Grow Your Sales Online: An Updated Guide for Beginners

Today, we’re going to revisit an old topic with some fresh new insight. Running your own eCommerce site is quite challenging when first starting. The entire point of an eCommerce store is to make sales and boost revenue. Besides having quality products that people want to purchase, you want to ensure you pay attention to the finer details.

But after you’ve assembled your primary marketing strategy, how do you decide which tactics will give you the best results?

A good website, excellent customer service, fast load times, great product descriptions, and paying attention to your user experience all aid in providing multiple avenues for sales growth. Let’s get into some more of the nitty-gritty with six ways you can start boosting your eCommerce sales.

Sell on Social Media

44.8% of all internet users search for information related to a brand on social media platforms. That makes up for a massive segment of the total population. Hence, if you use social media as one of your marketing channels, your chances of reaching your prospects are pretty bright.

But there are dozens of social media applications out there. That does not mean starting a profile on each one of them. You can narrow it down to the platforms where you can find your ideal customer profiles in the majority. Consider Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Pinterest.

Here is how you can use social media channels for your marketing campaigns:

• Build brand awareness: All big brands take their social media presence seriously because it helps build their understanding and trust among their customers.

• Paid advertising: Yes, this article is about free marketing tactics, but if you are willing to put in a few extra bucks, social media paid ads can boost your reach.

• Connecting with your customers: You can find new customers and reach out to older ones by engaging in comments underneath your post. Also, social media reviews are excellent at bringing you new prospects.

• Facebook store: With Bookmark, you can set up a Facebook store and start your business with billions of users.

The bottom line: No marketer in his right mind would miss out on the benefits of marketing through social media platforms. They are practical and pretty much free!

No Cart Left Behind

Simplify checkouts

Less is more. This is especially true when it comes to online checkouts. Don’t make people create an account on your website, often they’ll just decide to shop somewhere else. Instead, offer a checkout where they can simply log in with one of their many social accounts. This makes your customers only one click away from checking out.

Abandoned Cart Emails

Some people may have decided that they don’t want to purchase your product at that exact moment. But, still haven’t given up on the idea of getting it eventually. Abandoned cart emails are an amazing way to entice them into finally making that purchase. You can set them up to reach out to people who left things in their cart. Also, you remind them that their purchase can still be made.

Get this.. Bookmark has an Abandoned Cart Saver available for anyone who sells their products or services online. This means that anytime somebody abandons a cart on your online store, you can set up an automatic email that gets sent directly to that customer reminding them to revisit their order. It’s a simple solution that saves you time that you can spend building your business!

Offer discounts

Consider giving seasonal offers – think when people are most likely to buy your products. Many businesses offer discounts near the Christmas holidays because that is when you can expect the most sales.

Similarly, you can bundle up two or more of your products that are usually bought together—for instance, a rain boot and an umbrella. You can check data from your Shopify store to determine the combinations that customers prefer.

But giving away a discount that no one knows about won’t do you any good. Advertising your offers over the internet is one way to ensure it catches the public’s eyes. According to a study in the Netherlands, 40% of consumers look for discounts on online platforms and eCommerce websites.

Here are a few ways discounts can benefit your business:

• Meet sales goals: Are your sales turning a bit sluggish? A deal is an apt tactic to jazz things up.

• Attract new customers: What attracts customers more than slashed-down prices?

• Advertising your business: Offering discounts invokes conversation about your business among customers. Hence, marketing your company for free!

Nurture Your Leads

We now have our customers on your site. Woohoo! Now we need to get their contact information to communicate to them as a future lead. This simply can be an email list to inform your customers of updates, promotions and deals.

When it comes to leads, every customer is different – some like emailing, others prefer calls, and nowadays, there are even people that prefer texts. And they are all just as valuable as the other. You just need their info! That’s why you need to make your form as simple as possible, and if you can, have a small contact form on each page of your site.

It’s not always guaranteed that you will get a sale the first time someone visits your site, but the chances are higher if you email them a discount code for their first purchase.

Bundle Products

There is another popular selling technique known as bundling. Bundling is the offspring of cross-selling and upselling. You bundle together the main product and other auxiliary products for a higher price than the single products sold alone.

Bundling is also quite often used along with a discount to increase the perceived value of the offering.

Pure Bundling is when products are made available only in bundles and cannot be bought individually. Mixed Bundling is when both options (individual buy and bundle buy) are made available.

Remember… Learn From Others

Nowadays, it’s less about doing it first than doing it right! So less focus on coming up with the best new things and more on what our competitors are doing and learn from them! Do your homework! Visit their sites, see what they do, and do it. Here are a couple purchase strategies with low ecommerce penetration that you may not be fully leveraging.

Acquisitions

Most retailers lack in-house expertise and the keys to online success, such as online marketing and personalization. Yet, they are not using the benefits of digital fundamental and pure-play online companies to address these capability gaps.

Distributed Commerce

Here’s another way to increase a retailer’s online presence. It can enable retailers to shorten the sales funnel by allowing transactions to be completed on third-party platforms. Distributed commerce can be achieved through several customer experience enhancements, such as one-click purchasing and voice ordering through smart speakers.

Improving online presence may require an integrated approach that combines leading practices across products, skills and profitability dimensions.

Key Takeaways

eCommerce sales have become a vital part of business over the past decade. And I’m not even touching on the global upheaval resulting from COVID-19. Even with that aside, eCommerce has become an even more significant part of the retail business. Taking you through six fundamental tools, you can now practice to improve your online presence and drive growth. Start with these, and you are good to go!

And don’t forget that Bookmark has everything you need to get started.

It’s that time to sign off, and I hope you come back next week for our next blog to help upgrade you and your website.