Reshu Rathi — November 6, 2016 Follow @reshurathi
Every online store wants to increase their revenue…
But when it comes to increasing the revenue of your online store, most marketers blindly spend most of their marketing budget on customer acquisition.
Customer acquisition can be expensive, and before long you are simply driving up costs and diminishing your profit. Which is counterintuitive.
If you want to increase sales in your online store, you need to think of ways that will simultaneously improve profit at the same time. These six simple tips will help you do exactly that.
1. Optimize your email receipts
Every eCommerce business sends email receipts, but most of them use them just to inform customers.
Did you know that email receipts can increase your sales and delight your customers?
An email receipt doesn’t just act as a record, but can also include other value propositions to keep the customer engaged and drive a returning visit.
Here’re three ways to optimize your email receipts:
- Include relevant product recommendations in these emails. Why? According to one online survey by Harris Poll, 80% of consumers like when retailers’ emails contain recommended products based on previous purchases. Apart from making these emails engaging this will help you when up-selling and cross-selling your products.
- Add discount codes in these messages to incentivize another purchase (especially for new customers). Why? On average, eCommerce spending by a new customer is $ 24.50, compared to $ 52.50 for a repeat customer (McKinsey & Company). So it makes sense to incentivize new customers to make another purchase instantly.
- Ask for feedback. By asking customers how their shopping experience went, you can learn about the pain points these customers might have experienced during shopping.
2. Send out ‘wishlist on sale’ emails
Most eCommerce shoppers add products to a wishlist for buying later. Also, most online shoppers are price sensitive and love discounts. So it makes complete sense to tell subscribers when the items they have shown interest in go on sale.
Also, you should email them when the product they’ve liked is about to go out of stock to incite them to buy it.
Here’s an example from Stylebop.com:
3. Make special deals stand out
Most eCommerce sites are quite busy. This means that often shoppers will end up missing deals.
To ensure that your offers are not getting lost in oblivion, highlight your special deals in such a way that shoppers can’t miss them.
Here’s how to do that:
- Use popups to promote your special deals. When designing these popups, look for ways to make them stand out from your website color scheme in a subtle way without distracting the shopper. After all, your main job is to make it easy for your shoppers to convert.
- Use an info bar at the top of your page. It’s another good way to promote your special deals and boost your conversions from these offers. You can display them to all your visitors or target specific visitors based on pre-defined behavior.
Given below is an example from Charles & Keith, they’ve used geo-targeting to highlight their shipping policy for a particular country to make it easy for international shoppers to convert.
- Make the most of sidebars. If you don’t want to promote your special deals in headers, you can use sidebars to communicate your special offer to shoppers.
So, use your online real estate intelligently and communicate your offer clearly to get more conversions. Also, don’t forget to A/B test where to position your offer to capture your audience’s attention and promote accordingly.
4. Nurture cart abandoners
Cart abandonment is costing the eCommerce industry trillions in revenue every year. So, nurturing these abandoners through cart recovery mailers can help in recovering much of these lost carts.
But surprisingly, very few retailers are using remarketing emails effectively. Most of these marketers aren’t running their cart recovery programs at full throttle and are sending just one email to remind the abandoners about their incomplete purchase.
The fact is, not every cart can be recovered in the first attempt. But that doesn’t mean recovering these carts is off limits. In fact, stats say “remarketing campaigns that send three emails convert 26% higher than campaigns that send one email.”
So it’s important to build a cart recovery email strategy to increase your chance of conversions.
5. Product videos are a must
According to stats, video viewers are anywhere from 64-85% more likely to buy after watching a product video.
But not every retailer can afford a product video for every product, and that’s ok.
For those who can afford it, it’s an easy way to improve conversions. And for those who can’t afford it for every product, they can at least create it for their top selling products, expensive products, as well as, products with higher revenue margins.
Image Source: Animoto
6. Focus on up sells and cross sells, but be wise about it
It’s no secret that up sells and cross sells are the easiest way to increase your eCommerce revenue. But how and to whom you up sell and cross sell to, will determine if this will uplift your conversions.
For example, if you’ve got a few customers who frequently shop from your website but always buy discounted products. Is it advisable to up-sell to them? Probably not. In fact, you may want to do the opposite, and down-sell to them.
Similarly, if someone is on your checkout page, it’s better to show them products that can be bundled up with their current purchase instead of up-selling to them.
Here’s an example from an online jewelry store BlueNile who is doing it right:
And their checkout page:
On the product page, they’ve shown similar items to give people an option to go for the higher priced item or a lower price one – an excellent technique to help them make up their mind.
On the checkout page, they’ve shown items which when bundled with the current purchase will increase the order value which is again the right thing to do, and your customer will benefit too this way.
Showing options at the final stage may confuse the shopper.
Wrap
Hopefully you have found these ways to increase your online store sales useful!
Remember, that increasing the revenue of your eCommerce business doesn’t mean spending huge resources on advertising. Doing simple things the right way can help you grow profits.
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