Regardless of what products a company sells online, e-commerce website sales are can always be improved. To have increasing sales online, website operators and marketers must analyze, run reports, and make adjustments accordingly. Without the proper intelligence and understood intelligence, it is difficult to make improvements to increase sales with a website.
Conversion optimization is a technique used by marketers to apply best practices and very specific tools for each website and product being sold to increase sales conversions. Website design is improved; navigation, checkout processes, and other tools are used to get the job done.
Here are 10 tips for increasing e-commerce website sales and conversion.
1. Get a Responsive Design Website and Online Store
If companies do not allow their customers and potential customers to shop with ease via tablets and smart phones, they are loosing over 50% of potential business. This trend will just continue, making responsive design a must.
2. Decrease Shopping Cart Abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment is a common challenge for any e-commerce website. Marketers must engage in recovery, re-targeting, and third party services that help recover abandon checkouts to decrease the percentage.
3. Use Social Media to Drive Sales
Social media channels such as Pinterest, YouTube and Facebook are key social platforms amongst others to drive online sales with e-commerce websites. They must be setup correctly and managed for best results and increase in sales.
4. Run Giveaways and Contests
Companies should run contests and giveaways to stimulate an increase in online sales. These giveaways and contests can be promoted across many channels and through content marketing to get the best results.
5. Offer Discounts that are Time Sensitive
Companies that operate websites with e-commerce to increase sales can offer discounts. Time sensitive discounts can be seasonal such as Thanksgiving, Valentine’s and other holidays.
6. Display and ask for Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are some of the best methods to increase conversion rates for e-commerce websites. This is an important practice and expected by consumers these days.
7. Run Reports and Statistics Frequently
Flying blind is never a good idea. This is also true with e-commerce sales and conversion. The use and proper understanding of reports, statistics, and analysis of store pages, home page, and other landing pages for online sales is critical.
8. Improve Website Design
Quality and detailed website design is one of the most important ways to improve conversion and increase online sales. Taking short cuts here is never good. Cheap, broken, and poorly managed websites and designs decrease sales and conversion.
9. Simplify Checkout Process
Checkout processes are an important area that has to be reviewed and improved for higher conversions and increased sales. Simplifying the checkout process, letting customers know where they are during it, and other tools should be implemented.
10. Get Customer Feedback
Always a great practice is to simply ask the customers for feedback. Honest feedback can be collected from customers to strategically improve shopper’s experience. Reach out to customers and open up communication.
These tips to increase sales online and improve conversion of e-commerce website design are for any size operation and business. Regardless of size and product sold, these are the best practices. Online sales are growing rapidly worldwide.
According to eMarketer’s latest forecasts, worldwide business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce sales will increase by 20.1% this year to reach $1.500 trillion. Growth will come primarily from the rapidly expanding online and mobile user bases in emerging markets, increases in m-commerce sales, advancing shipping and payment options, and the push into new international markets by major brands.
Marketers, brands, and website operators who can keep their operations optimized for conversion, will benefit the most from this growing trend. Online sales can continue to grow for companies that sell via e-commerce websites, if the right decisions are made as well as improvements.
The largest benefit for improving sales online for e-commerce stores through conversion optimization is that they generate immediate increase in sales without additional resources for marketing and sales efforts. Any improvement can be a significant increase in sales and profitability.
Companies that are not sure how to go about such improvements, have the option to get help through marketing consulting services. This can easily be the best method to create the change necessary to increase sales, but also avoid costly mistakes.