The global shutdown from covid and all its variants have wiped out a lot of businesses, so moving online and growing your online sales is becoming vitally important. Let’s have a look at the ways you can boost sales for your eCommerce business.
- PPC Ads to Boost Targeted Traffic.
PPC or SEM to improve sales is a critical tool in a business’s arsenal. A pay-per-click campaign will serve your business in 2 ways
- Get traffic and eyeballs on your website and the products you are selling
- Capture relevant visitors to your niche and product offering.
The brilliance of paid search is that using Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, or affiliate leads uses keyword relevance to find people who are searching for what you are selling. Let’s say you are selling dual-screen smartphones, by targeting keywords around smartphones and larger screens or the model Samsung Fold you can capture those who are seeking exactly that type of mobile phone device. The volume of searches on Google alone is 5.6 billion searches per day! That is a lot of searches by a lot of people.
There is a further layer of targeting once a visitor performs an action such as clicking on your ad or visiting your website and that is retargeting. Due to them being warmer leads and because you can display more relevant ads to them, their conversion rates are typically 80-150% higher.
- Increase the Range of Payment Options.
It stands to reason that the more options a customer has to pay the more chance of checking out. This can be increased by accepting all major credit cards including Amex (the corporate preference) and JCB (for Asian cardholders). Crypto payment gateways on the blockchain networks are an extra form of payments to appeal to crypto wallet holders and then there are options like buy now pay later which have been shown to increase conversions because it is a deferred payment option. It gives customers the flexibility of not having to pay everything in one go, and it increases conversions.
- USP in Your Brand and Your Product Offering.
Standing out in the market is crucial to any company’s long-term success. A keystone to that is the uniqueness of your product, to increase the “barriers to entry” but also to ensure you appeal to a niche group of customers that competitors cannot.
No single product appeals to all consumers yet so many brands try to go mass market too soon. Unless you are a Colgate or a Dyson and become synonymous with that whole consumer segment it is difficult to appeal to everyone at the same time. Instead, carve out a niche and target that group of consumers.
You must identify the exact profile of the intended buyer so that you can create an effective marketing campaign to attract those customers. As well as giving your marketing activity focus, it gives the product development team a clear roadmap for new products to continue appealing to that customer segment. Too many companies lose focus after the first or second product because they build a customer base and then create new products that diverge too far away from what attracted those customers in the first place.
- Index Your Pages and Add a Good Quality Search Bar.
If visitors to your online store can navigate easily there is more chance of them staying on the site and buying something. Browsers are looking for nothing specific and just jumping around your website out of curiosity and there is a slimmer chance of them becoming a customer. The searcher is looking for something specific, he/she is further down the funnel and often will use the search function on your site to find the product they want. This search is called “on-site search” and eConsultancy researched that as much as 30% of visitors are searchers and their conversion rates are double that of other website visitors.
Having a clear page menu of your store with products separated by different categories and filters it gives the customers ways to drill down on what they are looking for and search for exactly what they need. Make sure it is a smart search function and really can collate all the relevant products on your website. Too many websites use the google search bar which is free but may miss some of your pages and can easily give results from other websites and not your own.
Final Thoughts.
It is crucial to set a niche target to go after with your product and marketing. The more targeted, the better the conversions for any traffic to your online store. Using paid search and retargeting will help bring more volume of such traffic to your site and once they are there give them advanced search functionality and more payment options to increase that conversion rate.
