How to make an online business successful
31/03/2021
How Magenta helps our Communities!
13/05/2021
How to boost your ecommerce sales
Starting an ecommerce business is tricky enough, but maintaining and growing it can be even harder. In an effort to boost your ecommerce sales there are many things you can try, from upping your digital marketing spend to launching new products. Whether you’re struggling to grow but get steady traffic or you’ve plateaued after a period of growth, never fear! Here are some tips to help you boost your ecommerce sales and grow your business!
Put your customer first
The customer might not always be right but they’re very definitely the people you need to please. Whilst onboarding new customers is vitally important, ensuring your customers keep coming back means you’ll always have people buying your products. The good news is that it’s much easier to retain customers and bring them back in than it is to attract entirely new customers.
Existing customers are just better, hands down. On average they spend more money and grant your site more sales conversions, as well as being easier to sell to and being more likely to spend big money with your business over the holidays.
Developing a relationship with these customers is vital. Email them. Give them deals. Let them in on new releases. Give them coupons or offers on their birthday. Identify best sellers and highlight them on site. All these things (as well as ensuring your customer service is top notch and personable) will help you retain customers so you never have to worry about your revenue stream.
Encouraging these customers to leave reviews is also vital. Positive customer reviews can help boost ecommerce sales and conversion rates by anywhere between 14 and 76%.
Expand your product offering
If you’re not selling any products, it’s time to consider expanding your business in an effort to boost your ecommerce sales. Whilst it’s not as simple as snapping your fingers and having a whole line of new products, it’s definitely important to put the work in.
This is especially true for sellers who make high value items that a customer will only need one or two of. If you don’t find a way to refresh your product and make it worth buying again, you’ll be losing the ability to sell to returning customers. It’s also essential for sellers in clothing or shoes, where styles come in and out of fashion quickly and trends need to be followed.
If you’re worried about launching new products and nervous you won’t get it right, do some market research. This could take the form of surveying your existing audience, checking out your competitors, or paying a survey service to survey your chosen sample of the population.
It doesn’t have to be as pricey or complicated as this however. You could do something as simple as publishing product pages with pre-sell buttons, or list the new items as “out of stock”, with a “Notify me when it’s back” button. This way you can collect market information about people directly interested in your product offering and figure out how new products will perform.
Invest in digital marketing
Having a good handle on the digital side of marketing is vital for ecommerce businesses. Whilst you don’t necessarily need to pour a large budget into an agency or expensive B2B software, it can help prompt a huge upswing in sales. With a good SEO, PPC and content team (either within your business or externally) or the perfect software you could grow your business in ways you may struggle to do alone.
The importance of figuring out how to make digital marketing work for you can’t be overstated. It’s definitely possible to get a handle on digital marketing alone if you’ve got the time, even if you can’t spend a lot of cash. Taking a couple of courses on basic SEO and content marketing can be a great place to start and will definitely pay off.
Get social
Mastering your social media is also an important step on the road to boost your ecommerce sales. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, and Twitter provide you with great conversion opportunities (depending on your audience). To top this off, 75% of users take some kind of action after seeing product posts (according to Hootsuite). It’s also important to explore influencer opportunities. Influencer marketing (from micro-bloggers to big-name celebrities) is a great way to bring extra traffic to your store.
Don’t underestimate the importance of curating your accounts. This is especially important during high volume time periods like Christmas and Black Friday. This will help you continue to connect with your audience whilst reaching new leads every day.
Consider office and storage spaces
Whether your ecommerce business is run by just you or by you and a huge team, staying on top of your orders and customer service is vital in order to get new and repeat customers. If you don’t have an office space or a place to store your records and stock, growth and expansion can get very tricky very quickly. Give yourself room to grow by investing in office space or business storage.
Here at Magenta Storage, we offer flexible options for working from our office spaces and storage options to suit you. Give your business the space it needs to grow and boost your ecommerce sales!
For more tips for online business success, check out our blog post ‘How to make an online business successful’here.