In this article, we are going to look at the 8 proven ways to increase your e-commerce sales in 2021.
Let’s get started.
8 best ways to increase e-commerce sales in 2021
#1. Remarketing
This method of increasing sales has proved to be the most effective. You may ask why?
It’s because you are now marketing to a user who has already shown interest and needs a final push in the funnel.
Try offering a discount or a free product when you remarket as it may motivate the user to make the purchase they have been delaying.
E-commerce websites that have a high volume of visitors use remarketing to the best of their needs and end up converting more visitors into customers.
Investing in remarketing pays off and it does wonders in terms of increasing sales given your display ads create a sense of urgency.
#2. Use brand awareness
Any brand in the world needs to be known. Brand awareness is the foremost and the biggest objective, especially at the start.
What happens if your audience does not know about your existence as a brand? How are they going to buy from you?
As an e-commerce business owner, you need to understand that creating an awareness of your business in the minds of your target audience, is an inevitable as well as an important process.
It helps you increase e-commerce sales because the more you are known, the more your chances are of increasing sales.
Let your brand get known as much as you can through the channels of communication that your users prefer.
#3. Target niche segments
Marketing Guru Seth Godin has said this decades ago - “Everyone is not your customer.”
As an e-commerce website, you would be having buyer personas but the question is - how to get more out of it?
The way to get more customers is to create a very unique niche that is even more precise than your existing target audience.
Let us say that you have been targeting 100 customers and 30 of them are purchasing from you.
How about creating your niche in such a way that 30 customers of that kind who purchased from your e-commerce website are targeted and 15-20 buy from your website?
How would that work for you? It’s going to save your money and ultimately help you sell your products better to the right kind of customers and your conversion skyrockets.
#4. Have mobile-friendly landing pages
With digitalization and plenty of good smartphones available in the market, the number of people using smartphones has increased.
As a buyer, you would not want a page to not load after 3 seconds, right? What would happen if you had to wait for that long? You would leave the page because it made you wait too long.
The optimal speed for an e-commerce website page to load in 3 seconds and your e-commerce page needs to have precisely that timing or a second or two here more but anything beyond that won’t help you retain that customer who visited your website.
A mobile-friendly landing page loads quickly and has a good UI/UX and that one on which the buttons are large enough for visitors to click.
Highly successful e-commerce sites have relied upon mobile-friendly landing pages and websites to increase sales.
#5. Create urgency
The more time you give your customers, the more difficult it is going to be for you to convert them.
The most common way for creating a sense of urgency can be by displaying a lucrative offer or a time expiry deal which can be customized just to make the buyer fall for it and make the purchase.
If you are creating urgency, chances are your business might boom and so would be your conversion rate. And which e-commerce store does not like that?
#6. Enable a smooth checkout process
What if your customer has spent 10 minutes on your website, added products to their cart, proceeded to check out, tried to make a payment, and failed?
It would be worse than heartbreak, wouldn’t it?
To prevent this from happening, you need to ensure that there is a smooth and glitch-free process and that your payment gateway is functioning properly.
There is cut-throat competition out there in the market and no e-commerce store can afford to lose a customer who was ready to buy from them.
Do a test run and see if your checkout page is working properly. Regular checks are equally important.
#7. Display customer testimonials
How many times have you purchased something because a friend recommended it to you?
Whether you are an established brand or a new entrant in the e-commerce sphere, you need to have testimonials to make your business stand out and have your leads trust you into buying from you.
92% of online buyers read online reviews before buying and 68% believe that reading positive reviews, about the products they are buying, builds their trust for a business.
Testimonials on your website are going to play a big role if you are looking to increase sales on your e-commerce site in 2021. They are the best brand advocates for you and you must showcase them.
#8. Adopt email marketing tactics
Email marketing is considered to be one of the oldest forms of marketing. Although it might be old, it works wonders for any business.
According to one research, the return on investment in email marketing can be as high as 4300%.
As an e-commerce business, you can cross-sell your products, promote your offerings during peak seasons, and time-bound offers in your emails that can increase your sales like you never expected.
After promoting your products you would observe that there are customers who must have added products to their cart but left without buying. How can you induce customers to make a purchase here?
This is when email marketing comes into the picture. You can send out an automated mail to all customers who have added products to their cart offering them a discount on their total amount or free shipping, for example, to urge them to buy, resulting in a sales increase.
Email marketing is here to stay and learning that skill through an email marketing course in just a few hours can help you achieve your objective fascinatingly.
We just saw some amazing techniques to increase your e-commerce sales. If you wish to learn more about how to grow your business with digital marketing efforts, check this online digital marketing course out.
Here are some additional tips on what you should avoid doing.
5 mistakes you should avoid if you want to increase sales
#1. Choosing the wrong e-commerce platform
Nowadays, there are numerous platforms available. The most popular ones include Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, etc.
But choosing the right e-commerce platform is the most important thing to do for any online business owner.
You must choose a platform that is SEO-friendly, secure, scalable, and mobile-friendly.
Check this out: How to choose the best e-commerce platform
If your platform is not equipped with the above things, maybe, it’s time to consider changing your platform and switching to a new one because it might not help you attain your motive of being recognized and increase sales in your store.
#2. Poor product quality
The one thing customers, anywhere in the world, care about is value for their money and that is justified by the quality of the product they get in return.
Any customer that has purchased on an e-commerce website has put in their trust, time, and money, and breaching their trust with poor quality products is the last thing you can do as a business.
It is highly recommended to provide high-quality products to your customers if they want to increase sales.
It’s universal, isn’t it?
#3. Bad customer support
Would you be interested in buying from any e-commerce store that does not listen to your grievances? You would not.
Online businesses that have succeeded so far have understood that a bad customer support system leads to the death of the business.
Imagine purchasing shoes that do not accidentally fit you and not hearing from the site’s customer support team for a long time or your query not being addressed. How would you feel?
Setting up a reliable customer support team goes a long way in increasing your sales.
#4. Refund and exchange policy
A complaint that has been common among online buyers has been that of refund and exchange policy.
E-commerce websites that have a poor refund and exchange policy cannot sustain in the long term let alone increase their sales.
Your refund and exchange policy must be such that the customers can sense transparency and do not have a hard time going through the process.
#5. Limited payment options
As an e-commerce business owner looking at ways to increase sales in 2021, offering limited payment options would not work well as of today.
More and more payment gateways are being added and adding the most trending ones or the smoothest ones facilitates buyers in making payments from applications or mediums that they’d prefer over others.
The world has undergone a digital revolution and the revolution is still on at a much faster pace as you are reading this article looking for how to increase e-commerce sales. You will be amazed by the number of ways you can use digital marketing to promote your online businesses at a global level at very affordable rates.
That’s all folks! We hope this has been an informative resource for you.