Lesson 6: Best practices on how to boost sales of your e-commerce store

By: e-Commerce Coach / e-Commerce / Comments Off

Every business’s main goal is to add value to the world by satisfying the customer’s needs. Satisfying their needs allow the company to earn money and scale up the business. It does not matter if you produce excellent quality goods or you offer top-tier services at a certain moment; you will need to boost your sales to cover your operational costs, scale up and increase your revenue. Sales are the core element of any business. Without it, it cannot thrive or – in most cases, even exist. The same logic applies to eCommerce. You can’t just set up a new website and expect traffic to appear and explode with new orders. You need to spread the word about your brand and ensure your customers’ shopping experience is safe and enjoyable. There are plenty of ways to boost your sales, and this article will show you some of them.

Table of contents Contents:

Build Brand Awareness
Analyze and learn from your biggest competitors
Analyze the customers
Boost the conversion rate of your shop
Run a promotion
Offer an Entry-Level Product

1. Build Brand Awareness

Surely you have heard about a brand’s awareness and the power of recognizability it brings. Some companies have created it to such an extent that in customers’ minds, it is almost synonymous with a particular type of product or service. We first associate hamburgers with McDonald’s, dandruff shampoo is primarily Head & Shoulders, fried chicken with KFC, and the energy drink is Red Bull. These products have many counterparts from other brands, but the strongest or most popular and recognizable ones dominate customers’ minds.

The brand makes it easier to communicate with customers – with the help of establishing the marketing campaign and implementing the catchphrases used in slang to show visual identity in the form of a product or logo. A uniform, clear message is created, which channels and addresses specific emotions among customers. With branding, you can create an image that will directly reach a specific group of consumers and convince them that YOURS can meet their needs, for example, in terms of excellent customer service or providing the highest quality products.

Thanks to such actions, consumers undoubtedly associate with the brand; they will distinguish it from the competition when it comes and gets used to it. It will boost trust and loyalty among people. It can easily convert into additional benefits – customers who feel a bond with a given brand will recommend it to others, strengthening the sales effect.

Key takeaways:

Create Quality Content: Great brands do not only sell their products. They also educate their customers
Engage with Your Customers: Reply to comments on social media and your blog, and make customers feel involved in your business.

2. Analyze and learn from your biggest competitors

To run a successful eCommerce business, you first need to understand your chosen industry and where you stand in it. However, it is difficult to do this without comparing yourself to the competition, so regular monitoring is necessary. One of the most successful options is to check out the competition before starting your own business because it will give you an idea of what to expect when entering a particular industry. Further monitoring will help you to be aware of the current situation, react to the actions of other entrepreneurs and adapt to dynamic changes in eCommerce.

To make the analysis of competition effective, it is worth thinking about what we want to achieve thanks to it. At first, tracking the competition allows you to recognize the biggest rivals in the industry and treat them as a kind of reference point. You can also analyze new companies, examine their market potential, and see if they pose a potential threat to your business. Observing the competition is also a space for development and continuous learning. By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of other companies, we can learn what actions to avoid and which ones are beneficial to the business. All this makes it easier to plan future moves and strategies for further action. An equally important reason for monitoring the competition is the ability to react quickly to their actions and adapt to changes in the market. If someone is already widely recognizable and has considerable sales volume, learn from him. Learning from eCommerce professionals and veterans will quickly tweak up your sales and boost them.

Key takeaways:

Find bestselling eCommerce stores in your branch and learn from them
Check out the business moves of the competition regularly to follow the newest trends

3. Analyze the customers

The goal of every e-shop is an effective sale. Effective (completed transaction) distribution results from planned and consistent actions. It is not a secret that it is an advanced process that requires certain knowledge. One of the most important elements is the analysis of the user behaviour of our e-shop, obtaining the most useful data and their conversion. A good seller carefully explores, observes, draws correct conclusions, and uses them to increase sales indicators. Analysis of consumer behaviour is one of the most strategic factors supporting sales in the eCommerce sector. Careful analysis and monitoring of a user’s behaviour on the site will accurately show us his preferences. Observation of activity on the site will show us the user’s motivations during online shopping, even in real time. It will allow us to know and properly diagnose the most popular products and services we offer. We will quickly discover the customer’s preferences regarding the payment model or the form and cost of delivery, and we will be able to adjust them to our sales model, increasing the sales volume.

The data must be analyzed extensively from scratch and be the process that is fully oriented on positive user experience. A consistent analysis of user behaviour on the site will effectively help us in possible optimization for increasing the value of the shopping cart. Even after the abandonment of the purchase, or abandonment of the shopping cart, we have analytical tools at our disposal, thanks to which we can take action to motivate the user to return and make a transaction.

Key takeaways:

Invest in marketing analysis so that you can collect data about your customers
Use the data not only to boost up the positive markers but also to diminish the negative ones

4. Boost the conversion rate of your shop

E-Commerce conversion is one of the most important factors in analyzing the profitability of online stores. It shows what percentage of users who visited our site made a purchase. If the percentage of sessions on the store was 1000, of which 100 placed the order and completed the checkout, then the conversion rate is equal to 5%. When analyzing the conversion in the online store, we must be aware that the average conversion rate is different for each industry.

There is no single, proven method for conversion rate optimization. Depending on the problem, a tailor-made solution should be used. Let’s take a look at an example: an online store sells furniture at competitive prices. Internet users visit the site and click on the menu, which ends their interaction. What problems can occur on this website? The menu with product categories is too extensive. Customers can’t find their way around it, so they leave the site. The solution to increasing conversion is simple – rebuild the product category menu. As eCommerce owners, we need to create landing pages tailored to selected target groups to achieve a specific goal, such as selling a selected product category, finding, and creating content that attracts users to the site and placing call-to-action buttons in visible places. All these strategies will eventually skyrocket your sales volume.

Key takeaways:

Create an attractive site look and category
Create attractive content associated with the website (blogs, ads, social campaigns etc.).

5. Run a promotion

Store shelves are overloaded with goods, and the Internet offers unique products on the spot. A wide range of products makes it increasingly difficult to make a purchase decision, and the modern consumer does have a hard start in choosing a proper product. Everyday sellers use various incentives to make each basket’s value as high as possible. Here are some of the most popular and effective mechanisms to stimulate the overall sales rate. Promotion, reduction, bargain discount – this is by far every shopper’s favourite set of words. The reaction of the human mind to discount labels can be astonishing. Goods that no one has even looked at before suddenly become incredibly attractive, and not buying at a better price is even treated as a sign of inconsideration and mismanagement. Most stores regularly “clean out” their warehouses by organizing their customers’ spring, summer, autumn, and winter sales. Alongside these, the eagerly awaited Black Friday is also celebrating its triumphs, and it is breaking the record of total commerce volume every year. Although the price difference is often insignificant, the magic of discounts always attracts attention, and, most importantly, the buyer’s wallet. In addition to labelling products as “sale”, “promotion”, and “%”, are also increasingly deciding to create a separate “sale” tab, which is a universal mastermind of incentives for shoppers and is mostly visited by them at first glance. Think about it. Do you know anyone who does not like discounts?

Key takeaways:

Tag products with labels like “sale”, “promotion”, and “%”.
Create a separate tab that plays the role of the sale section.
Add a field in the shopping cart which enables you to enter and use a discount code.

6. Offer an Entry-Level Product

If you sell a product that nobody knows about or comes at a premium price point, adding an entry-level product to your range might be a good idea. An entry-level product is something that helps the customer get accustomed to or even excited with your brand and shop. At the same time, it is not too expensive to not keep the customer too overwhelmed with a price tag. It has to be something small. Entry-level products are always placed under the average price point. That means if your Average Product Price is 100€, your entry-level product should cost less than 100€. Ideal if its price is situated under 50€. Similarly, if your average price point is 10€, the product should cost less than 10€, ideally less than 5€. Secondly, try not to make your entry-level products regular items on sale. It will make your entry clients special as they need to get to know your brand and get accustomed to it. Your entry-level product shouldn’t require a lot of thought. It should create a simple transition to becoming your customer. When you acquire new clients that way, it will significantly boost your sales—simple, non-bundled items which do not require complicated explanations to work and get satisfaction from it. You want shoppers to actually buy your product; you don’t want to force someone’s purchase because of a forceful, unnatural urge they’ll regret later. Just a little nudge to get someone who’s going to buy anyway but will do it right now.

Key takeaways:

Offer cheaper incentive products to acquire new customers and, therefore, boost your sales
Offer simple products(or samples) for a less price than the average price of your product
Create a non-aggressive feeling of urgency when offering entry-level products