As an e-commerce business, you want more traffic and sales for your store. But there are more effective ways to improve sales other than testing strategies with A / B testing or adding CTA (Call To Action) buttons.
Here are 6 high-impact ways to improve sales at your e-commerce small business.
- Create an email newsletter
One of the best places to start, having a weekly or monthly newsletter that your customers receive into their inbox is one of the marketing tools.
It opens opportunities to insert links to your website which means more traffic for your business. In fact, research has shown that marketing by email has the highest conversion rate (66%) in terms of purchasing (compared to other social channels).
- Offer Card Based Installments
One of the most effective ways to improve sales for your e-commerce small business is to offer clients easier payment methods and solutions that actually work. When customers are faced with the high price of a product, they’re more likely to turn away.
Offering smaller, more manageable monthly installments brings results; Glasses USA for example, improved their sales by 12% in less than a year by offering card based installments. Giving customers an option to pay in this more affordable way draws them in to the product since they will have to part with a smaller amount over an extended period of time.
- Showcase the products’ features
Whilst this may seem obvious, doing it in the correct way will do wonders for your business. Using Amazon-style key points to highlight features of your product engages visitors to the site and makes it more likely that they will actually make a purchase.
As well as finding the right way to describe each product, ensure that the content is relevant and noticeable. Writing the key features immediately next to or underneath a photo of the product is a good way to ensure the information isn’t being missed.
- Instill a sense of urgency
Offering sales and discounts is all part of running an e-commerce business, and is an especially good strategy for getting rid of older stock, but add to that a sense of urgency and you’ll have a winning formula.
Giving your sale or promotions a deadline, or even highlighting a limited edition item, gives customers a sense of urgency that if they don’t make a purchase by a specific time they will miss out. And since it is within our nature to have a fear of missing out, customers will quickly move from simply placing things in their basket, to actually reaching the checkout page.
- It’s all in the upsell
This one is so effective that many non e-commerce businesses use this technique. Upselling involves offering a customer a more expensive item than they are about to purchase.
And since customers often aren’t aware of other products that are available, this strategy has proven to be more effective; twenty times more effective to be precise. As long as the upsell is related to the product and is within the general price range of the original product, customers are more likely to buy.
- Offer free shipping
One of the most common reasons customers abandon their shopping carts is the high shipping costs. After spending a large sum of money on a high quality product, customers don’t like paying for something they can get for free.
Offering free shipping for basket sums over a certain amount means they are more likely to find another product to add to their basket in order to reach the threshold for free shipping.
Implementing these strategies will not only increase sales, but will likely bring more traffic to your site too. And by putting the customers first, you ensure that they are satisfied, which means translates to loyalty to the company and repeated business.
by Michael Avni – CMO of Splitit, is an internet marketing veteran with 15 years of experience in online strategy, traffic optimization, user acquisition and social media.
