store owner may not be able to create videos for each product. If that’s the case, you can create videos only for your most popular products.

The next question is:

Where to put videos? The obvious answer is, of course, the website! But here’s another stat that you should look at:

Incorporating video in emails can drive click-through rates up by as much as 300 percent,

Are you wondering how you can create a video for your WooCommerce store?

Well, you don’t necessarily need a fully-fledged professional team to make videos. You can make use of your smartphone camera to shoot videos. In fact videos like this can be seen to be more authentic, especially to a generation used to watching amateur videos on social media.

2) Ensure authenticity in your sales copy

How to increase online sales

As ecommerce store owners, we all want to drive more business. But it should not come at the cost of your business’ authenticity.

Did you know?

Customers identify authenticity as one of the top qualities that attract them to a brand. So, be authentic when you write sales copies for your ecommerce store.

Never make claims that you can’t substantiate. Because it affects your reputation. It is good to inform the customers about relevant offers, slashed prices and other benefits, but don’t go overboard and make spammy statements to attract customers. Believe me, they can sense something dodgy very quickly!

In the sales copy, all you have to do is to address your potential customers’ needs in a captivating way. Acknowledge the customer’s needs and desires and focus on how your products benefit them.

3) Provide a money-back guarantee

How to increase online sales

A money-back guarantee is an assurance that you will give a full or partial refund if a customer is not satisfied with your product.

Why it matters?

Online business does not allow customers to “touch and feel” what they are buying. So you must give something additional to persuade them, build trust and in the process, increase your sales.

According to QuickSprout, one of their sellers increased his revenue by 6.4% by simply providing a money-back guarantee.

Your customers may deeply interested in a product, but lack of a money-back guarantee might refrain them from making a purchase. This might be the small encouragement they need to proceed to checkout. In my opinion, a money-back guarantee is a great way to encourage your customers towards completing a purchase.

Besides, it helps build trust.

You vouch for the product when you provide a money-back guarantee, it shows you care for your customers, which indeed increases a customer’s confidence in your product and our brand. The benefit of the money-back guarantee is that customers get a chance to actually try your products. It reduces the risk for the customer.

But:

While providing a money-back guarantee you must make sure that it does not hurt your business. You can stipulate that the customer can avail of a money-back guarantee only if they meet certain conditions. For instance, you can stipulate that the product must be intact and should be returned within a specified time to get a refund.

 

4) Take your business to social media

How to increase online sales

Want to connect your business with millions of users? Go to social media!

Did you know?

30% of online shoppers are likely to make a purchase from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat or Twitter. There about 1.45 billion daily active social media users across the globe. Imagine the power of that audience. Imagine what they can do to your business. Promote your products in a social media space where your audience engages the most.

Moreover, you can explore new avenues like influencer marketing where you partner with a social media influencer (ideally, a person with a good number of followers and relevant to your target audience) to promote your products.

The influencers can recommend your product to their audience. Influencer marketing works well as 23% of online shoppers are influenced by social media recommendations.

Here’s a fact:

On average, a person spends 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media per day. Be it scrolling down the never-ending stuff on Facebook feed or perfecting the Instagram selfie.

Where to put your money?

There are a lot of social media platforms today. At first sight, you might feel everywhere is ideal for your marketing. But you have to tread carefully as the platform you use will depend on your target audience. Facebook is always a popular choice. Want to know why?

Because 85% of orders from social media sites come from Facebook.

What about Instagram?

Instagram is much beyond the stylish selfies and hashtags when it comes to social media marketing. There are over 500,000 businesses that use Instagram as an advertising platform.

But:

A mere presence on social media will not increase your online sales. You have to build an audience by creating quality content related to your business. Whatever you churn out on your social media accounts – be it ads or posts- it should be useful or informing content for your potential customers.

5) Social proof

How to increase your sales online

We already mentioned the word Trust – building trust in you and your products must be a key part of your mission. When considering a product your customers will look for the feedback of your previous customers to assess the quality of your products.

Social proof comes to your rescue here. It adds to the credibility of your business. So gather Social Proof and show it off!

Let your visitors know that you can be trusted. Social proof has immense power to drive your business.

Want to know why?

Nearly 70% of online users look at social proof before making a purchase. That is, if they want to buy a product, they will skim through reviews of previous customers.

Social proof can come from:

Customers: The review of customers who have already made a purchase from your eCommerce store can help those who want to buy from your site.

Friends: Your friends’ words matter. Probably they can give you the best and honest feedback about your product.

Celebrities: A social proof from a celebrity or public figure can easily persuade a lot of customers to buy your product.

Experts: An expert review adds to the credibility of your products. Expert reviews give detailed feedback on the product and highlight its positive and negative aspects.

For example, an expert review of a smartphone will give your customers many specific reasons to buy, or not buy a phone.

6) Provide hassle-free checkout

 

How to increase online sales

Last week, I was searching for running shoes online. After hours of surfing through the internet, I found a good pair of running shoes at quite a reasonable price on a website.

I picked my variant and tried to check out. Then this happened: The checkout wasn’t that easy. They asked me to sign up to proceed. I gave up!

The result?

I lost a beautiful pair of shoes

And most importantly:

They lost a potential customer who was on the verge of making a purchase!

So, here’s the deal:

Make the checkout process as easy as possible. Because it gives a hassle-free experience for customers. Reduce friction in the checkout process, provide guest checkout option for customers.

Apple Pay is a good choice for WooCommerce store owners. 

Did you know?

34% of customers in the US abandon the cart because the site wanted them to create a new account to complete a purchase.

Isn’t it alarming?

Focus on your customers. Think from their perspective and offer checkout options that they would love.

Hassle-free customer experience is crucial in every business. Because 86% of buyers will be ready to buy more for better customer experience. By 2020, customer experience is going to be the key brand differentiator.

That is, even your product may be less important than your customer experience!

Don’t force customers to sign up before a purchase, I can totally understand that you need their emails for remarketing and expanding your mail list. But you can still ask them to sign up after completing a purchase, right? Increasing your online sales involves you taking a look at your site from the customer perspective.

7) Create a sense of urgency

How to increase online sales

Creating a sense of urgency is a well-proven tactic to increase online sales. It plays on the FOMO fear that resides in all of us!

How do you do that?

Just make some small tweaks on your marketing copy or CTA.

For example, you can just add a Limited Period Offer tag to your products. When you set a deadline for your discounts, people are more likely to make a purchase. If you ask me, I would grab a product if I get it for a jaw-dropping deal!

The idea is to make your customers feel its’ a NOW OR NEVER thing.

Here some good strategies to create urgency:

  • Limit your discounts to a FIRST few customers

Tell people the discounts are applicable only to the first 100 customers.

But the offer should be exciting.

  • Limit your stock

Another strategy worth considering is offering a limited stock of products.

You can just say “1000 sold, 100 more remaining” or “ Stock limited to 1000 units” when you sell a product.

  • Add low-stock warning to Shopping Cart

Online shoppers may not buy a product instantly. Sometimes they make the buying decision only after considering a few more options.

I have the habit of stuffing my cart with products that I wish to buy. Too often a customer would do it in the hope of coming back later to place the order.

But you can make them place their order faster!

How?

Just create a sense of urgency in the cart. FOMO is real :).

  • Provide FREE gifts for First few customers

Who would not love free gifts?

Offer free gifts to the first 100 customers when they purchase from your site.

This strategy makes your customers feel privileged. Plus, you will get to know who your loyal customers are.

For example, if you’re running a smartphone store, you can give free accessories to the first 100 customers who buy the latest smartphones.

  • Show when your sales end

Let your customers know when the sale ends. The magic lies in the way you tell it.

The flash sales that you see on some websites use this strategy well.

They launch FLASH SALE of a product at a particular time and subtly inform their customers that the product will be gone in a flash if they don’t place the order on time.

You can set up a huge countdown that shows how many hours, minutes and seconds are left before the sale concludes.

Did you know?

A recent study shows that having a countdown timer alone on your website can increase your sales.

When your customers see a big countdown on your website, they are constantly reminded of the “urgency” factor.

They would be like:

“I should make the purchase right away before the time runs out!”

8) Optimize your email receipts

Have you ever thought about how you could use your email receipts or order confirmations to boost sales?

This is an area that we often forget. In my opinion, everything you send to your customers contains an opportunity for marketing. Consider email receipts as yet another effective way to drive sales. If you’re not optimizing your email receipts, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to increase the sales of your eCommerce store.

How you can optimize email receipts?

Provide additional value to your customers:

Give them a coupon to get a discount on the next purchase. A coupon can help you get repeat customers as it encourages people to make more purchases in the future.

Here’s why you should add incentives like coupons to your email receipt.

On average, a new online customer spends $24.50, compared to $52.50 for a repeat customer. Or you can just add a couple of recommended products. According to a Harris Poll online survey, 80% of consumers like when retailers’ emails contain recommended products based on previous purchases.

 

9) Try sending “Wishlist On Sale” emails

How to increase online sales

Wishlists are a great way to allow a customer to save items for future purchase. It’s essentially a “buy” signal that you should make use of. When a customer intends to buy a product in the future, he or she adds it to the wishlist. Now it’s up to you to make them buy it.

How can you make a customer buy a product in his wishlist?

One of the strategies that can really work here is putting the products in the Wishlist on Sale and then informing your customers that the products in their wishlist are now reduced in price!

If these products are popular, how about a small tweak in your email? Let your customers know when the products in their wishlist are going out to be out of stock or stock quantity is low! So you piqued their interest, plus you told them NOW is the best time to click that “BUY” button!

Favorite product + Best price + Limited stocks!

Wouldn’t that tempt your customers?

Also, you can notify the customers when a product in their wish list is back in stock and persuade them to buy it

If that does not work, here’s another thing you can try:

Just show them how many people have added a product to their wishlist. Show a number.

Let’s just say:

If the product is in the wish list of more than 100 people, it may increase the confidence in your product. The basic thing you are doing here is to send your customers reminders of the products in their wish list and create a sense of Urgency to purchase (Point 7 Above!).

10) Revamp your website

How to increase online sales

The design of your website matters big time.

Did you know?

38% of people would stop visiting a website if its layout or content is unattractive.

Here’s another important stat that you should look at:

48% of people think the website design is the crucial factor that decides the credibility of a business.

Think like a customer and analyze your website. Does your website actually attract customers to make a purchase? Or does it badly need any improvement? Ask yourself these questions and improve your website’s design accordingly.

Make your website as user-friendly as possible. Moreover, the performance of your website is very important. Make sure it works well on mobile devices and loads quickly.

Why you should build a mobile-friendly website? Because 62% of companies increased their sales by designing responsive mobile platforms for their websites.

Here are some quick tips to improve your website design:

  • Declutter the website for faster loading
  • Use colors sparingly and sensibly
  • Follow a visual hierarchy to show the content clearly
  • Add high definition and large pictures to feature products
    Simplify navigation

11) Advertise on Facebook

How to increase online sales

Whether your business is B2B or B2C, Facebook is a great platform to find new customers.

Did you know?

Over 6 million businesses use Facebook advertisements to reach their target audience. Here’s a strong reason why you should do Facebook ads:

69% of all adults in the United States use Facebook. It simply means you can easily find your target audience among Facebook users. Moreover, about 74% of users visit Facebook every day. Facebook advertising provides a lot of cool options to target your audience. That is, you can specify who can see your ad. You can set up a Facebook advertisement within your budget and show it to the relevant audience. If you advertise your eCommerce store well using this platform it can considerably increase your online sales.

12) Upselling

How to increase online sales

Upselling is a great way to push your eCommerce store’s business.

Some of you might be thinking, What exactly is upselling?

It is the practice of encouraging customers to buy a comparatively high-end product than the one they are actually planning to buy. At the core, upselling is all about pushing more business in one go. How do you do upselling in a profitable way?

Offer a cheaper option and grab the attention of customers. Then provide them with better and more expensive options.

Look at this example:

If you’re selling men’s socks, your easiest upsell could be a pack of three or four.

So you’re adding value to customers white still not hurting your business.

Here’s an important thing to remember when you plan to upsell:

When you’re giving two options to customers, ensure the more expensive option is packed well with benefits. That is, the customer should immediately be able to pick the higher option.

13) Match your landing page copy to your ad copy

How to increase online sales

If you’re running paid ad campaigns to bag customers for your WooCommerce store, you should always create landing page content in line with your ad copy.

The content on your landing page and ad should match. What happens if you promote something through ads and offer something slightle different on your landing page?

You’re likely to get a higher bounce rate, plus if you are using Google, you will get a lower quality score and thus more expensive ads.

As an online store owner, you don’t want that to happen.

Apart from the message match, you should also consider the layout and color scheme of your landing page and ads.

You can try using a similar color scheme and layout for your landing page and ad copy. It helps people identify your brand’s visual image and message without any confusion.

14) Retarget your customers through ads

Sometimes visitors come to your eCommerce store and leave without making a purchase.

Retargeting helps you bring back those customers.

How does retargeting work?

A visitor might have performed a series of actions on your website. For instance, if you are selling running shoes, they might have looked at a handful of running shoes on your site before leaving.

Retargeted ads help you reach those customers as soon as they leave your website.

How?

Suppose a visitor closed your website after looking for a pair of shoes and then logged into Facebook.

Using retargeted ads you can show him the products that he searched on your site and encourage them to make a purchase.

So a retargeted ad basically follows non-buying website visitors and tries to bring them back to make a purchase.

15) Offer free service/ products

Who doesn’t love free stuff?

Giveaway as much as you can to grab your customer’s attention.

This works really well when you execute it with a strategy.

For instance, if you’re into a software business, allow people to use a free trial version for a month. This fulfils a number of goals, it gives the customer the chance to try your product, but more importantly, it builds trust with the user, you are no longer an unknown entity. Once the trial period is over, many customers will be more likely to purchase your product.

If you have a product category to sell, provide free shipping to as many products as you can.

This encourages people to buy from your site.

Do you know?

60% of online shoppers abandon their carts because of unexpected extra costs (Baymard Institute).

A lion’s share of these unexpected costs come from shipping charges.

So never hesitate to provide shipping to your customers.

16) Reach out to customers with abandoned cart emails

How to increase online sales

It is painful to see your customers abandoning their carts. Cart abandonment hurts your business.

How can you tackle cart abandonment on your site? Reach out to people who abandoned their cart through email. The goal of abandoned cart emails is to turn a visitor who abandoned his cart into a buying customer. Draft a killer cart abandonment email and get them back to your site.

Here’s a reason why abandoned cart emails work:

According to Moosend, abandoned cart emails have an average open rate of 45%.

Abandoned cart email can also bring you more revenue. Because the average revenue of an abandoned cart email is $5.64, compared to only $0.02 for promotional emails, and $0.18 per welcome email. The timing of your emails is also crucial.

Here’ why:

According to SaleCycle, abandoned cart emails sent within 20 Minutes have an average conversion rate of 5.2%.

Emails sent more than 24 hours after cart abandonment only converts at an average of 2.6%. The “sooner the better plan” works well when you draft abandoned cart emails. Always hit your prospect with a well-drafted abandoned cart email to push your business. A good strategy to adopt here is automating your abandoned cart email and schedule it to go within 20 minutes a prospect abandons the cart.

Also,

Always include the cart in the email along with a strong CTA to bring back the prospect to your site.

17) Optimize your site for mobiles

How to increase online sales

With a surge in the number of smartphone users across the globe, mobile optimization is a killer way to help increase the number of online sales from mobile users.

Mobile commerce now accounts for 23% of sales online. That’s a huge figure and the rate is expected to grow in the future. The goal of mobile optimization is to provide a seamless experience for mobile users to use your site. Make it as easy as possible for mobile visitors to make a purchase from your ecommerce store. Because 40% of consumers visit your competitor’s site when they face bad mobile experience with your website.

What are the crucial aspects to look at when you design your mobile-optimized site?

Navigation: Create your website in such a way to facilitate easy navigation. Avoid confusion. Allow people to navigate without any difficulty.

User Experience: Make sure your website provides top-notch user experience for mobile users. Don’t clutter your website with too much information. Just organize the content neatly. Your pages should load almost instantly whenever a customer clicks.

18) Provide different payment options

How to increase online sales

How do you take payment from your customers?

Provide as many payment options as you can on your website. This makes it a lot easier for customers to make a purchase. Look for new payment services that are creating a buzz among mobile users. Apart from providing credit card payments, you can also add wallet payment to your site. Because everyone may not have a credit card to make a purchase.

Besides, 36.3% of customers use digital wallets to pay for what they buy online. It makes wallets the most e-commerce payment method across the globe. If you have heavy mobile traffic, it would be a good idea to include all popular mobile-based payment services on your website.

19) Encourage your customers to post reviews

How to increase online sales

Your objective should not only be to make people buy things from your site. In the long run, it is good to have customer reviews on your website.

In my experience, reviews can make wonders on your website. Always ask your customers for reviews. Publish them under each product.

Let your prospects see honest product reviews. Whenever I make a purchase online I look for reviews. But that’s how I actually get an idea about the product.

A review shows how the product looks in “real”! This gives a lot of confidence to customers.

According to BigCommerce, 77% of customers look at product reviews before they make a purchase.

After a few days of purchase, you can send an email to your customers for a review of the product.

When you ask for a review, the customers feel privileged and they understand that you care about them. Besides, a good review that highlights the pros and cons of a product or service helps you find weak spots in your business.

Summary

Running an ecommerce store is not a piece of cake. You have got to apply different strategies to stay relevant in the game. Increasing your sales over time should be your primary objective. You can apply these strategies to your business to increase sales. Or are there any killer ideas you have been using to boost your sales online. Let us know.