Once you get your eCommerce store up and running your main target should be to increase eCommerce sales. But how can you do that more efficiently when you’re already way past your thousand orders per month, yet revenue seems to stagger? Why does it stagger in the first place? Well, it usually happens during the checkout process, which leads to cart abandonment. No Facebook ad can help you increase your conversion rates if your customers abandon the shopping process seconds before the last step of the sales funnel. What’s there to be done?
Fortunately, plenty. There are countless ways to increase eCommerce sales and your conversion rates – also don’t forget that customer retention always pays off better in the long run than customer acquisition. Optimize your sales funnel, especially during the checkout process, to avoid cart abandonment. Think larger, social media-wise. Go beyond Facebook ads, explore other channels. All these and more will be detailed during the following article meant to enhance your eCommerce store, starting with the mention of a powerful tool that can help you do so: REVEAL.
Reveal may very well be the best option for eCommerce stores that have to handle thousands and thousands of orders per month. Customer lifetime value optimization, customer analytics, and retention optimization – with the integration of Reveal, all of these become much clearer in your quest to increase eCommerce revenue as quickly and budget-efficiently as possible.
Reveal, as a CVO (Customer Value Optimization) platform, helps you thoroughly monitor and manage your customers’ behavior so that you know at all times what’s currently most profitable and for whom, exactly. It uses intelligent RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) segmentation and offers cohort analysis features. With it, you can easily extract actionable insights from your customer data. It has plenty of features for increasing eCommerce profitability, such as CLV tracking to determine how long it takes to get the investment back after acquiring a customer or the Average Retention Rate which reveals the exact percentage of customers that ordered more than once.
But for now, let’s focus on the first thing you need to do to increase eCommerce Revenue. Once this step is taken care of, we will gladly reveal more tips that can help increase your eCommerce revenue.
Targeting Your Market
Understanding your customers is the first step towards proper market targeting, and Reveal helps a great deal when it comes to realistic market and customer knowledge. You need to know how to reach out to your target market, understand what they truly want in a product or service, and find out how they usually search for what they want to increase eCommerce sales.
Reveal can be used to track each of these RFM groups and offers insights about the Share of Margin per customer type, the Share of Margin per RFM group, and what’s best, the likelihood of your customers placing their next order.
To be able to target your market in even more depth, you can also derive information about the Average Customer Lifespan, the Customer Retention Rate, the Profit Margin per Customer, the Rate of Discount, or the Average Customer Value per selected interval.
You can use all of this powerful info at your disposal to confidently delve into the following eCommerce revenue increase strategies.
Focus on repeat customers
Customer acquisition is less budget-efficient than retaining your current customer database. Try to rather concentrate your efforts on your customer retention strategy. Why is that?
It’s simple, first of all, repeat customers almost always tend to spend increasingly more on each following purchase. Second, repeat customers spend more at key financial times than a new customer would, for example – because trust is already built, in one form or another. Third, repeat customers are the most likely to shop with you again, thus remaining loyal and again.
Reveal’s cohort analysis enables you to keep track of these repeat purchases and customer loyalty levels. At the cohort or customer level, you can see in real-time how many orders were placed and obviously, which products increased your eCommerce revenue the most.
The repeat customers are the obvious key to a more profitable business so try to spend more resources on building long-term relationships with them. Email or message them whenever you have a new campaign/product/service. Ideally with a custom written message.
Optimize your Customer Lifetime Value strategy
Get more valuable customers for a more profitable e-store.
Use Video to Increase Sales
We live in a world that is dominated by images and videos. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the power of the word has diminished, it only means that you should shift your focus more towards video marketing because video leads to increased online sales.
Sometimes, videos can sell up to 6 times more efficiently than classic print and online ads. If you manage to create a good video ad for your product or service, you also always have the chance to get viral which instantly increases your company’s sales and overall revenue.
Usual video strategies employ a mix of storytelling and realistic product showcase which triggers the feeling of being entertained. Round them up with some educational videos that add direct value to your product and you’re off to some great conversion boosts!
Improve product descriptions
A product description should, first and foremost, tie a person’s needs to the product’s solutions, not the other way around, else you may end up with bragging about the features of a product that no one wants or has a use for it. Yes, the word Description concerning a Product acts trickier than it seems. It’s not as much about describing your product as about making customers relate to it to understand that they need it.
As always, it all starts with paying attention to your customers.
There are questions that you should ask yourself regarding the tone of writing that you should use when targeting specific audiences, even though the need may be the same. Should the description be lighthearted or should it be extremely direct?
This will always depend on what you are selling and what your potential buyer finds more or less engaging.
Make Use of product reviews
As stated earlier, product reviews matter a whole lot when it comes to adding value to your product – especially when they come in the form of easy to understand, relatable video formats.
Of course, we can’t all start doing videos for each and every aspect or each and every product, more often than not we’re dealing with hundreds, if not thousands of products. We’d end up spending more than our marketing budget allows us to, and the point of increasing eCommerce revenue would be wasted on our business.
Instead, you should focus on creating a set of genuine product reviews that best showcase certain products that you want to come into the customer’s attention. Pro-tip: Add a FAQ to add even more product value.
Create Bundles and Offers. Use Coupons and Deals. Offer referral discounts.
Making a good first impression is very important when acquiring new customers, but when it comes to retaining them, which as we stated, is the safest and most cost-effective way to increase your eCommerce revenue, that first impression is not enough. You need to constantly meet your customer expectations. The best ways to do this is by creating bundles and offers, using coupons and deals, and offering referral discounts.
All these small bonuses keep your customers loyal and increase repeat orders by a great deal. Bundling (especially Create Your Bundle programs) benefits both shoppers and businesses. Shoppers get their much-desired discounts, ergo, the incentive to buy and businesses increase their AOV.
Coupons and deals also help keep your customer base happy and loyal. By the way, having a customer loyalty program should be a priority for your shop. Loyalty programs are an excellent way to engage your customers.
Finally, if you are confident enough to offer great referral rewards (especially double-sided ones, where both the sender and the new member benefit from), it will be your business which benefits MOST. You draw more conversions and turn your loyal customers into helping hands. You grow your business with minimal loss. Win-win.
Use Urgency and Scarcity
When it comes to using Urgency and Scarcity as selling principles, business leaders have to make good decisions about how to allocate resources so that they don’t make their entire business model look like an ample con device.
In marketing, scarcity is used to employ the sensation of product/service shortage, which encourages a possible customer to act (buy) faster. There are two main types of scarcity:
● The quantity-related scarcity, which sounds a bit like – Only X more products left available!
● The time-related scarcity (also called Urgency) – Our offer is available until X!
Scarce items generate a whole lot more attractiveness, but using scarcity and urgency properly remains a difficult subject for any serious business. Overusing them or using them falsely will lead to the opposite of revenue increase, it will directly decrease sales and perhaps more important for the future, even the business’ reputation.
Optimize Shopping funnels
The shopping funnel is the actual upon which a potential customer is set as they move towards becoming a proper, converted, customer. This is strongly tied to the Customer Journey concept, where point A would be the customer landing on your site and point Z would be him making a meaningful purchase. The shopping funnel keeps track of everything between A and Z, namely the pages customers visit until conversion. Optimizing your shopping funnels is crucial for customer satisfaction and will increase your eCommerce revenue.
Optimization at every stage of the funnel improves the actual number of people you drive towards conversion. Optimizing your shopping funnel puts the focus on your customers, which, in turn, increases conversions and improves customer experience. The objective of optimizing shopping funnels is to improve the conversion rate at each stage of the funnel so that more customers make it through the full funnel.
Always take care of every step of the customer journey, from the landing pages all the way (and perhaps especially to!) the checkout process, where most users take up to sudden cart abandonment.
Mobile optimization
Smartphone ownership is no longer something of the past – almost everybody on the planet has at least one smartphone and their performance grows tremendously year after year. People spend hours a day casually browsing their smartphones. Why wouldn’t your online store profit from this?
With this growing popularity of smartphones comes a great responsibility: making mobile shopping become an extremely solid choice when it comes to eCommerce. As such, eCommerce sales sites have to condense their main website and deliver it in a format suitable for any mobile operating system.
Furthermore, constant optimization must be held within grasp to increase sales performance. Hardware performance is great, but software optimization, more often than not, isn’t. Managing registries and store locations lookups, keeping easy tabs on featured products and gift cards must be made as simple and efficient as possible, else you can lose customers on the shopping funnel.
Try to increase your page’s loading speed, and most importantly, personalize the mobile shopping experience – geolocation tags with features like Stores Near You, are all brilliant uses of modern-day technology.
Make Use of Social Media
One simple Facebook Ad can go a long way.
For years now, social media has become (and will remain) an amazing marketing tool for almost any kind of eCommerce online sales business. To properly take advantage of it and increase your revenues, you first have to create specific content that will target specific customer categories and make them empathetic. By addressing a particular topic for your customers, they will more clearly feel understood and can be targeted in the future as a safe custom audience.
However, regardless of the approach, topic, and channel, always use keywords in your social media series of posts. Hashtags help to target the right audience A LOT. Thus, first research which hashtags can bring your audience closer. The next step is never to forget that social media = sharing. Share content that will add value, don’t spam people to buy your products. This will only have negative effects.
Social media groups, polls, and partnerships with influencers will help you both understand social media better AND increase your marketing performance and conversions over time. Your social media campaigns must be focused on whatever channel brings you most conversions. Depending on your products or services, you may be better off focusing on Facebook or Instagram or Youtube or Tik Tok – rarely all of them at once, unless it’s the channel testing phase.
The same goes for all the other strategies suggested during this article, so the most important pro-tip would be to ALWAYS stay in tune both with your product and services AND your current or future customers. That way, you will maximize the profit during every situation.
However, regardless of your chosen strategies and the time and resources you are willing to use to implement them and increase your eCommerce revenue, Reveal is your steady ally, ready to offer you all the accurate information you will ever need to grow your business.
