With the variety of e-commerce tools available to entrepreneurs and business owners today, there really are endless opportunities to make a good living through online sales. However, it is no longer enough just to post a few or several products on a website and wait for them to sell themselves.
Today, strategy is as important as quality in terms of finding out what works best to increase online sales for your products or services. In this post, learn about 5 effective online sales-boosting tactics that are also free!
1. Feature Just One Product On Uour Website Store’s Home Page
This is a technique that can work very well if you have one product that consistently seems to outsell the rest.
In what is becoming a rarity in the online world, this is also one instance where more text rather than less can work in your favor to make the sale.
By featuring a large graphic or photo of the featured product, along with additional descriptive text to answer frequent customer questions and outline how the product works, you strip the immediate purchase options away to just one key product.
If sales of the featured product increase after you make this switch, this is your clue to try more of this with some of your less-strong selling products.
If you are hesitant to feature just one product, you can split the page between 2 or 3 products to see which products and positions seem to work best to increase sales.
2. Be Sure Your Site Navigation Leads Shoppers Towards Checkout
If you have ever been on a website where one click seems to lead you ever further into an online maze with no exit in sight, you already know how important site navigation can be to sales outcomes.
For best results, you want as few barriers between the moment a shopper adds one of your products to their online cart and the moment they check out (i.e. enter their payment and shipping information to finalize the sale).
You can test this by having a friend or family member visit your site to make a test purchase. If they get confused about where to go and what to do, you know what is standing between you and stronger online sales – and you also know what you need to do to fix it and increase online sales.
3. Be Specific, Honest And Personal In Your Sales Pitch
The actual shopping and checkout experience may seem more impersonal than ever before, but this is what makes a personalized approach stand out so visibly from the rest.
By offering un-edited user reviews and ratings, sharing your vision behind the products you sell, responding promptly to any concerns, questions or complaints and other personal touches can boost trust, which in turn can boost online sales.
You can also deliver a personal touch through the language you choose to use. For example, using first person pronouns (me, my, I) instead of second person (you, yours) can move the shopper closer to the sale using subtle ownership psychology (i.e. “Yes! Sign Me Up!” versus “You can sign up here.”).
4. Make Strategic Use Of Color
There is a reason advertising and marketing strategists spend weeks or months debating the tiniest details of a new logo or product label – font type and size, colors, choice of mascot – each of these choices could potentially make the difference between more sales or fewer.
In fact, an estimated 90 percent of impulse opinions formed about products are made based on viewing color. That is a high percentage, especially when you factor in the total visual bombardment that is the Internet today!
When your store is online, the same holds true for the colors you choose. Color psychology is a growing focus for marketers for precisely this reason.
Since there is no guaranteed method you can use to know which colors your shoppers will respond best to, the best approach is to simply alternate colors and see if sales increase. If you are not sure where to start, try changing your “buy” buttons to an orange color (it seems to work for Amazon and eBay).
5. Blog About Your Products Online
While there are all kinds of ways to get fancy on your e-commerce webpage, and each of these tactics may increase sales, this will only work if people even know your store exists.
Blogging is still one of the most powerful ways to put the word out about what you have to sell and why it is worth buying. Blogging also gives you a way to produce free, sharable content that generates free publicity and marketing for your products. And blogging offers the chance to network in a wider community of collaborators where you can cross-promote to increase sales online for everyone.
Blogging also allows you to begin collecting email addresses that you can compile into a database of prospects and customers who express interest in learning more about what you have to offer. Many email management systems offer free trials and also free memberships for users who have a limited number of emails in their database. This gives you the perfect way to develop an email newsletter without spending a penny.
These 5 totally free proven sales-boosting tactics prove that you don’t have to spend any money to start making more money. What you do need to do is keep an open, creative mind about trying out small changes that can produce big sales returns.
If you have already built your website and your online e-commerce store is already up and running, now is the perfect time to start trying out these 5 tactics to see what works best to convert your browsers into buyers. By combining blogging with site color and navigational changes and analyzing the results, you will begin to get a sense of what generates increases in online sales.