8 E-commerce Strategies to Help Drive Sales
The ultimate goal of any business is to make sales. Making sales an integral aspect of any business that wants to grow. The e-commerce landscape is an extremely competitive one; both small to large businesses are competing for the same online space. If your business is looking for ways to spike sales and remain afloat, with the help of a digital marketing agency, you can implement these eight e-commerce strategies to help drive sales
Develop awareness for the brand
Branding is an integral aspect of any new or existing business. E-commerce websites need to develop strategies to keep reminding the public, both those that know them and those that don’t, about the uniqueness of the brand, services or products they offer. Gaining your customer’s loyalty is one of the cheapest ways to create awareness for your brand because the satisfied and loyal customers would be the ones talking about it to others through every means possible.
Other ways to create brand awareness is to advertise. E-commerce websites can take advantage of affordable advertising platforms like Facebook and Instagram and other mobile advertising platforms for their brand awareness campaigns. The logic here that the more exposure the brand gets the faster website visitors will become good leads, and convert to long term customers.
Market new and existing products
Email marketing is no doubt one of the most effective means to drive sales for e-commerce websites. It is said that email marketing accounts for about 23% of sales for most e-commerce websites. Which means that regularly creating and sending out timely personalized emails can increase sales.
The first and crucial goal of email marketing is to build trust between the e-commerce website and the new or existing customers. Trust is an important part of any emotional buying process. People will only buy from brands that they trust. That’s why every e-commerce website should make use of emails to build that trust in order to gain loyal customers who would keep buying from you.
Give coupons, discounts and offers
Giving out coupons, discounts or offers is one of the ways e-commerce websites can persuade people to buy from them. Over the years, it has proven to be a very great tool for spiking up sales. It can also be used to show appreciation to loyal customers or brand followers. You can give special discounts to email subscribers, to those following your page on social media, to those who download and use your app. You can even provide discounts or offers on special days of the year like Valentine’s Day or special holidays like Easter, Christmas, as well as other celebrated days like Halloween. You can also participate in popular retailer discount periods like Black Friday, new year sales, Cyber Monday deals and so on.
Understand your customers’ shopping behavior and preferences
Knowing your customers, who they are, and why they behave the way they do on your website can help e-commerce websites increase sales. If you know who you are selling to, it becomes a lot easier to sell absolutely anything to that person. E-commerce websites need to see things from the point of view of the buyer or customer to know what to say to convince them to buy. Imagine trying to sell a cheap sports car to someone who needs a family car urgently. Of course that will not sell, not because they are not offering a good product at an affordable price, but because they are selling a good product offer to the wrong customer which equals to no sales.
Make use of influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a booming trend for e-commerce websites looking to drive more sales. And there are quite a number of influencers today that businesses can work with to increase their sales. Influencers are people who have built themselves in a niche over a period of time and have gained considerable followership that is influenced by what that individual does. The implication of this is that such followers are likely to accept whatever the individual talks about because he or she has grown to be a recognizable authority in that niche. These are the people that can talk about an e-commerce brand and influence their followers to buy from them. However, the tricky part about this is finding the right influencers that have real influence over their followers not just accumulating followings for the sake of profits.
Eliminate rigorous buying processes
A lot of online shoppers are quickly discouraged from completing the buying process due to the rigorous process involved in making an online purchase. One of which is registering before completing an order. It is understandable why e-commerce websites need to do this, for data collection, but there should be other ways around it.
Secondly is the speed of the site in the shopping cart area or checkout area. If the website takes a long time to open in these key points of purchase, the business is going to be losing a lot of potential customers. Pop-ups and overlays are to be completely eliminated in these areas as well. Make it easy for shoppers to find what they are looking for by creating simple and easy to locate navigation columns or tools that are well optimized for mobile view too.
Be strategic about marketing efforts
Marketing is an integral aspect that should be strategically done. A lot of time and resources would be invested into the different marketing platforms that you want to explore, so it is advisable to be very strategic about it in order to get the desired sales target. Work with data extracted from your website’s analytics to understand who your customers are and how they behave. This will guide every aspect of the marketing campaign.
Create effective landing pages
Taking advantage of your website’s landing pages can improve sales. Every landing page must communicate clearly and quickly with visitors and must be inspiring enough to appeal to their emotion and make them take an action that could generate leads or sales.