You analyzed the latest sales report, and the numbers aren’t as good as you wish. Now, you feel the pressure and search for new ways to increase your eCommerce sales faster. However, you don’t want to trade quality over quantity. Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.
We want to help you harvest the low-hanging fruits to generate sales faster while keeping the long-term goals in mind because we’re sure you want more spikes in the revenue report. You need sales that bring new high-potential customers and consolidate your relationships with existing loyal customers.
Reasons Why You Can’t Increase eCommerce Sales
You need more than a great product or service to make people interested in your offer. Customers expect excellent experiences during their online shopping sessions and while using your products or services.
If you have problems increasing eCommerce sales, you need to take a step back, analyze historical transactional data, and determine which of the following issues your business has:
You don’t know who your ideal customers are
“Everyone who needs our products is our customer” will not work no matter how much budget you spend on ads and customer acquisition. If you don’t know who your ideal customers are, you will attract nothing else but deal hunters, who leave you as soon as they see a better price elsewhere.
Your eCommerce website is not optimized for fast sales
If you’re generating enough traffic to your website and product page but don’t generate enough sales with this traffic, you might have problems with your sales funnel. A complicated checkout process, unclear prices and costs, and lack of persuasive copywriting affect your conversion rates.
Your online presence doesn’t help with building trust
People new to your brand will search for social proof before purchasing from your website. A lack of reviews, testimonials, and other user-generated content types will make people leave your site without buying. Any friction that adds to the micro-moments of an online shopping session scares people away.
You’re not using email marketing effectively
You won’t get more sales if you’re sending only sales-oriented emails. Your target audience and existing customers expect personalized experiences, a mix of educational content, and product recommendations that reflect their wants and needs.
Your paid ads messaging is off
You need to identify the problem customers are trying to solve by buying a product or service from your store. How are you going to capture that in one punchy copy line? If your paid ads messaging is off, you can’t expect people to click or generate good conversion rates.
Your customer support team has low performance
Potential customers might have many questions about your offer while still browsing your website. Existing customers might be annoyed by your sales messages while their latest ticket hasn’t been resolved yet. Poor customer service is a major problem that drags your sales and reputation down.
Your delivery time isn’t clear or is too long
Who wants to order from an online store that isn’t transparent with its delivery time? While not all stores can promise fast delivery, what they can do is eliminate the delivery objection by offering additional benefits that make the waiting more bearable.
If you want to achieve your sales goals, you must start with a thorough understanding of your website performance and concentrate your efforts on converting those people who are most likely to become your customers.
10 Ways to Increase eCommerce Sales Fast
Ecommerce businesses with a customer-centric approach have higher chances of achieving better sales faster. We’ve gathered some of the best ways to boost your sales quickly while keeping your margins and customer satisfaction high.
1. Apply RFM segmentation for more targeted marketing campaigns
RFM segmentation is used by companies that want to become more customer-centric and realize that customer behavior is the main driver of demand.
You already have access to all the data you need for RFM segmentation. You attribute a score to each customer based on recency, frequency, and monetary values; then, you create segments depending on their scores.
How does this help increase sales fast? Their scores indicate their current status and what type of marketing campaigns you should apply to drive new orders.
You can use RFM segments to reach the right people with the right message at the perfect time, and maximize the potential of your acquisition, onboarding, churn prevention, and reactivation campaigns.
> Learn how to use RFM-based marketing strategies for your eCommerce store and boost conversion rates based on an in-depth understanding of customer behavior.
2. Attract better new customers using lookalike audiences
If you want to increase online sales generated by new customers with long-term retention, you should create lookalike audiences based on your existing top customers.
You might be familiar with this recommendation from Facebook guidelines: “You may get better results depending on your goals if you use an audience made from your best customers rather than one that includes all your customers.”
Using the power of your most loyal customers is the best approach when you want to maximize the outcomes of your customer acquisition paid ads. Reaching out to cold audiences similar to your current recurring customers helps you increase sales generated by new customers and keep customer acquisition costs low.
> See how you can create a lookalike audience in minutes using first-party data.
3. Create remarketing campaigns based on custom audiences
RFM segments are beneficial when you want to fine-tune your remarketing campaigns and encourage a certain behavior depending on their RFM scores.
You can create better messaging for your newly acquired customers and take them from onboarding to placing a second order. As you must keep building their trust, you don’t want to be too pushy and salesy. You must think about how your next campaign improves customer experience, helping you increase online sales too.
Another category is represented by high-potential customers you want to nurture and keep engaged. Remind them about your loyalty program and the benefits included to encourage a new purchase.
When it comes to your existing loyal customers, don’t let too much time pass between two orders. Surprise and delight them with exclusive offers, and remind them of the benefits included in the customer loyalty program. You don’t want to see them slipping into the dormant or at-risk category.
> Discover the benefits of using an automated audience builder tool for your eCommerce sales campaigns.
4. Reduce objections with smart copywriting
A potential customer sees an ad from your customer acquisition campaign, clicks the ad, and starts browsing through various pages. They have limited to no information about your brand. What do you do to make them trust you?
The key to increasing online sales is focusing on customer benefits and capturing their struggles and needs in intelligent copywriting. When you write, try to address every objection a customer might have. You can find what blocks an acquisition by looking at your customer support conversations or from messages received on chat.
5. Add testimonials and user-generated content to your eCommerce website
Testimonials and user-generated content (UGC) help build trust among new and existing customers. Think about product reviews, hashtags on social media, photos from customers wearing or experiencing your products, or unboxing videos.
Adding organic, authentic, unfiltered user-generated content to your product pages adds value to your brand, boosting eCommerce sales. People trust other people’s recommendations more than they trust traditional ads. You could also transform UGC into ads campaigns as long as there are no legal issues and you’ve got explicit consent from your customers.
6. Direct paid traffic to your best-performing products
Why promote products that look good in terms of revenue but don’t make customers happy, decreasing the chance to order again? Bad news travels fast when customers are dissatisfied, and you don’t want to increase sales that affect your reputation.
You should direct your paid traffic to profitable products that bring value to you and your customers. Your historical purchase data shows you the best-performing products in terms of high margin, retention rate, and customer satisfaction.
A simple way to identify these best-performing products is to apply the product assortment optimization framework, which helps you distinguish toxic products from sticky ones. A toxic product looks good in terms of sales volume but isn’t profitable long-term. A sticky product generates repeat customers who are happy with your brand.
> Discover the four data layers of the Product Optimization Framework.
7. Design and implement a simple checkout process
The reasons customers abandon shopping carts during checkout vary. Some think extra costs are too high; others don’t like that they have to create an account to order. Long, complicated checkout processes cause people to exit your site, move forward to other eCommerce sites, and look for the same or similar products as yours.
Research by Baymard Institute shows that the average cart abandonment rate varies from 69% to 85%, depending on the device used by the consumer who tries to complete the order. Can you imagine how much revenue an eCommerce store loses from the suboptimal checkout process?
One quick way to improve sales is to eliminate friction in the checkout process and make it easier for your potential and existing customer to order what they need from your store. Request as few fields as possible. Offer multiple payment options. Be transparent about prices and costs associated with the order.
8. Use urgency and scarcity to influence decision
Urgency encourages potential and existing customers to make decisions faster. When browsing online for a new product or service, people get distracted or delay their purchase, leading to those high abandoned cart rates.
If you want your audience to act quickly, use urgency elements such as limited-edition products, time-sensitive discounts, or limited-time free delivery offers. Use smart copywriting to support your tactic: “X time left to enjoy your 40% discount” or “Order our special edition product X before it’s too late.”
Scarcity brings the same benefits as urgency, and it’s a tactic you can use to increase sales for various products by emphasizing high demand and low supply. If you want to increase sales using scarcity, show a counter of people viewing the product and a visible message like “Only X left in stock!”
9. Help the customer narrow down to the best product
While product assortment helps you cover customers with various needs and motivations, having too many options leads to indecision and lost opportunities. You don’t want your customers to lose interest in your offer because they’ve got tired of browsing thousands of similar products.
Prospects and customers can get easily overwhelmed by the variety of products they can choose from. If you want to boost sales, you have to help the customers narrow down to fewer alternatives based on their criteria. Filters allow you to display the best options and show that you understand what even pretentious customers are looking for.
10. Add exit-intent popup with an irresistible offer
Exit-intent pop-ups help you retain visitors to your online store with an irresistible offer that increases the chances to generate a purchase. Use the power of “free,” add a discount for their next order, or any advantage that eliminates friction and objections.
The exit intent pop-up helps you emphasize a benefit or an offer your customers could have missed while browsing the product page. Displayed at the right time, this type of pop-up can help you increase sales and reduce cart abandonment rates.
Wrap up
Increasing eCommerce sales fast and long-term depends on understanding your target audience and ideal customers. It would be best if you kept a balance between quick wins like promotional campaigns and tactics that are profitable long-term, like loyalty programs.
Let’s recap ten of the tactics that are helpful for boosting eCommerce sales fast:
- Apply RFM segmentation for more targeted marketing campaigns
- Attract better new customers using lookalike audiences
- Create remarketing campaigns based on custom audiences
- Reduce objections with smart copywriting
- Add testimonials and user-generated content to your eCommerce website
- Direct paid traffic to your best-performing products
- Design and implement a simple checkout process
- Use urgency and scarcity to influence decision
- Help the customer narrow down to the best product
- Add exit-intent popup with an irresistible offer
If you’re interested in new advanced tactics for increasing eCommerce sales, boosting Customer Lifetime Value, and keeping your Customer Acquisition Costs low, there’s a place where you can learn from world-renowned experts: CVO Academy.
Discover the free and advanced courses and learn new ways to keep your eCommerce store growing sustainably.
Frequently asked questions about how to increase eCommerce sales
A sustainable strategic approach to increasing eCommerce sales enables you to mix tactics that are effective in the short term with those that bring long-term results. One of the most important elements of your eCommerce sale strategy is to concentrate on generating sales from best-fit customers, who are more likely to place high-value orders and become repeat customers.
All strategies that help you increase sales should start with knowing your customers. Understanding their needs and motivations helps you build compelling offers that generate interest in your brand and increase sales. Every campaign you’ll build to generate sales fast, and long-term can only be effective if you reach the right audience.
According to Jay Abraham, a world-renowned strategic marketing expert, there are three ways to grow a business: increasing the number of customers, increasing the average value per transaction, and getting existing customers to buy more often. The most sustainable way to grow is the latter.
