Running an online store can be a rewarding business, but it’s not always easy. The online market is arguably even more competitive than the traditional retail market, and it’s not enough to simply offer your customers quality products and great customer service. You need to do everything you can to entice them to choose your store over all of the others out there. Thankfully, there are a few effective tricks you can use to boost your online store sales.
1. Reaffirm Your Brand Through Web Design
Your website is incredibly important when you run an online store – even when you sell your items through a third-party platform. That’s why the way you design your eCommerce website is one of the most important things to consider. There are a lot of factors that go into that, and you can read more here about them. However, one thing that you should always keep in mind is that your website should reaffirm your brand. If you have a strong brand identity, make sure that comes through in your web design. Use consistent colours, fonts, and other design elements throughout your site to give it a cohesive look and feel. That way, your customers will always know they’re shopping on your site, which will make it far more likely that they’ll return in the future, and seek out your store specifically when they need something. To ensure the quality, you should have the website created by a professional. An attractive design, as well as a very good search engine optimisation is crucial for your sales. A web design does not always have to be expensive. A very good service provider for high quality websites is e.g. Interlogy.
2. Optimize Your Website For Search Engine Visibility
Another key thing about online store web design is that you need to make sure your site is optimized for search engine visibility. That means using the right keywords in your titles, descriptions, and other elements on your website that help it rank higher in search engine results pages. You can use a tool like Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner to find the right keywords to target for your business. Once you’ve found them, use them throughout your site to help improve your ranking and get more eyes on your store. Besides keywords, you should also focus on creating high-quality content that provides value to your customers. That will help you attract links from other websites, which will in turn help improve your site’s ranking even more.
3. Offer Discounts Or Free Shipping
People love getting discounts, and if you can offer them, it’s a great way to entice customers to shop at your store. You can offer discounts on specific items, or across your entire store. You could also offer free shipping, which is especially useful if you sell physical goods. If you do offer free shipping, make sure it’s prominently displayed on your website, and that the terms and conditions are easy to understand. That way, customers know exactly what they’re getting when they shop with you. Now, you can either offer free shipping for all orders, or you could set a minimum order amount that needs to be met before free shipping is available. That’s up to you, and both have their benefits. In the first case, you’ll probably need to bump up your prices a bit to make up for the cost of shipping, but you’ll probably get more orders overall. In the second case, you can keep your prices lower, but you might lose out on some sales from customers who don’t want to spend enough to qualify for free shipping.
4. Make Purchasing Easy
Yes, collecting customer data is important for an online store. That’s how you get them onto your email list, so you can market to them in the future, learn about their shopping habits, and more. That said, the last thing you want is to see an increase in cart abandonment rates on your website because your purchasing process is too complicated. Don’t ask for people to fill out a form with too many fields before they can proceed to checkout – you can get their email later. Just let them checkout as a guest, or make it easy for them to create an account if they want. The fewer steps there are in your purchasing process, the more likely people are to actually go through with their purchase.
5. Email Marketing
That said, once they do leave an email – have a plan ready. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to boost online store sales. Once you have a list of people to email, you can send them regular updates about new products, special offers, and more. Just make sure you’re not spamming them – only send emails when you have something valuable to say. If you do it right, email marketing can be a great way to keep your customers coming back to your store again and again. It’s also worth noting that the main benefit of email marketing is that it can be more personalized than any other type of marketing. You can target your emails to specific customers based on their interests and past purchases, which helps increase the chances that they’ll actually open and read them.
There you have it – five effective ways to boost your online store sales. Just remember that it takes time and effort to see results, so don’t give up if you don’t see an immediate increase in sales. Working with experts every step of the way in order to get started selling online can help make the process much easier for you. Keep at it, and soon you’ll be reaping the rewards of your hard work.
