Even the best product is not enough to keep your store afloat for long. Unless it’s a unique thing that only you can manufacture (but, even then, sooner or later someone will offer something very similar), you will soon have to face dozens of competitors selling the very same thing.
And this means you must fight hard to convert as many visitors into paying customers as possible. What are some of the most effective ways of boosting your e-commerce sales? Here are our 5 favorite ones.
Strategy 1: Take Care of the Foundations
You’ve got a store, now what? Before you start driving any traffic, take a step back and check if it’s actually ready for your customers to visit it. Already advertising your store? Great – it’s worth seeing if you check all the boxes anyway. Here are 3 core things you should look at – and a reason why taking care about each of them will boost your e-commerce sales:
Fast & Secure Hosting. Running an online store on a buck-per-month package won’t get you far. While you don’t have to spend hundreds on a dev team and a dedicated server when you’re starting out, you should at least invest in a cloud hosting. This is because cloud will provide you with the best price to quality ratio – offering your visitors great user experience, what can increase your conversion rates. Not sure which cloud to choose? Check out the eCommerce ready cloud hosting by Hostinger.
SSL Certificate. An SSL is one of the best ways of securing the data exchanged between your store and your customers. And the best is, it’s one of the things your customers will know about right away – thanks to the little lock in the address bar. This makes them feel safer and more eager to open their wallets and hand you their credit card number.
Source: Amazon.com
404 errors. Ever looked for a product only to come across the scary 404 result page? Doesn’t make the store look professional, does it? Unfortunately, the offer of most online stores changes frequently. To avoid confusing your visitors, ensure that you 301 redirect all the 404 errors to new pages – preferably to ones apologizing them for the lack of product & offering them similar ones. How to find 404s quickly? If your store is built on WordPress, you can use free plugins, such as Broken Links Checker.
Strategy 2: Make Your Store Blazing Fast
If you want to make sales, you can’t give your site visitors even one reason to go elsewhere. The speed affects everything – from your conversion rate to your bounce rate. Naturally, the first thing is to get a quality cloud hosting – already discussed above. But while it’s critical, it’s not the only way in which you can impact the speed of your store.
Other things include optimizing the size of product images (you can use tools such as Kraken or TinyPNG to do that), asking your web host to enable Gzip compression, and minifying HTML, CSS, and JS scripts. If you’re unsure what steps you can take to optimize the speed of your store, scan it using a web performance testing tool such as GTMetrix.
Strategy 3: Remarket to Those Who Left – In All Ways Possible
Even the fastest and most secure store will never achieve a 100% conversion rate. But it’s possible to still sell to some of those who left your store – all it takes is having a way to let them know about your offer. There are plenty of ways in which you could do that – the three most effective include:
Email Marketing List. Ask your visitors to sign up for an email in return for a lead magnet such as a discount coupon. Make sure that your visitors have to confirm their emails – while it reduces the total number of sign-ups, you’ll be sure all those emails are real.
Push Notifications – while email marketing is still effective, another great way of informing those who left your store about
Remarketing and Retargeting Ad Campaigns. Ever visited a store only to see its ads all over the Internet soon after you left? These are remarketing campaigns at its finest. All you need to be able to advertise to those who left your store is a FB or Google Ads pixel installed on your website.
Strategy 4: Give Your Visitors an Option to Contact You in Real Time
Another way in which you can increase the volume of your sales and reduce friction and bounce rate is giving them the answers to their questions as fast as possible. Site visitors don’t just like to wait for your site to load – they hate having to look for answers (or waiting for those) too. Giving them the option to get in touch with you in real time is a great way of improving your customer service score in their eyes too. How to do that?
It’s simple – give them clear ways to contact you – the faster they’ll receive the reply, the better. That’s also what makes online chats so popular. Can’t afford to keep customer representatives online 24/7? Consider switching between a bot chat and real chat. The former, when configured correctly, can be a perfect substitute, able to answer the most common questions.
Strategy 5: Never Engage in Pricing Wars
This strategy is about not doing something. Most business owners think that to compete with other online stores, they should keep cutting down the prices. Sadly, they believe that this will help them attract more customers and profit on the volume. While the former is true, this are rarely the customers you should strive to attract in the first place.
First, they don’t like spending money. This significantly limits the possibility (and profitability) of upsells. Moreover, unless you have very deep pockets, such a strategy can quickly lead to pricing wars, what could (and probably will) kill your business in the long-run.
Luckily, this strategy is also one of the easiest to introduce – just keep in mind that price is the last thing you should resort to when creating your online store strategy. Instead, you should work on improving improve all the aspects that attract customers interested in high-quality UX and great customer service more than the bargains – which were already mentioned in this very article.
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