5 Effective Tips for Boosting eCommerce Sales

If your eCommerce business is currently not making good sales, chances are high that you are doing many vital things wrong. As online shopping is increasing in popularity, so should online sales. If your business is missing out on this train, come closer, pay attention here! Irrespective of whether you’re running a side hustle from your garage or managing a full-blown e-commerce empire, getting your online sales strategy right can make or break your business. This is one vital fact many eCommerce business owners presently worry about. Significantly, too many great products fail not because of the quality of the products but because their owners don’t seem to understand what today’s online shoppers really want. These here are five effective strategies that are really essential to boost eCommerce sales.

1. Make Your Website User-Friendly

The design and deployment of your eCommerce website are very important to its usefulness for online sales. Your website is your digital storefront where online shoppers first make contact with your business. You must ensure it is well optimized to make it user-friendly. This means it must load fast and easy to navigate. Its aesthetic appeal must be such as to easily arrest the attention of online shoppers who are notoriously always in a hurry. If your website is confusing, cumbersome and slow, its bounce rate will be embarrassingly high. Real attention must always be paid to this as well as its checkout and payment process. On your eCommerce website, here is the trick that really works. The easier you make it for people to give you money, the more money people will give you. Never forget that.

2. Effective Customer Service 

In eCommerce business, poor customer service is a business killer any day. Just one unsatisfied and frustrated customer can leave reviews capable of scaring away hundreds of potential buyers. You can take deliberate steps to safeguard against this. Since you know that most customers always want quick responses to their inquiries, easy returns without guilt trips, and real humans, not just chatbots, prioritizing customer satisfaction can help boost sales significantly. If your customer service people are well trained and responsive, they can easily turn angry customers into raving fans just by handling complaints well. That’s powerful stuff for boosting sales.

3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

Presently, over 70% of shoppers are doing so via mobile devices particularly smart phones. So, if your website is not optimized to work perfectly on phones, chances are, you’re quite literally throwing money away on lost sales. Optimizing your website to work perfectly on phones can literally double your conversion rate within a short while. Once in a while, always test the accessibility of your website on your own phone. If by doing so you encounter serious challenges, it is a pointer to what your customers go through. Arrange to fix the problem as quickly as possible then watch out for your conversion rates percentages.

4. Get Your Business on Social Media 

Many popular social media platforms are equipped with in-house marketing tools you can always take advantage of. Hugely popular social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are now legitimate sales channels, and smart eCommerce businesses are cashing in big time. The trick to marketing on social media is to always create content consistently that doesn’t appear like advertising. The aim is to get meaningful engagement on your content and draw more users to it. The key is quality content appearing consistently and really authentic. This is what attracts users to your content and to engage with it.

5. Use Analytics Data to Drive Sales

You cannot be right all the time if you rely on your gut feelings to market online. Your best bet then is to rely on analytics data. Google Analytics is free and tells you everything you need to know about your website visitors. Which pages do they love? Where do they bail out? What products do they actually buy versus what you think they should buy? If you market on social media, the in-house analytics tools on each platform are also very helpful. It is advisable to start with simple metrics. You can easily track your most popular pages and products. Discover exactly where people drop off in your sales funnel. You can test different headlines, images, and prices, and pay attention to seasonal trends. Above all, don’t just collect data—you must actually rely on and use the data to make important business decisions.

Final Words

Boosting eCommerce sales isn’t exactly very difficult if you know what you are doing. Once you have in place a website that works, user-friendly, mobile optimized, and functions well, you are good to go. Having the business on social media that engages real people is also important. Next is to habitually make data-driven decisions and have in place an effective customer service that makes people want to come back to your business. This is what significantly drives conversions and sales over a prolonged period of time. 

7 Strategic Ways to Build Customer Loyalty in eCommerce

Acquiring and retaining customers is inevitable for any successful eCommerce business. Even though acquiring a new customer significantly costs more than keeping an existing one, many eCommerce business owners still like to throw good money into ads particularly on social media. Many while doing so completely ignore the customers already in their database. This is not a good strategy for many reasons. Marketers have learned that customer loyalty isn't built through discount codes or points programs alone even though they don't hurt. Fact is, lasting customer loyalty comes from deliberately creating experiences that make people feel understood, valued, and genuinely excited to be part of a brand's story. Because of this, eCommerce businesses that manage to build good customer loyalty aren't necessarily the ones that spend biggest on ads. They're the ones who've managed to figure out how to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to strengthen a mutually beneficial relationship. Building customer loyalty trumps all the strategies. Here are some 7 tips on how it can be done:

1. Make Everything Feel Seamless

When things are really seamless in your eCommerce website, your customers shouldn't have to think about how to interact with your brand. Irrespective of whether your customers are shopping on mobile, calling customer service, or engaging on social media, their experiences should feel consistent and effortless. Your website should be so optimized as to make the customer experience feel cohesive and smooth. For instance, if someone emails your support team about an order they placed on your website, that rep should have their full purchase history and preferences at their fingertips if your services are fully integrated. You can render faster and better services to your customers because of this. On this core, integration matters much more than innovation.

2. Build a Responsive Community

You can deliberately build a responsive community and not just a customer base. This will enable your best customers feel like they're part of something bigger than a transaction. By creating real opportunities for them to connect with each other and with your brand beyond merely buying things, it helps with customer loyalty. Such opportunities can be as simple as a Facebook group where customers share tips, or as elaborate as exclusive special events and workshops if you are so inclined. The key is to create the ideal spaces where your brand can effectively facilitate beneficial connections rather than merely selling products/services.

3. Use Analytics Data to Show You Care

You can effectively use analytics data to render personalized services to customers through segmentation. Personalization on this score isn't about stuffing someone's first name into an email subject line. It's about demonstrating that you've been paying attention to how they interact with your brand.  You can build customer loyalty faster this way because customers will feel seen and cared about instead of just being marketed to. For good results, you can for instance segment your audience by purchase behavior, engagement level, or product preferences. After this, you can then carefully craft marketing messages that acknowledge exactly where your customers are in their relationship with your brand.

4. Turn Your Brand into a Great Story
 
You can by deliberate efforts turn your brand into a great story worth being part of. Technically, most people don't just buy products. Many always buy into identities and stories. So, most brands that really inspire fierce loyalty are almost always those brands that have figured out how to make their customers the heroes of their brand story. You can try to figure out exactly what story does being your customer tell about anyone. Exactly what identity does it reinforce? With such vital info, you can then weave this narrative through every piece of marketing communication you put out in your business. It helps build customer loyalty.

5. Give Your Team Ample Room to Act

Customer service is one hugely important service business rely on to build customer loyalty. Significantly, it is exactly where most businesses make very costly mistakes. Instead of training their customer service people to operate with human touch, they tie their hands with scripts and policies that make it virtually impossible for them to actually solve problems and create an amazing customer experience. Well trained, polite and freely operating customer service teams are really helpful to build customer loyalty.

6. Be Proactive About Customer Concerns

A brand that is proactive about customer concerns can build customer loyalty faster. Such brands don't just respond to issues, they anticipate them. They rely on real time analytics data to predict customer behavior. If for instance you notice customers typically have questions about sizing after ordering, you can send a proactive email with fit guides. If on the other hand your shipping typically takes longer during peak season, you can communicate this expectation upfront and offer updates along the way. Such proactive customer concerns help a great deal to build customer loyalty.

7. Carefully Map Every Single Touchpoint
 
You must carefully identify the right touchpoints in the customer journey. That’s where your focus should be since loyalty lives mostly in the mundane moments that happen after a sale is made. If you miss these points, your business will continue to hemorrhage customers nonstop. Never fail to maintain contact with your customers immediately after purchase trying to find out how the touchpoints you’ve identified can help the customer journey better. Endeavor to map everything—from the thank you page to the packaging experience to the support ticket process. This is really important because every touchpoint is either building customer loyalty, or significantly eroding it.