You’ve put in so much work to build up your business. You’ve spent hours refining your products and your sales approach. You’ve invested your energy into offering the best products you possibly can.
But you aren’t seeing the results you imagined. Your sales are down and your stress levels are up. It’s time for a change: it’s time to think about what exactly you can do to increase your sales online.
There are many resources available with lots of suggestions about how to make this happen. We’re going to take that information and distill it down to seven important things you can do that will boost your online sales. You’ll need to focus on:
- your product quality and your bestsellers
- how to upsell and cross sell your products
- offering fewer but better choices
- your CTA and remarketing campaigns
Once you have a strong understanding of these concepts, you’ll be able to optimize your online store to boost your product sales.
Improve your Product Images
Product images make a major impact on your potential customer’s perception of you. If your product images are grainy, contain distracting backgrounds, or don’t showcase all features of the product, then you have a problem. Your product images have to shine if you want to attract customers. Make sure that you include different angles, and if possible, include 360 degree views and videos of the product.
Focus on Market Upsells
When you upsell a product, you offer an upgraded version of it or you direct the customer to a page with a more expensive version of that product. Contact your web developer and ask them to add a section in your product page for listing upsells. Or, depending on the eCommerce platform that you use, you might be able to add a plugin like Product Upsell by Shopify or Also Bought by Open Cart that will automatically tie the regular products to the upsells for you.
Add Remarketing to Your Digital Campaign
Remarketing is an important way to remind potential customers of your great products. When a customer interacts with your app, adds products to their shopping cart, but doesn’t buy those products, the data of what they added is sent to Facebook (or whichever social media platform you are paying for advertising on). Then, Facebook will generate a remarketing banner ad that contains the items that they viewed in your app. The banner ad will prompt the user to return to your app and purchase your product. Remarketing is a fantastic way to keep your products at the forefront of your potential customers’ minds.
Focus on Market Cross sells
Cross selling is the practice of offering accessories or related items to the item that your customer is viewing. For instance, if you’re offering a bracelet, a cross-sell might be matching earrings and a matching necklace. Cross selling is not as easy to do as upselling, but it’s possible and follows a similar process.
Fortunately, there are plugins that will do the cross selling for you, such as Cross-Sell by Shopify, AutoResponder Max by Volusion, and Cross Selling on Cart by Prestashop. By influencing your customer to purchase those related items, you will boost your online sales revenue.
Promote Your Best Selling Products
Your best-selling products are bestsellers for a reason. You need to find out what those products are (which can be done through Google Analytics) and promote them. There’s a reason why your customers like those products. Analyze them more closely to discover what it is that’s so appealing.
You can even survey your customers and ask for feedback. Then, once you have enough information, develop similar products with those features that you identified were the best and promote those, too, to increase our sales revenue.
Experiment with Your CTA
Your call to action is an invaluable part of your marketing campaign. By using a plugin like Optimizely, you can experiment with different CTAs to see what generates the most clicks. Change the color. Change the wording. Change the placement.
Just make sure you track what changes you’ve made and the results of each. Optimizely will help you by developing an A/B test. Run that test for at least two weeks, and then analyze the results.
Offer Fewer Choices
In psychology, it’s called “analysis paralysis.” In eCommerce, it’s called a disaster. When you offer your customers fewer choices at first, you relieve some of the anxiety that comes with being overwhelmed by so many different options.
When people feel overwhelmed by too many choices, they experience that “paralysis” which leads them to abandoning their carts. Don’t let this happen to you. Instead, offer just a few categories of products, and then offer more categories within each. That way, you help customers find exactly what they’re looking for.
In Conclusion
By improving your product images, focusing on upsells, adding remarketing to your digital campaigns, focusing on cross-sells, promoting your bestsellers, experimenting with your CTA, and offering fewer choices, you can increase your online sales. eCommerce is an extremely important revenue stream now, and it’s important that you do everything you can to improve your online store.