How to Increase Sales in an Online Store. 12 Proven Methods from SOTE.

Get acquainted with the methods of increasing sales in the store. They include the process related to sales, reaching new customers, SEO and online advertising.

Learn 12 proven ways to increase sales in an online store. Practical advice that you can start implementing today.

How to increase online sales?

1. Take care of good customer contact.
2. Improve the visibility of the store. Better SEO.
3. Increase sales with effective advertising.
4. Measure the effectiveness of marketing activities with ADS Tracker.
5. Prepare good Landing Pages.
6. Share your offer on sales sites.
7. Add video to products.
8. Recover abandoned baskets.
9. Use the newsletter to reach customers.
10. Offer discounts and promotions.
11. Add online store profiles to Social Media.
12. Build customer trust.

Regardless of the store we run, increasing sales can be divided into 3 areas that affect the final result:

• Increase the number of new customers.
  • More entries from search engines.
  • More effective advertising.
  • Offering offers on Allegro, Google Shopping, price comparison sites.
• Increase the average order value.
  • Higher prices.
  • More products in the basket.
  • Products in sets.
• More frequent purchases by existing customers.
  • Remarketing.
  • Newsletter.
  • Promotions and discounts.

It is worth building your own list of elements for each point and dividing into smaller tasks that are easier to implement and measure. Below are 12 ways to get new customers and encourage them to shop in an online store.

1. Take care of good customer contact.

This is the first and most important element which is often overlooked. It can also be quickly and easily added to your website.

Customer behaviour is changing and to provide a convenient contact in the store, email and phone are no longer enough. The key element for many visitors has become an online chat where they can ask questions, seek help or advice on purchases.

Examples of online chats:

• Facebook Massenger
• Smartsupp
• LiveChat

If the store has social media profiles, add them to your communication channels.

2. Improve store visibility, better SEO.

Organic traffic to the store from search engines is very important, but before making any changes, you need to plan the actions in the right order.

SEO should be divided into 2 elements:

• Technical aspects of SEO
• Content and content marketing

First of all, we need to make sure that the page is correct from a technical point of view, as this is the ticket for search engines to visit our page and correctly read the content.

Technical aspects of SEO

What can be quickly and easily improved?

• SSL Certificate - absolutely required and important.
• Product description
• Using headers in product descriptions h2,h3.
• Using lists.
• Longer and informative product descriptions.
• Use the Sitemap site map to index new pages.
• Complete meta tags. In particular, the title and description. Keywords can also be added, but this field is no longer important.

Content and content marketing

It is important to realize that a higher position in the search results does not depend only on the content on the page, but to a large extent on the domain ranking.

First of all, focus on positioning the page for longer keywords (containing 3-5 words). When you get good results for such expressions, then you can choose shorter, more competitive keywords.

When preparing a product description or blog post, the most important criterion for evaluation is whether the content on the page matches the search engine query. Therefore, before writing it, it is worth listing a few to a dozen keywords related to the product and include them in the content. The more natural, the better.

3. Increase sales through effective advertising.

Regardless of whether the store is already advertising or just starting its adventure with advertising, it is worth taking a look at its activities and marketing plans in this area.

The key to success is the right message, for the right people, at the right time, because even the best advertisement shown to the wrong audience will not bring the expected results.

This is ideally illustrated by the situation in which we enter a room where a certain group of people is gathered. We ask "Who is hungry, let's raise your hand". Now we can invite them to our restaurant. This is our target group. This is who we are looking for.

Therefore, before planning advertising campaigns, it is worth taking the time to accurately describe who our customer is, what their preferences are, what they are interested in, where they can be found. Let's not forget to ask "Who is hungry":)

Where to start?

A very good solution is to add a campaign related to the store's brand in the Google search engine. Many customers treat the Google search engine as a navigation tool and enter the store's name or address in the search field. This form of advertising is very effective and rewarded by the search algorithm. In addition, if we do not do this, our competition will.

Use remarketing

If someone has landed on our page, we can display our ads in remarketing campaigns. They can be defined in a simple way both on Facebook and in Google AdWords. Such campaigns are much cheaper than advertising for new customers and much more effective.

Refresh ads

If you are already advertising on Facebook or Google and have the same ads for more than 3 months, it is the perfect time to show something new. If we show the same ads to customers all the time, their effectiveness decreases.

Other advertising platforms and ADS Tracker

Advertise on other platforms. Look for new places to advertise and don't worry about the entry and sales reports from ads on the new platform. All this will be provided to you by ADS Tracker, which is included in the standard version of the SOTESHOP online store. You don't have to trust data from another company, ADS Tracker will provide you with a full report from the entire platform or individual campaigns and ads.

4. Measure the effectiveness of marketing activities with ADS Tracker.

What is ADS Tracker? It is a system created by the SOTE company that allows you to measure the effectiveness of any links leading to stores. It supports Google, Facebook advertising platforms, but you can also add new platforms and group ads into campaigns.

How does ADS Tracker work?

When someone enters the store page, the system remembers the customer's visit and will be able to recognize it even up to 180 days. If during this time the customer makes a purchase in the store or enters additionally from another ad, then in the order there will be an exact path that the customer took and from which ads he visited the store. This is an ideal supplement to advertising platform reports.

What's more, the system very well recognizes customer behaviors such as closing the browser, changing the device, or connecting. How does it do it? That's our little secret:)

Large online stores and marketing agencies use very expensive integrations with "click database" systems that remember customer behavior, we provide such a solution as standard, without any additional charges.

Thanks to Ads Tracker you can make better decisions and you can advertise wherever you want. Even if you share a link on a partner's page, you will see entries and sales exactly from that place.

5. Prepare good Landing Page pages.

Landing pages are the pages we direct customers to, e.g. from ads. It can be a store's home page, a category page, a product card, or a blog article.

We should treat such a page as the first page the customer sees and therefore it should contain more information.

If we use the landing page as a product card then:

• take care of a good description, photos, video materials,
• add information about delivery, returns, warranty under the basket,
• add highlighted product reviews,
• add clear information about product availability.

If the landing page concerns a blog entry then:

• make sure the information is useful to the customer and has value for them,
• add a good photo, attach a video,
• if you refer to products, add links in the content,
• encourage the article to take specific action, e.g. sign up for a newsletter, share in social media, make a purchase.

6. Share the offer in sales services.

A good method of reaching new customers is to add products to sales services such as Google Shopping, Allegro, Ceneo, a store on Facebook and many others.

You can share selected products to each service or add them all at once. If someone enters your store and places an order, the ADS tracker will recognize the platform and add the information both in the order and in the sales report from that platform.

See the list of SOTESHOP integrations

7. Add video to products.

Number 10 must be special:) And it is. Beautiful photos increase interest in products and have a positive effect on sales, but video is the king. That's why it's worth adding a video gallery to the product card to interest the customer and better present the offer.

Video doesn't have to be difficult to record and doesn't have to burden the page. In SOTESHOP we managed to combine beautiful presentation and speed of operation. Just add a few 5-10s videos made with a phone and customers will appreciate it.

For some stores, e.g. from the fashion industry or handicrafts, products with video can be groundbreaking. This is a feature that is definitely worth checking out.

Example of a product with video: Fashion store

8. Regain Abandoned Carts.

Abandoned carts should be looked at differently. As a group of customers that are easier to persuade to place an order. Adding products to the cart without making a purchase is natural and can affect up to 60% of customers.

We can use, for example, Facebook ads to target these people or additionally remind them in remarketing.

Depending on the store, the time from the first visit to the purchase may take many days and that someone did not place an order right away does not mean that they will not be our customer in the future.

Here, ADS Tracker comes to the rescue again. If the average time from the first visit to the store to placing an order is more than 7 days, ADS tracker will be even more useful, as the reports from external advertising platforms are limited to 7 days only. With ADS Tracker, you can set up sales reporting from 30 to 180 days from the customer's visit.

9. Use Newsletter to Reach Customers.

One of the biggest advantages of newsletter is that the data collected there is yours. You make the decisions when and how to use it.

Newsletter is a very effective sales tool, but there are a few simple rules and information that can be useful.

• Send messages only to people who have added their address.
• Reward signing up for the newsletter, e.g. give the customer a discount coupon for their next purchase.
• Send interesting information and articles, not just links to sales.
• Remember that not everyone reads and clicks on links from the newsletter.
• On average, 15-20% open the newsletter, and 3-5% click on the link.
• Do not expect everyone to read your message. That's still a lot more than in ads.

It is worth adding materials from the newsletter in remarketing ads. You will reach those who did not open the newsletter and those who did not sign up for it, but were on your website.

Use ADS Tracker to report customer entries and orders from the newsletter. No matter which system you use.

10. Offer discounts and promotions.

Discounts and promotions surround us from all sides. Very often it is not only about the price, but also about the message behind the discount.

If we give discounts to everyone, its value is small and at most it is as much as the saved amount, but when we give them as a thank you, appreciating the customer, its value increases significantly. Then it is not only a discount, but also the satisfaction of the customer, who feels appreciated and is more likely to come back to our store. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend the store and so on and so forth:)

Use promotions, discounts, discount coupons to encourage customers to make more purchases. Appreciate customers who order from you again. Adjust the validity period of discounts to the specifics of your offer.

11. Add store profiles to Social Media.

Social media is not only a place to share content, but also a new method of communication with the customer. Here the discussions take place not only in private messages, but also in comments under posts, videos, events. Social media is also part of content marketing.

The online store should appear (at least) on the following platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube

People who follow us and comment build a community around our store, and their opinions are important to many buyers.

We don't have to post and upload videos every day, we can do it e.g. once a week, but first of all we have to be on the given platform, so that customers can find us there.

12. Build customer trust.

When a customer comes to your page and wants to make a purchase, they often look for confirmation that the store is trustworthy and the product is of good quality.

This is the moment when we have to convince the customer. It is one step to placing an order, and our goal is to eliminate the customer's concerns so that they can complete the order.

That's why it's worth presenting information about deliveries, returns, and warranties clearly. Show and highlight the best reviews of other customers about the product or store. You can use the store's review program for this or add social media links.

A good method is to use customer reviews in advertising or promoting posts, e.g. on Facebook, which have a lot of likes and comments.

Summary

There is no one universal way to increase sales in an online store, but with a good plan, knowledge, and good tools, we can compete more effectively in the online market. When taking marketing actions, measure their effectiveness and analyze them to make better decisions. Build trust among customers and take care of the credibility of our store. It always pays off.

Related Pages

• New version of SOTESHOP 8
• Add video to product gallery
• ADS Tracker. Google Shopping and Store on Facebook.