If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking for ways to increase your online sales in your ecommerce store. Well there’s that, and then there’s the fact that I’m just so gosh darn hip that you hang on every word I say. Probably the first one.
That’s ok, no hard feelings. I understand if all you want to do is increase your online sales. After all, this is the Entrepreneurial Daddy, and we’re all about making you some moolah.
So the question is…
How Can You Increase Your Online Sales?
Getting people to buy your stuff online really isn’t as hard as you might think. Sure their are a bazillion sites online and half of them rank higher than you do in the almighty Google search. Although ranking high in a search is powerful, it’s not everything.
If you follow a few simple little rules, you’ll have people clicking that Add To Cart button over and over again, and with a smile on their face.
Simplicity Rules
Here’s the deal. No matter how cool you think your ecommerce store looks with all those insane colors, auto playing videos, flashing badges, and crazy fonts, that crap is distracting. It’s sensory overload from the second anyone lands on your site.
Think about it. Why are you trying to drive traffic to your ecommerce store. Is it to WOW people with your amazing visions of coolness or is it to get people to click that buy button? You don’t have to make it incredibly boring, but it should be so blatantly obvious what they should do next that they’re surfing through your stores categories in seconds.
And while we’re on the topic of keeping it simple, lets talk about…
Site Navigation
If you really want to increase your online sales in your ecommerce store , cleaning up and simplifying your category navigation is a quick and easy way to start getting some results.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your making it easier for your customers to shop by having every single little category and subcategory all broken down and listed on your sidebar.
It’s not making anything easier. All its doing is adding clutter that causes your shopper to start over thinking before they’ve even put anything in there cart. You definitely want to have well organized categories and subcategories, but you only need to have your root (main) categories on your ecommerce store front page.
Awesome Product Descriptions
This is where a lot online stores fall short and I can totally relate to it too. Because honestly, most of you are like me. You have an online store (or a few) and you also handle just about every aspect of running it. As simple as ecommerce is, there’s still a lot i’s to dot and t’s to cross. Writing descriptions for products doesn’t exactly seem like the most exciting thing to do especially when the wholesaler and your competition already have descriptions that you can just “borrow”, right?
Using the exact descriptions from other sites is a HUGE mistake. It doesn’t help you rank higher than whoever you took them from, shoppers will notice the duplicate content and think your a second rate copy cat, and you’ll only loose any credibility of being an authority in your niche.
Sound harsh? It supposed to.
There’s no harm in checking out the descriptions from the #1 competitor of your ecommerce store.
- How are there descriptions formatted
- What keywords are they using in the descriptions
- Are they linking to other products in there descriptions
Find out what they’re doing and do it better and in your store’s own voice.
And The Sell Go’s On
What do you do after someone clicks the buy button and you get that “you’ve got money” email?
You send them a receipt for their purchase and a download link or tracking information depending on what type of product it is, at least I hope you do. Do you have any contact with them after that other than any mistakes made or shipping questions?
Your ecommerce store is the ultimate list builder. Every time you make a sell, you collect another email address. This is where you can start creating those raving fans I’m always talking about. If you’re not reaching out to these people, you’re missing out on a HUGE opportunity to stay in customers top of mind.
The Raving Fan Formula
Like I mentioned above, emailing your list of customers, after the sale, is what turns them from a random customer to a Raving Fan who will spread the word of your ecommerce store to everyone they know.
Email marketing is a key part of the formula to increasing your online sales. They key here, is to not actually do any selling.
Huh?
Yep. No selling. At least not in the obvious sense.
This is your chance to get freaky with creating cool content around the products you sell. If you think of each email as an individual lesson it’ll make it easier to not sound sellsy to the reader. The goal is to educate and inform your customer about whatever market your in.
Let’s say you have an ecommerce store that sells fight gear and someone bought some boxing gloves from you.
You could follow up with them by sending some instructional videos on how work out with a punching bag correctly (yes there is a correct way), and then you could let them know about some top name fighters that use those gloves (tickle the ego a little), and then maybe let them know about new gear that’ll be coming out soon (build up some anticipation). Notice how I’m never saying, “Hey you, look what I’ve got on sale. Buy it now!”.
It’s ok to send out sales and special offers but ONLY after you’ve hit their social triggers and removed any walls they’ve built to keep out the sales vulchers.
How’s your ecommerce store looking?
Are you applying any of these methods? How did they increase your online sales?
