The question that we face each day regarding sale volume is whether it is at all plausible to increase sales by about 30% without spending on extra plug-ins and SEO enhancing add-ons. There’s always a chance that you did not optimize your conversion funnel which means you are currently spending more on acquiring a customer that you should.
1. Let them talk
It might come as a surprise to many start-ups, but user generated content like reviews and discussion forums can help boost your sales in many different ways. Most importantly, they help in boosting your websites SEO. They will guide more visitors and potential customers to your website through SERPs.
It is always an option to monitor your reviews so as to filter out the less popular ones. But if you have unique products on your inventory, you should not have to worry about the “bad press”. In this regard, you can always opt for different free plug-ins which will readily convert your website product pages into evolving pages, complete with reviews. Even better if you can employ plug-ins which allow review sharing on popular social networking sites. You can also create Fan-pages where people can talk about your products and services.
2. Trust on innovative landing page content
When you check out popular ecommerce websites the landing page always stand out. Give your customers a glimpse of the bold statement, innovation in products and trustworthy after-sales support through your landing page. Select bold and yet elegant, responsive landing pages for your ecommerce websites. It is important to play attention to every detail while designing your landing page especially for mobile app version of your ecommerce store.
3. Give them a slight nudge
Shopping cart abandonment is a glaring problem among the ecommerce stores. It has been shown by various studies that automatically generated shopping cart abandonment emails propel customers to go back to your website. This is a very effective way to generate highest return on investment.
The most important feature of these shopping cart emails which push your potential customers to become buyers include, a visual representation of the products they had abandoned, special shipment deals which include immediate and minimal cost shipping.
The most important feature is a link to a similar section of the product inventory which holds the products which might be an alternative to what the customers have abandoned in their shopping carts.
All you will require for this is contact forms which request customers to sign up once and sign in every time they log into their website accounts. Some shopping cart plug-ins already has these features while other require some free add-ons to facilitate shopping cart abandonment emails.
4. Targeted advertisement
This is technically not stalking, however if you have noticed the trends of ecommerce adverts on your Facebook page you will notice that they mainly comprise of websites you have visited or would live up to your taste. This is called Retargeting, more like wherever you go, the ads seem to follow. This is something followed by prominent ecommerce sites like Amazon, Staples and even Etsy.
This is a cost effective way to maximize your sales, be it for a small business or a large one.
5. Turn your home page into recommendation page for returning customers
This is actually one of the best ways to make your customers feel that you know what they need. Instead of a generic home page, once your customers are logged in, you can present them with a suggestion page which contains items arrayed according to their last searches or buys. This requires little configuration but nonetheless helps boost your sales by at least a whopping 20%.
6. Social sharing and the herding tendency
As you have seen, most people love aping the successful decisions of their friends and family; why not put that to your advantage? You can start simply. Just put out a list of people who your current visitor might know who have liked your website or a particular product. In this regard, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter help you a great deal.
7. Be known by your logo
Check out the collection of logos here; you can link all of them to their store/brand names. This is the effect your logo should have on your potential customers as well. Your logo should be an insignia, a mark of your identity which brings about trust and conveys a message about the quality of your products.
8. Offer a slice of your products and services first
It is like good appetizer in a gourmet restaurant; let your customers sample a bit of your products first and then ask them to sign up. Just like popular websites like Quora or Pinterest; where you get to read a few threads and posts and then they block you from reading on and ask you to sign in or sign up.
This has an added advantage, since you provide your email info this becomes easier for the plug-ins to send the shopping cart abandonment emails once you sign out leaving products in your cart.
9. Make your website feather light
Most potential shoppers want to check out as many products as possible within a limited time, they do not want to wait till your pages load. So it is advisable to keep your WebPages informative, lively, interactive and yet feather-light so that your customers can browse, add and buy items while on the run. eBay is one of the ecommerce websites which is known for its lightning fast loading speed.
Now you can get it too, but do not worry, you do not need to pay a dime for increasing your site speed. Google PageSpeed is one application which helps you decrease your load time.
10. Pay more attention to website designs and pageflow in general
Just making your landing page attractive is not at all enough. Your entire website needs to have a smooth, user friendly and yet stylish design. Most important and yet overlooked component of ecommerce stores is their color, this actually plays a huge part in customer decision making within first 2 seconds.
All your pages should have options of multiple grid layouts, including product thumbnails with “add to wishlist” or “buy now” options. You cart should be auto-updatable with one step checkout options. Always have an option of 24×7 customer support or at least a mail id where your customers can send their queries and complains to you. To keep the interactions even stronger, go with online chats which let your customers talk to customer care executives exclusively during certain hours. In fact, companies like Amazon are well known world-over for their excellent customer care service and the friendly behavior of the staff on the other end of the line has actually helped in boosting positive reviews and sales by at least 30%.
Most importantly, keep up-to-date with your online traffic. All the 10 methods which have been mentioned here may not be equally fruitful for everyone at every situation. So before going with these changes you should check out case studies which show a correlation of these steps with changes in web traffic and customer sales.
