In the eCommerce world, you need to convert as many customers as possible, as efficiently as possible. But sometimes businesses struggle and often wonder how to increase eCommerce sales.
It’s hard to give a direct response to it. There are so many reasons why your sales aren’t as high as they should be.
You might have a subpar website. The payment process may be too complicated. You might not be taking full advantage of some selling or cross-selling opportunities. These are all bad for business and this isn’t an exhaustive list.
Slow growth is better than no growth, but if you’re missing sales targets then you need to address the problem.
Fortunately, there are ways to increase your eCommerce sales.
There are plenty of things to consider when trying to increase eCommerce sales. You can try to become as creative as you like. But, there’s no point in trying to reinvent the wheel. There are some proven methods that you can try out that are bound to get you results.
It’s easy to think that increasing sales equals increasing your number of customers. However, boosting your eCommerce sales can be achieved by nurturing your current customer base.
Existing customers are much more valuable than new customers because you’ve already done the work by attracting them.
It can cost you five times more to acquire a new customer than retaining those already spending money with you. Nurturing your existing customers will lead to a boost in revenue while also keeping costs low.
People will abandon their carts on your website. They have done in the past, they do now, and they will in the future. It’s the bane of any eCommerce marketer’s existence.
When this happens you have two options:
If you want to increase revenue, the second option is probably your best bet.
Leverage your customer data to re-engage customers intelligently. There is no point in sending messages to them that might be of interest. That’s a waste of time and money. Not to mention you’re going to irritate your audience.
Identify where they left the purchasing process and bring them back to where they left off. Show them images of what they left in their basket. Offer them a discount if they complete the purchase in the next 24 hours.
By setting up these campaigns, you will certainly see an increase in eCommerce sales.
The need for personalisation in the eCommerce industry is massive, and will only increase in importance.
There is very little interaction with basic, generic messages amongst customers. 72% of people will only engage with messages that are personalised for them. To create personalised campaigns, you need to have a good understanding of your customers. This means having a solid grasp of the data you collect. This is often overlooked with data held in multiple silos providing little or no insight.
Consolidation of your data under one roof is incredibly effective. It becomes much easier to understand your customers because you have everything from demographics to purchase history in one place.
Using this data to create specific, personalised campaigns for your customers will increase your engagement rates. And the more people engage with you, the more likely they are to buy from you.
Although some customers won’t engage with your communications, you want to keep this to a minimum. Driving engagement through the use of just one channel further hinders your ability to drive sales and increase revenue.
Bear in mind, your customers are busy people. Communications can be ignored because you sent them at the wrong time. Or they simply get lost amongst all the other messages and emails they receive. This is especially true if you only send your message via one channel. The best way to get through to them is to hit them through as many channels as you can.
Using multiple channels of engagement early on also allows you to develop an understanding of your customers. Specifically, how they like to communicate. Every person is different and reacts differently to channels. Understanding which channels they respond to best means that you can use your resources more effectively.
If a proportion of your customers rarely ever click through to your emails, then you know to contact them via SMS or app push.
Use your customer data to tailor your communications to your audience, rather than expecting your audience to put up with what you send them.
Sending your messages through your customers preferred channel can help to increase eCommerce sales.
Transactional data can be an incredibly important tool if you make good use of it. Knowing exactly what your customers have purchased in the past can help you put other products in front of them. Products that you know they will probably like.
You should take any opportunity you have to cross-sell to your customers. Abandoned cart emails, thank you emails, product recommendation notifications, the list goes on. These are perfect occasions to get other similar or complementary products in front of their faces.
Including cross-sells, or product recommendations will help to increase eCommerce sales. Customers will be interested in purchasing add on products if they are relevant to them.
Only 3% of overall web traffic converts on their first visit. You need to find a way to reclaim some of that 97% that has left your site without purchasing.
The data collected from the customer’s visit will give you an insight into what they are interested in. A great way to now use it is to retarget these browsers with relevant content.
For example, someone uses your eCommerce site to browse your array of products. However, they don’t purchase anything and leave your site. But, you now know what products they were searching for..
The next step is to send customers a message promoting your jackets. Maybe you could even offer a discount to drive them back to your site.
The channel you choose to send these messages is up to you. We would recommend using web push notifications. Using these allows you to send a notification to your customer even if they’re on a different website.
Over half of the internet’s content and websites are written in English. Yes, the majority of internet user’s first language is English (565 million). But there are plenty of users out there who don’t have English as a first language.
So, how does this affect your eCommerce sales? Well, 40% of people will not buy from a website that’s not in their language. That’s a fairly hefty chunk of internet users.
The way to combat this is to give people the option to translate your website into their own language. Even if the translations aren’t exact, you will still see an uplift in your sales.
Odds are, a lot of these suggestions can be added to your strategy pretty quickly. They can be surprisingly easy to get off the ground and you will see the benefits in a short space of time.
Some of these things require good quality data and an understanding of your customer. Both of which you should already have. If not, it’s never too late to get started on it.
To learn more about how you can use your data to increase your eCommerce sales, get in touch and request a demo.
About Xtremepush
Xtremepush is the world’s leading customer data and engagement data platform. We work with various top brands within the eCommerce industry. Schedule a personalised demo of our platform to learn more about how we can help your brand drive repeat customers and increase revenue.