How to Increase Ecommerce Sales: 12 Proven Tips & Strategies to Try

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Online sales are skyrocketing, and now more than ever, there are far more eCommerce stores than ever before. Today, eCommerce is now a vital part of the online ecosystem and lead funnel. Nasdaq reported that by 2040, as much as 95% of shopping would be facilitated by eCommerce.

This is good news because it means that there’s a space for growth. It’s also bad news because it’s a highly competitive marketer with many competitors regardless of your industry. In fact, research shows that an estimation of 80-97% of eCommerce businesses fail.

Having an eCommerce store isn’t what it seems if you’re not too careful; you might just become another statistic. Instead, here are some ways you can increase eCommerce sales and take your business to the next level.


1. Invest in Advanced Google Ads

What are Google Adwords, and why are they so essential in increasing eCommerce sales for your business?

Google Ads are ads created with keywords and a tailored audience and once published showcased on Google platforms like advertisements that appear on other websites through the Display Network and Google’s AdSense program, whether locally or globally.

Google ads are so effective that:

  • 63% of people say they would click on a paid ad in Google search results
  • 55% of people who click on Google Search Network ads prefer the network’s text ads
  • 49% of people click on text ads
  • 91% is the average click-through rate (CTR) for the Google Search Network

When you’re creating Google Ads, you have to consider some factors: if you can afford it?

Google Ads is highly effective, but it’s also a pay to play platform that thrives off massive ad budgets. Unlike Facebook and Instagram ads that you can run for less than $100 for you to start seeing results, Google Ads requires far more. For more on what kind of Google ads you should use or how to create a budget for Google ads, check out WordStream’s guide,
Google Ads: What Are Google Ads & How Do They Work?

2. Push More Facebook & Instagram Retargeting Ads

Facebook and Instagram retargeting ads can help you to increase eCommerce sales because you’re strategically placing ads in front of potential customers who’ve already interacted with your eCommerce store, so they’re fairly familiar with you.

Social Media Retargeting ads allows you to show ads exclusively to people who’ve already visited your website but have not converted (meaning they haven’t made a purchase).

By adding a simple tracking pixel to your website, you can follow these lost visitors with ads across the web, even though they may be completely anonymous to you.

For example, if you decided that you’d like to shop for some beauty items for your next holiday gift and visited Nordstrom’s website, then for some reason, you let it without making a purchase.

A few hours later, while you’re on Facebook scrolling through you’re feed, you’ll notice this ad below, retargeting you and reminding you to make a purchase based on the items you were interested in buying earlier. This is how retargeting works and why it works so well.

Maximize your ads for remarketing with Wishpond’s all-in-one marketing tools. Click here to get started.

3. Make Your Checkout Process Easier

Next to increasing sales is preventing shopping cart abandonment. This is where people visit your eCommerce store, add items to their cart, but they never complete a purchase. Shopping cart abandonment is more common than you’d like to think. In fact, seven out of ten visitors leave checkout without buying.

There are a few factors that contribute to this, along with a complicated check out system. Making checkout easier by optimizing this section can help you to prevent more people from leaving. The Good found that if you can boost your checkout completion rate by even five or ten percent, you can make a significant difference in your return on investment.

Whether you’re using an eCommerce store builder or you’re coding your site from scratch, here are some key ways you can optimize your checkout page:

  • Add guest checkout as an option: Some people prefer to be in and out of an eCommerce store without the added step of creating an account, no matter how easy it may be, so give them the option to checkout as a guest. Obtain their email to verify their order so you can hook them in for another purchase where they’ll most likely create an account.
  • Display trust signals throughout the checkout process: Trust is an essential factor in an eCommerce store to be sure to add credit card logos and other trust signals on relevant pages of your checkout process.
  • Keep it simple Less is always more, so be sure to keep your check out page free from clutter. Removed a header or footer, so customers are not easily distracted.
  • Keep the back button fully functional Some people want the option to edit easily, go back and add products to their cart. When you remove the back button or fail to have an edit button, it is more likely to leave the checkout process altogether.

4. Invest in Upselling Features

Upselling features are easily overlooked, but they play a major role in marketing your store and products outside of social media, email marketing, and ads.

Upselling is the art of persuading website visitors to purchase more products than they had initially intended. You can do this by providing bundles, discounts, using FOMO notifications, and personalization to various stages of your eCommerce marketing funnel and pages of your eCommerce store.

Check out SleekNote’s guide: E-Commerce Upselling: How to Increase Your Average Order Value. Plus, here’s a FREE eCommerce Checklist you can use to ensure that your online store is ready to attract and generate sales.

5. A/B Test Your Pop-ups

At Wishpond, we helped increase conversions by up to 33% with the help of a welcome pop-up that’s triggered when a new website visitor lands on your website, it fills the entire page with a specific CTA.

Pop-ups instantly grab your new visitor’s interest, whether they decide to accidentally or intentionally leave your website. This allows you to keep them on your eCommerce site with an irresistible offer or freebie.

Wishpond Pop-Up Example

But like everything on your eCommerce store, you should always take the time to test your eCommerce pop-up to maximize your results. A lot of eCommerce owners create pop-ups with discounts or offers, and years later, the same pop-up is still being used. To ensure that you’re getting the most sales and clicks from your pop-up, it’s good to practice to test your pop-up’s offer, image, copy, timing, and CTA.

Quickly test and create eCommerce pop-ups with Wishpond’s simple drag-and-drop editor, Canvas.

Canvas makes it easy for any marketer to create amazing pop-ups, without the need for design or programming knowledge. Plus, use Wishpond’s Shopify integration to add pop-ups to your eCommerce store. To get started click here

6. Create “Better” Influencer Campaigns

I know that a lot of eCommerce brands are invested in using an influencer, and why not? It works. But only if it’s done right.

Businesses are making $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. The popular misconception most brands have is that once you use an influencer, you’re going to see massive sales and new followers. However, that’s not how it works.

Brands that see influencer marketing results have done the work, proper planning, and built a connection with influencers. So how do you craft an influencer marketing campaign that will help you to increase eCommerce sales?

Here are five things to consider and do when working with influencers:

Reaching Out to the Right Influencer: Don’t be blinded by the fact that most influencers have massive numbers. Ensure that the influencer matches your brand values. You also want to ensure that their followers match your ideal customer persona. It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the level of engagement that comes with the number. This could mean working with nano, micro, and macro infleuncers for your campaign. Branch and Bundle show you how to select influencers and which influencer fits your budget or brand:

Outline What’s Expected: Now that you’ve selected your influencer, don’t leave it up to chance that they’ll provide the content you need. You can either be specific about the type of content (post, stories, videos, or contest) you need from this influencer, or you can give the influencer creative freedom, but they must outline what you’ll be receiving. Some influencers have promotion packages based on cost and the number of followers they’ll promote your brand during the campaign.

Use Multiple Social Media Platforms: Influencer marketing isn’t exclusive to Instagram. Find influencers across the social media platforms that your potential customers are spending most of their time. This could be YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter.

Here are some guidelines on using influencer across social media platforms:

Track the Progress: Always track your influencers’ process so you can know if you need to invest more or find another influencer to work with for your eCommerce store. Without results, you’ll only be working with an influencer for vanity metrics (likes, followers, and shares). You can use influencer marketing apps and platforms to help you to track your influencer ROI in real-time.

Feel free to check out these 15 Influencer Marketing Platforms for Instagram You Need to Try.

Measure, Test, and Repeat: Once you’ve finished your influencer campaign, don’t end it there. Take the time to look over the results, your influencer’s relationship, and then learn from your mistakes. This helps you refine your influencer marketing campaign each time to grow your eCommerce store, push sales, and create an attractive influencer program.

7. Listen to Your Customer & Audience

When you listen to your audience, you can find ways to improve your eCommerce store in ways you may have missed. After all, your customer is your primary users. While you’re stuck on the back end, they can tell you what it’s like on the front end of things.

One way to get customer feedback is to provide a quiz/survey with a reward. This helps to motivate people to provide information and share what they think about your brand.

You can do this by creating a quiz funnel with your email marketing list. A quiz funnel works in much the same way as a regular funnel.
You create a quiz that your target audience would be interested in.
They answer a series of multiple-choice questions.
After answering the questions, they sign up for your email list.

The powerful thing about a quiz funnel is the insights you gain about your audience. You can use information respondents provide to segment people into different groups. You can then send these segments information that would be of interest to them.

Ultimately, by the end of the quiz funnel, you want to get three key pieces of information:

  • The goals of your respondent
  • The problems that they are facing
  • How much money they have to spend

For more, check out How to Use a Quiz Funnel to Grow Your Email List

8. Dive Deep into Analytics

I know that “analytics” sounds like a scary word for eCommerce owners. But using analytics to help to optimize, improve, and edit your store details can make or break your sales. With analytics, you can see real-life data accumulated from customers’ behavior and actions.

If you’re using an eCommerce builder like Shopify or Wix, you get built-in analytics, but only the basics. However, if you need something a bit more detailed, then you’ll need to use software like Google Analytics.

I’ve listed the best step-by-step guides you can use to connect Google Analytics to your e-commerce store. If you have more than one e-commerce store, you choose to link it to one or two different Google Analytics accounts.

For more on how to use Google Analytics for your eCommerce store, check out these step-by-step guides below:

9. Focus More on Existing Customers

There’s a lot of leverage to the bottom line by growing existing customers. According to research undertaken by Bain, increasing customer retention by 5% can impact profitability by between 25% and 95%!

Customer retention is when your existing customers stick with your brand, shop with you consistently, and provide customer loyalty. In eCommerce, we get so excited about getting new customers we forget to give our existing customers the VIP standard.

Existing customers have completed your eCommerce buying stage. Based on their experience, the chances of an existing customer purchasing from you is far more likely than with a new customer who is still going through your buying process.

10. Host a Giveaway

Giveaways are one of the best ways for your eCommerce store to increase sales and boost your brand awareness. A giveaway is not solely about giving free products to someone. It gives your brand the boost it needs to get in front of the right audience, your potential customers.

Brands like Bhu Foods have gained up to 35% in online sales growth by adding giveaways to their social media strategy.

Not to mention Wishpond helped Enigma Fishing to generate almost 3000 leads by using a $150 giveaway to help them earn over $52,000 in sales.

Types of Contest & Methods to Use for Higher Conversions

As contest and giveaway experts, we know what type of contests and promotional methods can help you get the most out of your giveaway. Here is a list of the highest converting contest methods:

  • Sweepstakes: is one of the oldest contest methods to date. Before social media and the internet glued us to our phones, our grandparents entered sweepstakes. Even now, in the digital age, they’re a contest staple to any marketing strategy looking to increase sales and brand recognition.
  • Welcome-Mats: can be a useful lead generation tool for your website. Grab new website visitors’ emails and conversions in an instant. Earlier, we spoke about how to use a welcome mat contest entry method can increase your conversions by 33% when compared to regular pop-up features. You’re putting your contest front, and center before your new website visitor has a chance to be distracted by other shiny things on your blog, giving you the perfect opportunity to increase sign-ups for later use.
  • Bonus Entries: increase the odds of contestants winning your grand prize. No one likes to lose. Maybe this is why this contest method has one of the highest conversion rates. After all, more entries mean more chances to win.
  • Hashtag Contest: has grown in popularity with the rise of Instagram and Twitter. Hashtag contests are relevant and effortless to use/enter. Not only is this a high converting content, but when you incorporate your branded hashtag, you increase your brand’s visibility and social media content.

Need help with your next eCommerce giveaway?

Book a free call to learn how our team of contest experts can help you create high converting social media contest today.

11. Focus More on Your Best Sellers

An eCommerce store has a wide variety of products but only a few best-sellers. Your best-sellers are “best sellers” for a reason.

Customers have selected them as “the go-to” products to buy from your eCommerce brand.

Capitalize on these products by creating a tab on your home page, use them in website pop-ups, or push them in your next email marketing campaign.

Here are some guides that will teach you how to use best-sellers to boost sales:

12. Hire an eCommerce Marketing Expert

Need a hand implementing increasing your eCommerce sales?

Our team of dedicated experts (marketers executives, project managers, ad specialists, designers, and copywriters) will work with you to set up a custom marketing strategy made specifically for your business.

Take the Guesswork Out of Marketing With a Team of Professionals

Your marketing executive will work with you to ensure your campaign is a success. Get unparalleled support 24/7 with access to designers, ads specialists, content writers, and more. Get Started

Summary

The journey to running a successful Shopify store can be hard. But it is possible to obtain enormous growth.

When it comes to having an eCommerce store, you never stop learning. It’s important to keep up to date with new apps, software, features, and techniques, or you’ll get left behind. So today, ensure that you use two or more of these methods to increase your eCommerce sales, but don’t stop there. Take it a step further.

Here’s a quick recap of how to increase eCommerce sales: 12 proven tips & strategies to try :

  1. Invest in Advanced Google Adwords
  2. Push More Facebook & Instagram Ads
  3. Make Your Checkout Process Easier
  4. Invest in Upselling Features
  5. A/B Test Your Pop-ups
  6. Create “Better” Influencer Campaigns
  7. Listen to Your Customer & Audience
  8. Dive Deep into Analytics
  9. Focus More on Existing Customers
  10. Host a Giveaway
  11. Focus More on Your Best Sellers
  12. Hire an eCommerce Marketing Expert

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