6 Best eCommerce Strategies to Increase Sales for Your Business
If you’ve dedicated the time to developing a quality product or service and building your eCommerce site, the success of your business still hinges on one critical factor: your ability to make sales. Unfortunately, determining what it takes to drive conversion continues to stump many online retailers. With an innovative business idea, shouldn’t customers be flocking to your site?
In reality, there are other pieces of the puzzle that must be in place to boost sales. From quality customer service to a smooth shopping experience, we’ve demystified the must-have qualities of a magnetic eCommerce site that continues to produce sales. Here are the six best eCommerce strategies to increase sales for your business:
1. Product Recommendations
Personalized product recommendations have multiple benefits: they enhance the buying experience while also supporting upsell opportunities. And, it works on a whopping majority of shoppers: 96% of shoppers believe personalization strengthens the customer/retailer relationship, and 56% are more likely to a return to a site offering personalized recommendations.
Personalizing product recommendations doesn’t have to involve complex algorithms. Simply making relevant recommendations on specific product pages is the “secret” that successful eCommerce giants like Amazon have used for years. While they rely on customer purchasing history to make predictions about what future shoppers might also be interested in, most eCommerce sellers’ inventory is nowhere near as vast. Thus, you don’t have to analyze mountains of data – common sense can go a long way in making effective product recommendations.
2. Follow Ups After Cart Abandonment
For every 100 visitors to your site, 67 of them will abandon their shopping cart. The good news is that 63% of that business can be recovered – but only if you take action. You can draw shoppers back in with a follow-up email: nearly half of all abandoned cart emails are opened, and more than a third of clicks back to sites lead to purchases. You may choose to include incentive such as a discount or free shipping, but most importantly, remind them of what they abandoned. This simple message can elicit the fear of missing out, which can be a compelling driver for making a purchase.
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3. Retargeting
Retargeting is a modern and powerful form of online advertising in which visitors who have left your site can continue to see your brand elsewhere on the web. Using cookie-based technology, this approach keeps your products in front of your bounced traffic. Partnering with platforms like Facebook can be especially effective, as the social media site has more than 2.2 billion active users. You can even optimize your retargeting efforts by segmenting ads for a specific audience. Track your campaign’s progress regularly to see which ads are most effective.
4. Live Chat
In some cases, it could be fear of the unknown that’s holding your customers back from making a purchase. Maybe they need to know the specific measurement of an item but can’t seem to spot the dimensions on your site, or perhaps they’re struggling with finding the field for entering a coupon code. Live chat gives your shoppers instant, personalized service, so their questions can be answered quickly and accurately. Nearly half of shoppers consider the ability to have questions answered by a live person a must-have feature on a website, so consider making this a priority for your eCommerce site.
5. A Speedy Site
Studies show that the average online user only tolerates a load time of 2 seconds – any longer and your customers may grow impatient, leaving your site to visit a competitor’s. Thus, fast, reliable hosting is essential for eCommerce. When every millisecond matters, you’ll need to make sure you’ve invested a high-quality hosting option that can support your full product line, high traffic volumes, and any other factors which could slow your site.
When it comes to speed, another factor to consider is checkout. Using autocomplete plugins to instantly populate fields for customer information and implementing streamlined two-step checkout forms are effective ways to improve checkout conversion rates.
6. An Outstanding Mobile Experience
Most importantly, you must optimize your website for mobile. Roughly a third of your shoppers will abandon a transaction if the shopping cart isn’t optimized for mobile devices, and 25% of all global web searchers are performed via mobile. Your site should deliver a flawless shopping experience, no matter how your customers are accessing it. Be sure to test your mobile experience regularly and make any adjustments to enhance it as needed.
The ability to drive conversion is ultimately the most important element of your business’s success, so while implementing these eCommerce tactics may require a bit of an investment of your resources, they’ll prove to be worthwhile when your sales begin to increase.
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