How to Get More Customers and Increase Sales in Ecommerce

Every business owner has to strive to attract more clients to their brand and increase their sales through various means. Unless you do that, your business might slowly start stagnating and eventually die out.

Luckily, there is a number of effective practices and techniques that are considered quite effective in achieving these goals. Here’s how you can attract more customers and accelerate your sales in e-commerce.

1. Offer Security & Safety

One of the biggest turnoffs for customers when it comes to online stores is that some such sites look sketchy and unreliable. Just think of it: if you were in the place of your potential client, would you trust every e-commerce shop you come across? Probably not.

This is exactly why you need to offer security and safety to your customers and ensure that they notice the extra measures you introduced to protect them and their data. Here are some things you can do to improve the reliability of your website:

• Add special codes and plugins on your website that will prevent hackers from breaching your protective wall.
• Move to a URL that starts with “https” rather than “http”.
• Acknowledge the fact that security is a priority for your customers and write as much on your website for your site visitors to see.
• Display security badges that show the trustworthiness of your site.

2. Offer Various Discounts & Promo Codes

You will be surprised by the fact that not that many companies are offering good discounts to their customers. If you start doing it, you will definitely see more satisfaction among your clients and your sales will go up.

If you are worried that you won’t make a profit, you can simply increase the base price of your products and then offer discounts on top of that. Everyone wants to get a good deal, so seeing a discount instantly works positively on them.

As for special promo codes, promotions, and sales, holidays are probably the best time for such things. During these times of the year, people are more likely to spend an extra buck, so promoting your holiday sales is a must for e-commerce businesses. Running regularly giveaways and contests is a fantastic way to acquire more customers offering coupons and promo codes .

3. Demonstrate Your Products

Demonstrating your products is essential for attracting the attention of your target audience. If you don’t show what you have to offer, nobody will be interested in whatever you are trying to sell. This is basic market logic.

In recent years, business owners and marketers have been constantly looking for new ways to demonstrate their products. Here are just some of the techniques you could start using:

• Video Demonstration
  Consumers (and search engines) love video content. If you can create engaging and informative videos that will also be optimized for SEO, you will be able to achieve two goals at once: attract customers and rank higher. Besides, videos have the potential to go viral.
• Augmented Reality Media
  AR and VR have become somewhat of an important part of our lives, but we often go about without realizing it. As business owners or marketers, it can be a great way to demonstrate products by using Augmented Reality technology and surprising your audience this way.
• Interactive Ads
  Even though videos can be as effective as ads, you should not shy away from using the latter ones. In fact, interactive ads can be extremely powerful when it comes to demonstrating all the advantages of your products and increasing customer engagement.

4. Don’t Try to Mislead Your Customers

Many businesses believe that it is absolutely normal to mislead their customers, but some of them don’t even realize that they are doing so even if they are against it. This is why you need to be careful with the kind of content you create and the messages you are sending.

If you want to acquire more customers, it doesn’t mean that you have to lie to them about the products you offer. In fact, customer retention is way more important, and if you are honest with your existing customers, they will be more likely to stay.

You need to focus on improving the experience you provide and make sure all the information you put out is accurate. If there are some flaws in your product, don’t hide them. Instead, try to present them in a good light to make them look like advantages.

5. Remember About Mobile Optimization

The majority of your target audience will be using mobile devices for searching the Internet This means that optimizing your website for mobile is essential. You don’t just want it to be optimized for SEO but also usable for smartphones and tablets.

Imagine if your customers find your website by searching for something, but once they click on the link, they get to the desktop version of your website that looks very small on their mobile device. Do you think they would stay?

You must ensure that your e-commerce store is mobile-friendly in order not to lose sales. You might also want to consider creating a dedicated app for your brand, but keep in mind that only the most loyal customers will be likely to install it.

6. Collect Feedback Regularly

In order to understand all the issues your customers have with your business, you need to ask your clients to give you their valuable feedback. By analyzing it, you will know which things need improvement which will, in turn, lead to better customer satisfaction.

At the same time, customer feedback can help you promote your e-commerce store, improve brand awareness, and build a certain image of your company. Seek out feedback and reviews online and then repost or republish them.

Moreover, many consumers find that they believe product reviews from real people more than they believe product descriptions from the companies selling these items. This way, the feedback about your products will also help you become a more reliable brand.

7. Use Social Media Marketing

Nowadays, it has become a commonly accepted rule that every business should have at least one social media account. Of course, if you can manage two or three, your social media strategy might turn out to be even more effective.

Most e-commerce stores do well on social media platforms that largely rely on visual content such as Instagram and Pinterest. You will need to determine which platform is right for you and then think of the strategy and the social media marketing tools you will be using.

It’s a good idea to combine social media marketing with other types of digital marketing such as influencer marketing and affiliate marketing. If you can pull that off, you will see how impressive the results may turn out to be.

8. Publish Multilingual Content Optimized For SEO

In order to find more customers and accelerate sales, you will need to reach new audiences. This is possible by going global and expanding to international markets. Don’t worry, it’s not as difficult as it sounds.

The easiest way to do this is to start publishing multilingual content that will be optimized for SEO. You can use a translation and localization service like Speakt which will save you a lot of time and money.

Think of the regions you want to be targeting and then make a list of languages that you will need to translate your content into. Take into account your website as well as your social media accounts and your emails.

9. Improve Customer Service

For one reason or another, this aspect of a business is often overlooked. Your customer service is essential and is closely related to the number of sales you make and your customer retention rate. If your clients don’t get the right treatment, they simply won’t return.

This is why improving your customer service can have such an immensely huge impact on your overall business performance. Here are the steps you can take:

• Determine the issues with your customer support department and make sure to eliminate the flaws and replace them with better practices.
• Understand which channels of communication are preferred by your customers (live chat, knowledge base, cloud-based phone system etc.). You might be comfortable with email, but they will favor phone calls.
• Remember that your customers are always right, but that doesn’t mean that they are always reasonable. Listen to them but do things your way.

10. Use Lead Generation Marketing

Lead generation marketing or simply lead generation is now considered one of the most important aspects of digital marketing by many professionals. This is exactly why business owners need to start using it in their own strategy.

The most important part is defining your lead and sorting it into categories such as marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), product qualified lead (PQL), or service qualified lead. Once you know that, you can continue guiding your lead to conversion.

Lead generation is somewhat of a complicated process, so it is important to get its nuances at the stage of learning in order not to misuse its practices afterward. Do your research and get prepared for it.

11. Launch Effective Ad Campaigns

There is no telling how many ad campaigns failed just because the approach the business owners had was incorrect. There are many things you need to consider when preparing and then launching advertising campaigns, but not everyone acknowledges this.

In order for your ad campaign to be as effective as possible, take into account such things:

• The Channel
  Where will you be launching this ad campaign? It might be a Google Ads campaign or Facebook Ads campaigns, but these two channels are different from one another. You will need to understand all the specifics of the platform you choose.
• The Target
  Who is your target audience? The best thing you can do is build buyer personas to understand how you need to word your text and structure your ads to appeal to the particular potential customer group.
• The Budget
  How much can you spend? No ad campaign has been effective with a non-existent budget. Even if you have a tight budget, you can still make it work as long as you have a clear plan in your mind and on paper.

12. Test & Experiment

In order to be sure that your particular strategy will work, you first need to test it and see if it works on a smaller scale. Some aspects such as content that is optimized for SEO are not disputed because we all know that SEO is important, but other things need to be tested.

For example, if you want to start posting short comedic videos, you first need to create a few of these and see how they perform. If you are satisfied with the results, you can build a strategy for that and move on to making this serious choice.

Of course, you can always go the rocky way when you simply create and do and create and do until you realize that something isn’t working. However, such an approach will cost you a lot of money and headache, so it is better to test things before investing in them.

13. Use Email Marketing

You’ve probably heard at least something about the effectiveness of email marketing. Well, it’s all true! Some people believe that email is dead, but the reality is completely different. Email is still one of the best channels for marketing.

Once you grow your own email list, you will be able to launch proper email campaigns that will lead to a dramatic increase in your sales. The key here is to remember about A/B testing and experiment with different variants before you launch the campaign.

Keep in mind that promotional emails are also a good way to attract customer attention during the holiday season. Your customers will be looking for the perfect gifts for their friends and family, and you are the one who can provide them with these gifts, so don’t miss out on this.

14. Revamp your sales process

The way you sell to your customers might be working just fine, but imagine if it were better than “just fine.” 

Revisiting and optimizing your sales process is a great way to increase your e-commerce sales. In the online shopping realm, ensuring that you are putting time and money towards attracting an audience that will actually find value in your product is arguably the most important part of your sales process. You can have the most convincing marketing messages and product descriptions out there, but if the customer’s wants and needs don’t align with what you’re offering, they won’t give it a second thought.

Make sure you have a good understanding of your target audience by asking yourself the following questions: 

• Does this person have a need for my product?
• Does this person have the budget to buy my product? 
• Can they make a timely purchase? 

Qualifying customers might not be directly involved in selling your solution, but it will end up saving you a lot of time and money when doing so. 

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, increasing your e-commerce business sales is much easier than you may think. As long as you stay dedicated and invest your time and money into your brand, you will be able to get fantastic results.

Make sure to take note of the advice in this article. Think of the tips that will be most appropriate and effective for your particular company and start combining these techniques for more efficiency.