Wherever your eCommerce business is, either just starting out, along the path of growth or well established, increasing your sales volumes is always of upmost priority. If you are here, you have probably ironed out and finessed your branding of your business and website, and may have even already secured a fulfilment partner, like UK Fulfilment, to store and process your customer orders seamlessly. But increasing sales is always on any businesses' agenda, and here are some tips to maximise your sales or customer acquisition:
1. Define Your Demographic
It may seem simple and straight forward from the outside to know who your target audience are market are for your business model, but it is much trickier than in may appear. One of the key mistakes new eCommerce business owners make is casting their sales and marketing net too wide and attempt to sell everything to everyone. In a saturated online marketplace, a targeted approach and specificity is key. You need to research and find out who exactly your customers and ideal audience are, start with these simple components:
Gender
Age
Location
Ethnicity
Income
Education Level
Family Composition
Interests
Shopping Behaviours
Motivations
Pain Points
If your not just starting out, then it is easy to find this information through reviewing your past sales, and see which characteristics your current customer already possess and then target specifically them. Or if you are just starting out, take time in your market research and begin with a potential competitor and see what audiences they are attracting and how.
Once you have identified your customer’s persona, you can then target your ideal audience much more effectively and make the most out of personalising your customer’s shopping experience to tailor it to your ideal customer demographic.
2. Expand Your Sales Channels
When it comes to the game of eCommerce, it is never a good idea to limit yourself and be reliant on a single sales avenue. There are numerous benefits to diversifying your sales avenues, and using multiple channels through either marketplaces like Amazon, Magento and Shopify, or through your website, every channel is another weapon to your sales arsenal. If you want to read more about the benefits of omni-channel eCommerce you can here.
3. Optimise and Clean Up the Design of Your Website
In today’s world, having a dated website with slow loading times, hard to find shopping carts and poor product photos is the same as having a shabby uncared-for store front. Both of which have a negative impact on your customer experience and ultimately your sales. If you want to know more about how to improve your customer’s experience you can find out more here.
4. Create Unique & Interesting Content For Your Customers
When it comes to content it has a variety of lanes from pictures to videos to podcasts and even blogs like this and utilising as many of this content avenues as possible will benefit your brand and give it a strong online presence with more visibility to your customers. Content creation can be timely and take a lot of skill along with the pain of coming up with new ideas, but if it is done right it can do wonders for your business.
5. Get Help with Your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
We all know the higher your business ranks on a search engine like Google or Bing the more traffic your website will get, and more traffic, as long as you have a good product, will translate to more sales. Nowadays it is very hard depending what industry you are in to rank at the top on search engines, but you want to maximise your ranking if possible. This can be done through website improvements and the input of popular key words, along with consistent creation of creative materials, which together will help you move your business up the rankings.
6. Utilise Social Media
Social media is key in a busy online marketplace to not only keep up with your customers and building a bigger online presence, but ultimately it is the number one tool for customer acquisition for an eCommerce brand or business. Social media utilised with unique content can be a valuable marketing tool for your business, and again the more social media avenues you use the better from Facebook to Instagram to TikTok to Pinterest all will add to obtaining different eyeballs looking at your business.
7. Gain Your Customers Trust
Attracting your customers to make a purchase is not only about getting them to your website and having good products, it also is dependant on the trust your customers have with your brand or business. That is where reviews come in, the more positive reviews you have from your customers or clients the better, and even more important is to limit your negative reviews, as 1 negative review can offset 10 positive ones. Utilising third party review sites like Trustpilot can also assist in building the trust between your website and your customers. If your customers have trust in your brand, you will see an increase in sales.
8. Giveaways
Everyone loves a freebie, not only are they good for more customer attention and a great marketing tool, they are also a good way of getting rid of any surplus non-moving stock which your business may have.
9. Paid Ads
Whilst paid ads can be tricky to get right, expensive and time-consuming, if you have a budget for it they can be an extremely good tool for increasing your traffic and your sales. Using a variety of platforms for social media ads is the best way to get the most eyeballs on your business as not all of your customers will use the same avenues. While organic efforts are good there is ultimately no better way than paid ads to get eyes on your business.
