Skyrocket Your Online Sales with These Tried-and-Tested Tips

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Feeling discouraged with the abysmal figures on your online sales reports?

If so, this post is for you.

Improving your sales performance isn’t always as easy as 1, 2, 3. It takes time to see significant spikes in your profit as you keep applying the right strategies.

Many other factors can affect your ability to generate sales that might even lead you to consider restructuring your online business. 

Check out these six sales-boosting practices.

1. Target specific niches. 

Sell niche products to target specific audiences. Doing this makes it easier to convince customers to buy from you, foster their brand loyalty, and retain them.

You’ll likely have fewer rivals and less intense competition. You can also spend less on your paid and organic marketing campaigns but get higher ROI and better results.

For instance, if you’re running an ecommerce business, you can target pet dog (cat, or any other animal) owners, such as Lucy & Co., which sells dog accessories:

If you’re a managed service provider, IT firm, or SaaS company, get more leads from online sellers needing software programs for accounting, app management, etc. 

When targeting specific niches, be sure first that you have a sufficient number of buyers to make your business more viable.

2. Use the right tools.

To maximize your sales performance, use the right platforms and tools for various aspects of your business.

For example, you should have stellar ecommerce platforms that ease your product showcase and selling, storefront customization, business scaling, and other needs.

One such platform you can use is Bigcommerce, which lets you design your store, add and remove products instantly, obtain data and analytics, and more:

To maximize your online store’s performance data and extract valuable insights for boosting profitability, leverage the best business intelligence tools. These include Zoho Analytics, Power BI, and more.

Now, to organize your business projects and team collaboration, use platforms such as Asana:

Asana lets you categorize and transfer your tasks by their status, assign the right people to which assignments, comment and add files, and more.

Additionally, use A/B testing and heatmap tools such as AB Tasty to know which web designs bring you the most conversions, clicks, and other sales performance metrics.

Your lack of sales can also be caused by your website’s low search engine visibility, which means you might not be reaching your target audiences or ideal buyers. 

Use tools such as a Google position tracker to gauge your search engine results ranking. This should prompt you to assess your current SEO strategies and assess which of your web pages need more effort.    

3. Send compelling emails.

The right kind of emails motivates your customers to perform your desired actions and make them feel valued — which is crucial in fostering their engagement.

If you have new club members, send them welcome emails to make them feel happy to belong. Personalize your messages by mentioning their names and greeting them on their birthdays.

For customers with abandoned carts, remind them of the items they saved. Recommend other products they might like to add and entice them to complete their purchase.

You can also introduce new items with visually pleasing newsletter designs and CTA buttons linking to the right webpages.

To do all that, use email marketing platforms such as MailChimp.

MailChimp offers customizable templates for welcome emails, abandoned cart campaigns, and others, plus automation features to send messages instantly based on triggers and conditions.

It even lets you segment your audiences, connects with your online store, provides real-time analytics, and other capabilities enhancing your marketing for more sales.

With these email marketing platforms, you can deliver compelling promotional messages that grow your customers’ interest in your products.

4. Set up omni channel systems.

Omnichannel shopping experiences simplify your customers’ interaction with your brand and availing of your services, encouraging them to continue transacting with you.

Omnichannel systems unify your website, social media platforms, and even your EPOS system, so that there’s continuity in information delivery, promotion, etc.

You also become present everywhere your shopper is — whether on their Instagram feed, browsing your site on their laptops, and others. 

For instance, if your customers booked their hotel accommodation on your website and called your front desk about that, your staff should know the updates and can give the details needed.

Additional examples include displaying retargeted ads based on purchased items and sending automated emails according to buyers’ milestones in their customer journey. Chatbots can even recommend products similar to what visitors browsed in your online store.

This makes shoppers feel that you tailored and provided your services precisely for them. Consequently, it boosts their patronage of your business. Personalization has become one of the top customer experience trends today — and omnichannel approaches help achieve that.

Without omnichannel systems, you frustrate your customers, who will find your store as inefficient and perhaps vow never to return.

Boost your omnichannel marketing and shopping experiences through a combination of tools, such as for live chat, customer relations management (CRM) software, inventory or operations supervision, social media administration, and others.

5. Go for purchase-intent keywords.

Target keywords expressing shoppers’ interest to buy your products. When they find them in your webpage in paid and organic searches, they’re likely to click it and respond to your offers.

Examples of purchase-intent keywords include “where to buy scientific calculators,” “dresses under $50,” “affordable lunch bags in Michigan,” and others.

Check the feasibility of those keywords with tools such as Moz. To show you how it works, I typed in “cheap teddy bears,” and got these results:

Moz reveals the keyword’s minimum and maximum monthly search volume ranges, level of difficulty to rank on the first page, estimated percentage of organic clicks, and others.

You’ll also find additional keyword suggestions with their monthly volumes, analysis of the top 10 pages in the search results, and keyword mentions in web pages and URLs.

These data and insights show you how likely you will appear in the search results pages. Use them to show your customers you have what they’re seeking to purchase.

6. Connect with influencers.

89% of marketers find that influencer marketing ROI is better or comparable to other channels. This shows how the strategy is vital in helping you gain your much-desired sales and profits.

Find the best influencers for your business through tools such as Intellifluence.

Intellifluence lets you set up your influencer marketing campaign by picking your goals, searching for ideal influencers on which platforms and based on filters, and other related tasks.

Here’s a sample of the results with specific filters entered (United States, Instagram, YouTube, and others):

Intellifluence keeps a record of their influencers in cards, where you can find their niches, description, number of social followers by platform, etc., and perform actions such as viewing their profiles, saving them for your campaign, and more.

Once you’ve found your influencer, Intellifluence lets you add funds for monetary compensation and send your pitch to the chosen influencer.

Work with influencers to promote your products in their video reviews, tutorial videos, blog posts, and other content types.

Skillshare, for instance, partnered with Natalie Barbu in a video demonstrating how she plans her day with Google Calendar and Asana.

In the video description, Natalie Barbu shared a link activating 2 months of free Skillshare premium access for the first 1,000 people who click it. She also mentioned that the brand sponsored the vlog.

By collaborating with influencers, you widen your potential customer reach and significantly boost your sales opportunities.

Following best practices is only a part of the big picture. 

Optimize your customers’ and marketing data using reliable online marketing dashboards to visualize your progress, instantly create digital marketing reports, track your performance, and more. 

7. Launch your store’s own app.

According to Google, nearly 60% of customers consider the ability to shop on mobile a significant factor when choosing retailers to buy from. And one excellent way for them to purchase products from their phones is through a store’s mobile app.

Launching your app allows customers to concentrate on exploring your items, adding products to their wish lists and virtual carts, and completing their purchases. It’s also an ideal venue for you to announce promotional offers such as discounts, vouchers, etc., to new and existing buyers.

To maximize your business app, elevate the shopping experience, and increase your sales, design with these features in mind:

• Organized product pages. Categorize your merchandise appropriately so shoppers can quickly find what they’re looking for. Use easy-to-understand labels as well.

• Seamless navigation and interface. Shorten your navigation paths to let customers get to their desired pages fast. Also, think like your shoppers to achieve an intuitive, functional interface. Apply negative space around your CTAs, product titles, etc., and defined structures to make your app look clean.

• Rapid logins and checkout. Offer options to log in via social networks and email, store information, and auto-fill your customers’ account credentials. To encourage them to complete their purchases, remove unnecessary steps and use auto-complete features for faster checkout.

Security is also crucial to get your app going well even after deployment. Protect your code and data from hacking, system failure, and other cybersecurity risks through constant backups. However, this task is tedious, so use automated tools to simplify and speed it up. For instance, you can use Backrightup if you built your app on Microsoft Azure DevOps. 

Backrightup automatically duplicates all your repositories, pipelines, etc., and its updates, then informs you accordingly on your dashboard. This way, you can simply check your backups’ progress, guarantee your code and data safety, and focus on your store’s profit-generating operations.

With your own engaging and secure business app, you can encourage more shoppers to buy from your online store and skyrocket your sales.

Over to You!

Hiking up your online business sales and profits does not happen overnight — but applying these practices can bring you a step closer to achieving that.

Be creative, and don’t stop experimenting, monitoring, and improving your campaigns. Keep your customers at the center of your strategies — and you’ll attract and compel them to take your offers more effectively.