Since the advent of COVID-19 prompted customers to start shopping online, many of them are now loyal online shoppers, accelerating the growth of e-commerce. In fact, figures shared by Statista showed that the global e-commerce market is projected to grow by more than 56% and reach about US$8.1 trillion by 2026, reflecting exciting opportunities for aspiring or new e-commerce business owners to tap into.
However, with the equally intense competition in the market, it is easy to feel intimidated as to how to grow your business and stay ahead of the competition. Fortunately, with a solid plan and simple yet effective sales strategies and marketing tips, you can increase sales and create a thriving e-commerce business. Here, we dive into some tactics to help you get started.
How to increase sales: tips for e-commerce businesses
1. Leverage customer reviews and ratings
As humans, it's natural for us to look to others for validation when making decisions. This makes user reviews a powerful marketing tool for businesses to increase their e-commerce sales. As a form of social proof, they reassure potential customers that a brand can deliver on its promises. By instilling confidence in consumers, e-commerce businesses can effectively persuade them to purchase.
When gathering testimonials, monitoring social media mentions and taking advantage of them to promote your business is an excellent way to get started. Leveraging tools like Hootsuite and Facebook Insights can help you to stay informed. If you plan to use a review, remember to seek permission from the content owner before featuring them on your website.
Tip: To ensure that your customer reviews help, strategically place them in a prominent place, such as the product page. It's also crucial to make it easy or rewarding for customers to leave reviews and ratings, as this increases the likelihood that they will do so.
2. Optimise your product listings
A "Best-selling items" badge is another effective social proof to capture customers’ attention and increase sales for your e-commerce business. For customers who are hesitant about making the online purchase, the "best-selling" status can provide the extra push they need to add the product to complete the order.
With increasingly shorter attention spans, you only have eight seconds to catch a consumer’s attention with your marketing efforts, as found by Entrepreneur. To increase the likelihood of a customer clicking on your listing, keep your product title catchy, concise, and relevant to what customers are searching for.
Including high-quality product images are also ideal as they enhance a customer's understanding and persuade them to choose your offerings over others. However, do optimise your photos’ sizes to avoid long page loading times that encourage customers to leave your site.
Tip: To effectively showcase your best sellers, you can prominently display it on your product pages or create a dedicated section on your homepage.
3. Offer competitive pricing and promotions
Everyone loves a good deal. And running a promotion is a sure-fire way to grab attention, boost your e-commerce sales and acquire new customers. However, frequent discounts can dilute the brand and even encourage existing customers to postpone their purchase until the next discount. As such, having a calculated strategy is crucial, and here are some tips to help you with drafting your pricing and promotion mechanisms:
Duration: It is recommended to limit the duration of your online promotions and time them based on periods where e-commerce traffic and purchase intention are high.
Targeting: When reaching out to the overseas market, you can tailor your pricing based on regions to avoid losing leads due to changes in pricing after accounting for factors like tax rates.
4. Optimise for mobile and social
The importance of mobile in e-commerce has been steadily increasing, 45% of global consumers using their phones to make online purchases, as discovered in a survey by YouGov. Notably, 82% of respondents reported buying a product using their mobile phone after seeing it on social media in a study by Influencer Marketing Factory.
Clearly, mobile and social are becoming dominant channels to facilitate and increase online sales conversion, making it essential for e-commerce businesses to focus on optimising content for these platforms. For example, you will want to avoid chunky paragraphs and have a readable font size. Incorporating your social media handles on your website, using aesthetically pleasing photos and writing snappy, attention-grabbing copies also ensure your content is optimised for social media sharing.
Tip: If you’re unsure how to identify if your e-commerce platform is optimised for mobile devices, you can run a quick test on Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.
5. Monitor and analyse your performance
With an e-commerce marketing and sales strategy and an optimised website, monitoring your business and making tweaks is crucial to maintaining good performance. However, the engagement metrics to track will vary depending on which stage of the sales funnel you're focusing on. For instance, during the conversion phase, metrics such as cart abandonment and average order value will be more essential than metrics like impressions and reach, which are better suited for the awareness phase.
If cart abandonment is a significant concern, hidden extra costs are one of the top reasons identified by FinancesOnline’s study. As such, addressing this concern will require you to increase the transparency of your e-commerce site. One way is to make all cost information, such as shipping fees and taxes, readily available or incorporated into your product prices. Where possible, you can also try to minimise these extra costs to reduce their impact on customers.
Tip: Regardless of the stage you’re targeting, considering the entire customer lifecycle as part of your strategy can help you better identify areas for improvement.
Boost your sales now
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or looking to take your e-commerce business to the next level, simply familiarise yourself with the sales and marketing strategies above, put them into action, identify what works best, and voila! You have the answer for how to increase sales for your online store.
