If you have been in any business for some time now, you will know that nothing grows on its own. For a business to develop and progress further, you constantly need to take measures and work hard towards it. Year 2016 is almost over and it’s time for New Year resolutions.
If one of your resolutions for 2017 include increasing the performance of your online store and take it to the next level, we have some ideas for you. These are all tried and tested methods that have been proven to be effective by the industry. So even though you would have already taken care of some of these measures, there is no harm in revisiting them and making sure if nothing is left out.
So here are 5 proven ways to increase your store revenue in 2016.
Social Media Promotions
Apart from a medium for people to interact, social media has now evolved as a medium for businesses to reach the masses. But a few straight posts aren’t enough if you really want to make a mark. Social media platforms can be utilized in many different ways to further increase your ecommerce sales and revenues.
The customers who receive free products or really cheap products from you never tend to forget you; in fact it leads to positive publicity from them. So, you can run contests and giveaways on these platforms to attract attention to your store. Furthermore, you can use platforms like Facebook stores from where you can sell directly without diverting your customers to the site. Social media platforms also have different groups where you can post various product promotions according to the interests of the bunch.
Improved Site Performance
People are shifting to online shopping because they want to save their time and efforts and when they have so many options available, slow performance of an ecommerce site can cost it a significant number of customers. Improve the performance of your site not only in terms of the page load speed but every function and step that starts when your customers first click on your website, to the time they check out. Increased performance also leads your customers to spend more time on the store and hence increasing the chances of conversion from each customer.
Uncomplicated Website
You might want to offer a lot to your customers on a single page and direct them to many things but make sure that you are not cluttering your page in the process. It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can do while designing your store. The best way to attract more sales and revenue for your business is to keep your store minimalist. You are not Amazon, so don’t follow Amazon and make your product pages complicated.
Minimalism is the flavor of the season and will be more trendy in 2017. Though you shouldn’t compromise on essential elements like product descriptions, reviews, and other important things, but make sure it’s not scattered all over the page. Keep it simple and easy to scroll through. A sorted out website attracts more customers than one which appears to be messy. Design your website with the goal ‘Simple is classy’ and you will see it reflected in your revenue records.
The good old email marketing
Well e-mails are an old enough concept so what’s so special about it to make it to the list? Even though it’s old, it is still the most effective digital marketing channel to get your products sold. What makes this channel effective is how you are utilizing your promotional mails to increase your ecommerce stores’ sales. There are a lot of innovative ways of sending emails to your subscribers and customers which leads to conversion.
For your returning visitors who haven’t bought yet, you can send out stock out reminders to let them know that the products they are interested in will be out-of-stock soon. It’s mostly for things like cosmetics, kitchen stuff, dog food, toiletries, etc. Another way is to send out urgency emails is by using words like ‘now’, ‘till midnight’, ‘last day’, etc. It instills a sort of urgency in the reader and websites clicks are triggered which increases the chances for conversion. You can also send out reminders for abandoned carts. You can also provide some offer to bring them back to your store.
Email automation is one of the fastest growing areas of digital marketing and there is no reason why your should not adopt it too, to increase the effectiveness of your emails using action triggers to send out email at the right time, to the right people.
Customer Reviews
You must have heard about it earlier as well but if you haven’t worked on it yet, it’s time you became serious about customers reviews. Customer reviews work as recommendations real people and hence are very crucial for your sales. Reviews can make or break the performance your products. To persuade your customers to review the products they buy, offer them tiny discounts or reward points. Positive feedback by previous customers is one of the best ways to increase your product sales.
So how many of the above tactics are you already working on? All these are proven ways to increase your sales and can’t go wrong if adopted with proper strategy. New Year bells are ringing; ensure that you make it happy for your store too!
This article is contributed by Maulik Shah, the founder & CEO of Biztech IT Consultancy Pvt Ltd., one of the leading web design and Development Companies in India. He also runs Biztech Blog, where he shares insights from the world of ecommerce and other web based technologies.
