Boosting sales and increasing revenue should be the goal for every business, but many are afraid to implement certain methods or don’t know how to.
However, it can be straightforward, and some necessary steps can drastically improve your bottom line. You will even find that some features increase your revenue and improve your overall customer satisfaction by making their lives simpler.
This list of 11 ways to boost online sales is in no particular order, and they are all effortless to carry out.
11 Methods to boost sales online
Site speed
Every second you make a potential customer wait, the more income you will lose in lost sales. Customers these days are impatient and for a good reason.
If your website is too slow, you likely have a competitor whose website is faster and slicker than yours and very happy to usurp your customers from you. You can boost the speed of your site, and perhaps the most important is making sure that you use a high-quality hosting company.
If you don’t know where to start, you can check out hosting aggregation sites like FortuneLords.com, who help find the best hosting deals.
Honesty is the best policy
We all tend to somewhat overinflate our products; after all, they are the best in the world, right! This may be true, but you must take care of your sales copy and try not to be too hyperbolic in your descriptions.
Today’s online shoppers are savvy enough to see through any kind of marketing nonsense, and any whiff of shady copy will send your trust plummeting. As they say, it is difficult to gain confidence, but easy to lose it.
User testimonials
Some people just need a nudge before they are comfortable parting ways with their hard-earned money. This is perfectly understandable, but how can you achieve this without being overly pushy?
By using real customer testimonials, or ratings in your products, you will hopefully convert those who aren’t quite sure. Obviously, make sure that your product is top-notch so that you don’t get any negative comments or reviews!
Create urgency
Although this may sound like a contradiction of the second point, you can sincerely and transparently create a sense of urgency.
For example, you could promote a special offer that lasts a few days, giving a 10% discount on the total cart amount. This can help to give your business a short-term boost. Nonetheless, you should make sure to use sparingly and preferably only during special occasions like holidays.
Less is more
I’m talking about choice here. The result of too much choice is often a lost customer. Put it this way, do you prefer to eat in a restaurant that has an excellent, clean, simple menu dedicated to a specific niche, or one where you can get sushi, roast lamb and Thai green curry?
Obviously, there are outliers to this theory, such as Amazon, etc. Still, they have the clout to pull off some fantastic A/B testing that is entirely out of the realms of possibility for small businesses.
By reducing the number of products you offer, particularly on individual product pages, you will increase your website’s stickiness. It is far easier to convince someone to buy 1 thing rather than multiple products.
Let them checkout easily.
In a similar vein to the previous point, by keeping your cart and checkout simple, you will reduce cart abandonment. Now that isn’t to say that you shouldn’t attempt to upsell at this point, but you need to be careful about it and make sure that any impulse upsell can go directly into the cart without leaving and visiting the product page.
To maintain integrity, you can add a “quick look” method that allows them to see some select details without leaving the cart page.
We buy with our eyes
Following on from the restaurant analogy earlier, we also buy with our eyes in the same way that we eat with our eyes.
A terrific image could be the tipping point for someone to decide to buy. Investing in exquisite images will pay dividends going forwards. You could hire a professional photographer for this task, or you could make them yourself.
However, a pro will be able to advise on composition and give you the full catalog of raw images plus the final edits.
A fantastic photo can have substantial file sizes, so to keep your site speed healthy as per the first point, you should reduce the dimensions and compress them before uploading them to your site.
Consistent branding
If you have ever visited an online store and seen many different brand colors and graphics, you should already know that it can be jarring enough to make you leave. Consistent branding makes your site look professional, but it will also add an air of trust that is missing too often.
Have a great FAQ section
A Frequently Asked Questions (faq) section is vital to building trust with your audience. However, it also serves another purpose: it will ultimately cut down on your customer service work. By answering as many of the more straightforward questions you can with an faq section, you will cut down on the number of emails you will need to respond to.
Shipping and return information and accepted payments are just a few of the questions that you should include answers to. If you have already been operating for some time, you can also include any other relevant matters that customers have previously asked, thereby preempting them by using your own data.
Create an email list
An email list is an invaluable commodity that you should be building right from the get-go. If you have a list of verified emails from willing customers, you will be the proud owner of some seriously hot leads.
You could offer anything to get them to part with their email address, but it is common for eCommerce sites to provide some kind of exit-intent discount if they purchase something. This way, you are winning back a potentially lost sale, and also collecting their email in the process. If they have bought your products before, it stands to reason that they will do so again if you email them new offers. Make sure to use sparingly.
