Sales are the lifeline of all business.
Whether sales dropped in the last couple of months or you want to increase online purchases to boost your revenue.
Either way, you have come to the right place and found 21 ways to go about it.
Increasing online sales is critical to the success of any business. In 2018, an estimated 1.8 billion people worldwide purchased goods online. According to the projections, that’s around 2.8 trillion US dollars spent online.
Today, I have something that will help you get a more significant piece of the pie:
21 insanely actionable ways to increase your online sales, that you can use right now.
1. Get Rid Of Sliders
When you were researching the best layout for your website, you would have come across tons of articles on including a slider image on your homepage.
While the slider adds that classy touch to your website and displays a variety of products. If you want to increase sales, you have to change the slider as soon as possible.
Almost any web designer recommends sliders, but no evidence backs the assumption that it increases sales.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Sliders divide the most valuable real estate of the website between offers.
So what happens? Your customer gets the paradox of choice and doesn’t make a decision.
Sliders even affect SEO because of how much they slow down your website. Even Yoast had an article ‘Sliders suck and should be banned from your website‘.
2. Bandwagon Effect
This technique uses psychological, and many marketers have become successful because of it.
We are wired to make decisions based on other peoples experience. The correct term for this phenomenon is “the bandwagon effect.”
To use this effect to your benefit, indicate the most popular product or service among your customers.
Over the last few years, you might have seen the pop-ups when it says ‘sally purchased xyx’. This is an example of the bandwagon effect, which will drive extra sales.
3. Add Contact Information
This method works best if you are a B2B company. According to a study by KoMarketing, the number one thing potential clients find most lacking on a business website is contact information.
For this reason, it’s a good idea to add anything that will enable a potential customer to contact your business.
Visitors look for contact details most of the time; it is also advisable that you add your contact information on every page. You can add contact details in your header and footer for convenience.
4. Match The Landing Page and Ad
I have split-test several ads and landing pages, and the combination that always outperforms is the combination of having facebook ads that correlate to your landing page.
The reasons? It helps convey a brand and transfers trust from one platform to the next. For the customer, it can seem very sketchy, leaving Facebook to a landing page and having to enter your card details.
Having a consistent message on both platforms helps diminish this.
So to spike your conversion rate and subsequently sales volume, make your landing page and ads correlate. It will increase the number of signups and sales.
5. Include Payment and Security Trust Seal
According to MonetizePros, 61% of shoppers didn’t buy because there was no trust seal or badge.
The best method of cementing customers trust is by getting verified by a third-party vendor. This will allow you to display the seal of trust from them on your check out page.
The method works for any industry with a trusted accreditation. It doesn’t have to be limited to an e-commerce store.
Also, add a description of the measures you have put in place to protect your customers’ critical data. This will reassure visitors that their personal information will be protected.
6. Add Testimonials
Every person before buying a product wants to make sure that other people who purchased the product were satisfied.
Testimonials can play a huge part in increasing your sales, but unfortunately, many businesses usually ignore it.
It’s not just enough to include quoted testimonials on your landing page. You need to add real images of the people giving their reviews.
Pro Tip: Include video testimonials they increase dwell time and give a personal touch.
7. Evoke a Sense Of Urgency
Creating a sense of urgency will also help you attract sales. You can create urgency by applying scarcity.
You can do this in two ways:
- Include a countdown on the item
- Show how many items are remaining
8. Offer a Money-Back Guarantee
Depending on the nature of your product, you can offer a 30-day money guarantee to your customers.
The money-back policy is a promise to a customer that you will return 100% of their money under certain conditions.
30-day money back guarantees done correctly, will send a message to a potential customer that you are confident about your product functioning as designed.
9. Reduce Checkout Steps
Try emulating e-commerce giants like Amazon by adopting just a single-click option in the checkout page. A study by the Baymard Institute found that long or complicated checkout process causes 27% of cart abandonment.
10. Learn the Life Time Value
If you sell subscription-based products, you will be selling on a monthly subscription basis. If you learn what your lifetime value is per customer, you can work out the benefit of selling a yearly plan.
As an example:
If your average customer stays with you for four months, your yearly plan will have a more significant margin because that’s 12 months. Therefore you can offer three months for free when they purchase an annual plan. Giving you an extra five months of revenue.
Though you have discounted the yearly plan prices, they provide you with the real scenario of gaining higher total revenue than the month-to-month plan.
11. Use Live Chat
The best way to convince an on the fence customer is by answering all the questions they may have.
There are hundreds of live chat apps today you can easily install on your sales page or website, we like Live Chat and Collect.Chat
And, having a salesman responding to potential customers’ objections will increase conversions.
Today, more than 30% of customers expect live chat on your website.
You can also use chatbots that are on Facebook like Opesta
12. Include Social Proof
If you have ever visited an e-commerce store or a website with authority, you have probably seen logos of brands in the footer or the first hero section.
They usually say
- Featured in… [logos]
- Our customers… [logos]
Online stores provide social proof to potential customers by using customer reviews.
For a visitor who is unsure about your product/service, social proof can be a powerful motivator.
13. Split-Test Headlines
Whether you have an ad running, or have a service to sell. There is a headline at the top of the page, and you need to catch the customers attention. Great headlines sell and CopyBlogger nails it with a timeless article about headlines.
I like to include a number that catches the readers attention and gives structure to the post and includes a benefit.
Then write out different headlines and test which performs the best.
14. Be Honest
Honesty will not only boost the image of your brand, but it can foster and enhance trust in your company. Consumers today know about marketing ploys and can spot BS a mile off.
So it’s vital that you are straightforward and honest about your product.
15. Multiple Payment Options
Provide as many payment methods as possible, and this will allow every customer to buy from you. Some different options are:
- Credit cards
- Google Wallet
- Stripe
- ApplePay
- WePay
- PayPal
16. Ad Extensions
This feature is available in AdWords and Bing and enables you to make your ad larger with ample spaces to click. This feature is free and will increase your click-through rate.
17. Lookalike Audience on Facebook
Many people do not know this method, but it’s one of the best ways to increase your online sales. Using the available data about your existing customers, you can find other people who might want to buy your products on Facebook using the ‘Create Lookalike Audience‘ feature.
Using this method lets you find a new target market that’s close to your existing one.
18. Try Gmail Ads
Gmail Ads are now available to everyone after spending years in and out of beta. You can put this feature into good use by targeting your competition’s keywords.
Customers who are using your competitor’s products are getting emails from them. So with Gmail ads, you can target those keywords and show up in their inboxes and increase your brand awareness and increase sales.
19. Concentrate on Your Audience
I know in a bid to increase sales, you may be tempted to target everyone online. But this never works. Instead, concentrate on your target market and understand what they need.
Create a buyer persona to identify prospects based on income, demographics, likes, dislikes and many other characteristics.
20. Page Speed
This wild card is not a technique on how to sell in a different way but to optimise your existing website to increase conversions. Speeding up your website will have a two-fold effect.
Speeding up the time your website loads will help you rank higher in the search engines. This is often an overlooked SEO tactic but it’s a significant ranking factor in Googles eyes.
The second effect is for user experience, which will tie into sales, having a website that loads anything slower than 3 seconds dramatically increases the abandonment rate.
For every 1 second, your page takes to load you lose 7% conversions from a recent study at HubSpot.
21. Test, test, test
You need to test everything and keep testing you never know what trick, strategy, or angle will perform for your business…until you test it. What customers might think to an idea be utterly different from what you think.
Constantly testing is a core value at Evolved Toaster, and it should be in your business. Testing will help you create a better user experience, increase sales and find new ways to promote your business.