Article

George Mathew
George Mathew 4 January 2023

How to Drive Sales to Your Online Store

In this post we will look at different ways you can use to drive sales to your online store. Let’s get started.

Start with Honesty

This may seem somewhat obvious. It’s amazing to see how many sites write copy that’s brutally dishonest.

Honesty is a crucial currency that builds up your business’s reputation. It fosters and encourages trust. Don’t make claims that you can't substantiate with factors. Don’t be too consumed by hyperboles.

Today’s customers don’t take marketing hype with kindness. Be straightforward and easy-to-approach in your sales copy and on your homepage.

The principle applies to how well you position yourself as a business. 

Don’t make the mistake of overreaching yourself. If you’re a business run by two people don’t plaster a copy that makes you appear as if you’re a multi-million dollar enterprise with tons of offices around the world. If you’re a small company let your copy reflect that. 

To create better copy, you may want to hire a freelance content marketer to assist you in writing your website’s copy professionally. 

Use Ad Extensions to Get More Clicks

If you’re selling stuff online, ad extensions are the best way to do this. The feature available on both Adwords and Bing lets you make your ad bigger and gives people more places to click on it. It doesn’t cost extra either and simply increases your click-through rate.

Increase sales online use ad extensions

Use Customer Testimonials and Other Badges

In today’s customer climate there’s apparently nothing that creates more trust than a customer testimonials.

It shows how satisfied your customers are and you can showcase this with the help of testimonials.

Increase sales online include customer testimonials

Satisfied customers are more likely to be influential than best-written sales copy. Make sure you include gushing testimonials and reviews from brand evangelists who dig your brand.

This copy may appear on product pages, landing pages, pricing pages, and more places.

Add trust signals into your copy to increase the average order value.

It creates a better positioning of your brand and if your business has professional accreditations then something like a Better Business Bureau rating can go a long way.

Build on the Sense of Urgency

Being honest and transparent about who you’re targeting and what you do are critical to success. However, there’s no rule against creating a sense of urgency to persuade prospects to buy from you.

Look at the time-limited sale at the top of the header area.

Consumers respond well to incentives that create a sense of urgency. This begins from time-sensitive special offers to limited edition items. These are different ways to call on urgency.

You can offer coupons or discounts to customers who are willing to buy from you immediately with the help of free shipping or a huge discount.

You can use ad customizers on Google ads to offer limited-time sales.

Offer a Money-Back Guarantee

Most times, one of the most powerful factors when making a decision is to avoid a potential loss.

The perceived risk more often than not is financial. What if the product doesn’t work. Or if the customer doesn’t like them. Even small purchases carry this risk and to overcome this objection you can always offer a bulletproof money-back guarantee.

The more risk you remove from the buying decision, the more likely it is they’re going to buy from you. So stop short of anything that dissuades prospects.

how to increase sales online lifelock money back guarantee

Limit Choices

Many businesses hate the idea of limiting choices to customers. Offering more products is often seen as a ticket to improve sales. That’s not always the case. Masterclass for example provides limited tutorials.

In many cases a greater variety of choices can lead to indecision on the part of prospects and this results in lost revenue.

If you have a vast range of products consider creating product pages in a way that it offers far fewer choices to visitors. This reduces the odds that the visitor will get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices.

You can arrange the products into narrow categories and offer fewer products. Either way is fine.

Reduce Friction in the Checkout Process

According to a study from Business Insider, shoppers abandoned more than $4 trillion worth of merchandise in their shopping carts in 2021.

What amazes me, even more, is that most of it, around 63% is recoverable.

This is a truly awe-inspiring statistic.

And it reveals to us just how important optimizing the checkout can be.

how to increase sales online abandoned shopping cart

Similar to that point about user experience, reducing friction in the checkout process can have an impact on your conversion rates. Just like you make it easy to navigate your site, you should also make online purchases super easy.

Eliminate unnecessary steps during the checkout that discourages prospects from converting.

Skip unnecessary form fields and don’t shock them with surprise shipping costs.

Provide More Payment Options

how to increase sales online easy iphone payment

Consumers may not require a multitude of product choices. However they need a variety of payment methods.

By offering more payment options, including new services that are now more popular than ever, you can make it easy for prospects to give you their money.

It’s a bit of a hassle to optimize the site to add these options. But this is an almost guaranteed way to increase sales online. Even more so if you are targeting mobile traffic.

Invest in Product Images

There’s evidence to show that well-presented food tastes better than food that’s not assembled well enough. Given the importance of beauty in perceiving things, it stands for us to figure out that quality photography will have a similar effect on consumer minds.

Regardless of what you’re selling include high-quality product photos. Don’t use tiny thumbnails. Or poorly lit photos. Be sure you can include a variety of shots and cover different angles.

You Don’t Need Landing Pages

You don’t always need an endless number of landing pages. Better optimizing your online ads to align with customer intent is more beneficial. For example here’s my landing page on Grammarly free trial.

Call only campaigns that you regularly see on Facebook or Google ads remove and replace the traditional landing page. Most people don’t want to mindlessly scroll through pages on their mobile phones. They want to simply contact businesses.

Call only ads are the solution and they make it easy for prospects to reach out to your business, eliminating leaky stages of the online sales funnel and increase the volume of calls to your business as well. 

Address Questions and Objections in Your Copy

One common pitfall when selling online is making assumptions about the knowledge level of prospective customers. Many companies tend to believe that they know customers well. That’s why they don’t address much stuff on their copy and this harms sales.

Consider all questions you can think of and answer them in your copy and on product pages. However don’t bombard customers with every little detail you can think of.

This approach results in a water tight, clear and concise copy.

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