Boost Your Online Sales: 5 Techniques That Work

We’re constantly being told that we can make a high income just from selling products in the comfort of our own home. However, the eCommerce industry is insanely competitive.

You’ve probably seen the stats – 80% of eCommerce stores fail within the first 18 months. It’s a high number, and the truth is that without sales your online business won’t succeed either. It will become just another statistic.

Sales are King.

But as well as asking who your customers are, you also need to be asking how you’re going to convince them to shop in your store and choose to buy from you. In this article, we take a look at how to boost the sales of any eCommerce store with these 5 techniques that work regardless of what you’re selling, and who you’re selling to.

1. Develop An SEO Strategy

It doesn’t matter who you are on the Internet these days, without a strong SEO strategy, you will struggle for visibility on search engines such as Google.

Customers might well be looking for you, and you might have the exact product they need and are willing to buy. But unless you make it easy for them to find you, your paths will never cross and they’ll shop elsewhere.

While Facebook ads are a good way of drumming up interest and attracting customers, SEO is still the best (and arguably most cost-effective) way to drive organic traffic to your site and boost sales.

A strong SEO strategy improves your ranking on Google, helping you climb up the search results. If your SEO strategy is absolutely amazing, you might even find yourself dominating the search engines.

Once there, your potential conversion traffic goes up. What this means is that, if one of your keywords is ranking #1, there is a good chance that you will eat up all the traffic for that keyword.

Not sure how to develop a good SEO strategy? At Boostability, we’re all about SEO. We help you increase visibility and profits, and we offer a free website analysis and SEO consultation.

2. An Easy-To-Use, Presentable Website

SEO is only one piece of the puzzle. SEO makes your site visible and attracts people to your store. But unless your store is easy to use, navigate and looks presentable, your bounce rate will be high.

In other words, customers will be bolting out of there in a matter of seconds and all your SEO efforts (and money) will be in vain.

Web design is critical to the success of an eCommerce store. It can make or break your company by catching the attention of a prospect for the right or wrong reasons.

As well as having a website that clearly looks professional and trustworthy, you also need to make sure that your website is responsive (works on all devices, especially mobile), and presentable.

For example, how easy is it for customers to find the shopping cart? Is it visible? And how about the type of products you sell? Is it easy for customers to know what niche this is?

3. Manage Your Inventory Properly

Running any business is a balancing act between having too little inventory and too much. Have one of either, and you have a cash flow situation on your hands. Too much inventory can mean you run out of money super fast, while too little means you miss out on the opportunity to make money.

Successful online businesses know that to succeed they have to get smart about their inventory. You can do this, too. There are inventory apps that help, such as these ones on Shopify. Stocky Inventory Management, for example, helps you to cut out the guess work and instead know which stock to order.

It also helps you to focus on metrics such as average order size, product categories, as well as value per visit.

And when it comes to managing your inventory, metrics help hugely as they arm you with the right knowledge to make better decisions about your stock.

4. Get On Board With Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence sounds scary and daunting. Not scary in the sense that robots are going to take over the planet (although, yes, that sounds scary too), but scary in the sense that many of us still think AI sounds too complex for us to get to grips with.

We’re just running a small eCommerce store, do we really need to get robots involved?

It isn’t actually that daunting at all. Rather, AI is here to assist your online business and boost your sales by making things even easier.

One thing eCommerce stores struggle with is personalization. How do we learn more about specific customers so that we can recommend products that they’re likely to buy? This is where the robots come in. Thanks to deep learning algorithms, AI can gather together enough information on your shoppers to recommend them something they’re likely to purchase. This boosts conversions and sales.

Amazon, for example, are pros at personalization. They recommend items that are usually bought together, increasing the likelihood of the customer viewing them making multiple purchases.

And how about chatbots? Chatbots helpfully talk to your customers when you can’t, keeping them in your store and solving their problems. The potential of AI is limitless, and you should start incorporating it into your online store.

5. Use Facebook Ads

Skeptical about Facebook ads? Don’t be. According to AdWeek, the average ROI from a Facebook ad is a whopping 152% for eCommerce stores.

Facebook ads do cost money. But if you’re focused on the long-term, you can develop a strategy using them that boosts your sales.

There are a few ways you can use Facebook ads to your advantage. It’s always a good idea to offer an incentive, such as urgency. People are more likely to take action if an offer is about to expire in the next few hours.

Use trigger words in your ads too, such as “new” or “cheap.”

It’s also a good idea to prequalify your leads so that the only people clicking the ads and coming to your store are more likely to make a purchase. You can do this by displaying the price of your product and listing the target market in your ad.

Get Help from the SEO Experts

These are 5 online sales techniques that work and can help increase your online presence and visibility. Follow them consistently and it shouldn’t be too long before you see results. Boostability is a leading provider of white label SEO services with partners located around the world. We have been helping our partners deliver results to their clients with our data-driven strategies for over a decade. In addition to that, our Sales Support team helps teach partners how to sell SEO effectively and successfully close on more deals. Check out our SEO program and see if it’s the right fit for your agency!