In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 50 percent over the next four years, reaching about 7.4 trillion dollars by 2025.
Growing an eCommerce business and increasing sales can be challenging. It is a long-term game that requires a lot of knowledge, strategy, and hard work to become successful.
The good news is that you can do things as an entrepreneur that will help you grow your eCommerce business and increase sales a bit faster than your competitors.
Are you stuck on how to grow your eCommerce business? You may be optimizing and trying everything, but you still can't find ways to increase sales and create a steady, continuous stream of revenue.
If you are doing business online, you must consider growing your eCommerce sales constantly. In the current competitive scenario, there is no room for stagnation.
You have to keep trying new strategies and tactics to grow your business to attract new customers.
SPD Group’s ecommerce development services experience has also given us one more valuable ability - the ability to get extremely large-scale eCommerce development projects on the right track and ensure their positive target outcomes.
How to Grow eCommerce Business and Increase Sales?
There are two ways for an e-commerce business to grow:
- Increase the number of customers
- Increase the average order value
Increasing the number of customers is usually a more expensive option. It requires acquiring more traffic, which can lead to higher marketing costs. Eventually, you will reach a point where it becomes difficult to scale.
On the other hand, increasing the average order value (AOV) can be done without a significant increase in marketing expenses. By optimizing your website and improving your customer experience, you can increase conversion rates and shopper engagement, thus increasing AOV. This has a positive impact on your bottom line.
Here are some tips on how you can improve your website and boost sales:
1. Build your brand awareness
If people don't know about your eCommerce business, they won't buy from you. Your potential customers must be aware of your brand, products, or services before they will be ready to make a purchase.
There are several ways to build your brand awareness and reach more people.
Start by completing an SEO audit of your website. Make sure that all of your pages are optimized for search engines so that you can rank higher on Google. The higher you rank in the search results, the more people see your site when searching for specific keywords.
Use social media to reach more people online and grow your brand awareness.
Create a Facebook page, Twitter account, and Instagram profile for your business. Share photos, videos, and news about your products or services on social media to grow your following and reach new people online.
You can also write guest blog posts for other websites related to your topic and get links back to your site from those articles. This is called guest blogging or guest posting, and it helps boost your site's authority in Google's eyes. The best part is that it helps drive traffic back to your site from other sites.
2. Build an email list
Source: HostGator
In the current e-commerce landscape, building a massive following on social media is not enough to grow. To grow your e-commerce business, you need an email list.
Building an email list will allow you to capture leads and follow up with them in the future. Then when you release new products or have special promotions, you can quickly alert your subscribers - resulting in more sales!
How do you build an email list? It's elementary, but it does require a bit of planning and implementation. Here are the steps:
1) Install an email marketing platform (such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber).
2) Create engaging content that people will want to sign up for (such as a free eBook or neat infographic). You can later use this content for marketing automation, social media ads, webinars, and other strategies.
3) Embed your signup form on the key pages of your website.
4) Drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into subscribers.
You can increase your email list by creating reasonable offers and then using other traffic channels to funnel those prospects to your website so they can sign up for your offer.
You can also use social media, Facebook ads, Google Adwords, search engine optimization, etc., to drive traffic to your offer so that you can grow your email list.
3. Have a good cloud infrastructure
The first step is to ensure that you have a robust cloud infrastructure in place.
The cloud consultant can help you manage your business operations, data, and customer interactions more efficiently. It is also essential to guarantee your hybrid cloud security.
In addition to being more reliable than traditional platforms, cloud-based platforms also offer more features than ever before. For example, prior to the cloud adaptation, Black Friday used to be the most difficult day for eCommerce store owners as they struggled to keep their store up & running with sudden high moments of visitors.
Now, cloud features like Autoscaling are helping e-commerce sites manage their sudden flow of traffic, more effectively. Which means less downtime and more sales.
As a part of cloud infrastructure managed services, your MCSP sets up your cloud infrastructure. The service provider helps align your cloud network operations to your business needs, regularly updates and monitors the state of your cloud environment, and reports back to you.
4. Meet your customers where they are
You may have the best eCommerce products, but you won't make any sales if you can't get them to visit your site.
One of the ways to meet your customers where they are is by connecting with other brands in a mutually beneficial partnership.
There are some established magazines open to accepting mutually beneficial deals.
This review post on the best hybrid mattress is published in a magazine, HealthyAmericans, where people of similar interests look for the same product. By doing this, you can increase the chance a visitor converts into your customer. Another tactic is to reach out to influencers and offer them a product sample to review.
Another tactic is to reach out to influencers and offer them a product sample to review.
You can also meet your audience on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Two features will help you reach more potential customers:
- Facebook retargeting ads. These are the ads for products people were browsing on your website that follow them around the web (and even on Facebook).
- Instagram shopping ads. You can now tag products in Instagram photos and create links to your product pages right in the app.
Some people are more comfortable talking to someone over the phone than shopping online, so consider setting up a customer service phone line where they can call in and speak with a representative.
If possible, hire someone who has experience as a customer service representative at another company before taking on this role yourself.
5. Collect reviews and feedback
Source: BBC
Reviews are an essential part of selling online, not just for the eCommerce owner but also for the customers. They help build trust among your buyers as it increases the reliability of your business.
Here are a few tips for collecting reviews:
1) Send out emails to ask your customers for reviews when they receive their orders.
2) You can also incentivize your customers to leave a review or feedback by offering them a discount on their next purchase.
3) Use a third-party review collection tool like Trustpilot and PowerReviews to collect reviews from your customers.
Not only do reviews build trust and confidence in your brand, but they also help customers make purchase decisions.
Encourage your customers to leave feedback about their experience with your company. I mean, you can offer them a discount on that.
Collecting reviews and feedback from real customers helps you show social proof and increase the credibility of your eCommerce business.
6. Optimize your website for mobile
Having an optimized, mobile-friendly website is just as important as having robust cloud infrastructure in place.
You need to optimize your website to load quickly on both desktop and mobile devices. You can use services like Pingdom to check how fast your website loads.
In addition to optimizing for speed, you must also make sure your website is easy to navigate through from any device.
If a user lands on your website from their smartphone and finds it hard to navigate or adds a product to their cart but can't figure out how to checkout, they'll leave. And most likely never return to purchase from you again.
To avoid this from happening, you should test your website's usability from multiple devices.
There are two ways to go about it:
- Responsive design is used when a single URL and HTML respond to the user's behavior based on screen size, platform, and orientation. It uses CSS3 media queries to change the CSS rules depending on the screen size.
- Mobile sites are entirely separate from their desktop counterparts and have different URLs. This is an alternative to responsive web design because it allows for creating different websites for different devices. To achieve this, you can consider hiring a dedicated developer from their website. This approach offers more flexibility in design but can be a bit more complicated for a developer.
There is no absolute answer to this question because it depends on what you want your mobile website to look like in the end and how much you want to spend on it.
There is one particular thing, though - you need a mobile-friendly website. You cannot rely only on desktops since over 50% of all eCommerce purchases are made using mobile devices.
7. Display social proof & security proof on your website
Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.
When customers decide whether or not to buy from your store, they'll often look at what others have experienced with your brand.
Social proof can be implemented through product reviews, testimonials, and even celebrity endorsements. If customers see that others love your product or service, they'll be more likely to buy it too — they want to experience the same thing as before.
Social proof is one method of gaining trust that you can't afford to ignore.
Security proof is the idea that your website is safe and secure from hackers. It will help avoid potential customers from abandoning their websites out of concern for the safety of their financial information.
The best way to gain your customers' trust is to display the necessary proof on your website. This will show visitors that you're reliable and trustworthy, thus making them more likely to buy from you.
8. Continuous A/B testing
Source: InVision
A/B testing is the process of creating two versions of your website and changing one key element on each page to see which change leads to more conversions. If you want to grow your eCommerce business and increase sales, you absolutely must take the A/B test.
For example, let's say you have a landing page where users sign up for a free trial of your product.
You have a "Start Trial" button that says "Start Free Trial" in purple text. In your A/B test, you create a new page variation with a button that says "Start Now" instead.
Now 50% of visitors see the first page with the purple "Start Free Trial" button, and 50% see the second version with the grey "Start Now" button.
If one version gets more signups than the other version, you know which control is better and should be kept as the permanent call-to-action on your page.
A/B testing is a user experience research methodology.
The process starts with identifying what you want to improve.
Do you want to increase your conversion rate? Are you looking to reduce shopping cart abandonment?
Then choose a metric that you wish to measure due to the test. It can be anything from several clicks, revenue, sessions, or transactions.
Wrapping Up
People don't see the face of your business, and they don't see a great design. They look at word-of-mouth, social media, Facebook, or any other channel. They know what they are looking for the bottom line.
Make your experience worth knowing, sharing, and talking about. That's how you get referred to new customers.
The key here is making each of your customers' shopping experiences unique. This means profiling their behavior and understanding what works best for them.
In doing so, you can use the knowledge you garner to tailor your checkout process, pricing pages, and email campaigns in a way that has proven most effective with past customers.
Doing so will help improve conversion and retention rates, contributing to more robust sales in the long run.
