E-commerce is a rapidly growing industry in which millions of sellers competing across the globe. Whilst this sounds more difficult than a high street shop that passersby physically must pass, it actually presents a vast target audience opportunity. This article will cover a few different ways that you can increase your sales during a time of growing competition.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click ads are a shortcut to get your website in front of people. They work on the basis that you pay for specifics keywords (that will triggered specific ads) and each time someone clicks on your ad and is directed to your site, so there’s no risk of paying for something to go unnoticed – like a billboard or TV ad. It was found that over 25% of people click on the first result of a Google search, and almost every clicks on a result within the first page.
To easily start advertising on Google, through Google itself or through Premier Partner such as CleverAds, users can obtain free credit with a Google Ads Coupon, which gives them a headstart in putting their website at the top of Google results. However, managing these ads can be hard as they’re very metric-centred. CleverAds is one way to manage these in an easy way so you can find effective keywords, create banners, and even translate the ads to different languages.
Sales Copy
Sales copy is the words within your adverts or website that are designed to make users take action. An example of this is Call To Action buttons that are geared towards converting email signups for a newsletter – which will then later be used as a marketing tool.
Writing in a persuasive way is not for everyone, so you may want to outsource it. However, if you decide to go about it, you can use PPC adverts to test which advert had the more effective sales copy. This is called A/B testing, and it’s extremely powerful and fast in experimenting what your best advert or landing page is.
Creating urgency
Free market economics works because of scarcity – unlimited wants and needs in a world with limited resources. This taps into our primal brain too, so it’s best to create a sense of this desire within users – even if it’s artificial.
For example, instead of cutting the cost of a product to entice users, try offering a “one-time-only” sale, or a sale that will “End Monday”. This creates a sense of urgency and prevents them from endlessly searching around for the product at different sites. Instead, they must grasp this exclusive deal they’re fortunate enough to stumble across.
You can also take this to the next level by making your inventory scarce. For example, the video game Fortnite notoriously offers in-game cosmetics to dress your character. Instead of offering every cosmetic, all of the time – which some would assume that more choice would lead to more revenue – the opposite is in fact true. Each cosmetic is only available for 24 hours before the user has lost their chance to buy it – not knowing what will be available tomorrow, either.
Money-back guarantee
One thing you must accept as a small business owner of an online shop is that you’re a risk for customers. You likely haven’t got a reputation that instantly translates to most of your traffic, so you must try and build this trust rapidly from the seconds they spend on the site.
A great way to do this is by being explicitly clear about your bulletproof money-back guarantee. Knowing you can get your money back takes away a lot of the apprehension towards pulling the trigger on a purchase, and they’re instead left with the raw assessment of “do I want this product for X amount of money”, instead of “I hope it’s as good quality as it states because I cannot return it”.
Of course, cheap products are often not even returned by customers on the account that it’s more hassle than it’s worth – though this is something you can quite quickly measure and can be factored into your cash flow forecasting.
Social media influencers
Social media influencers are incredibly powerful. No other advertising stream can create the level of engagement that a gym model can, or a reality TV star. If these appear too expensive, then you can always search for influencers that are more niche but have fewer followers.
For example, even a local salon can pay a popular local resident who has, say, 3,000 followers (and can prove these are mostly local followers) to advertise the salon for them. Alternatively, they could be accepted for free treatments in return for social media posts about getting great treatments in the salon. This can be low cost, but be careful, it’s difficult to measure the ROI unless you give them an affiliate link to monitor traffic source.
Whilst these tips can help increase sales, there are some prerequisites to sustaining long-term sales growth. This includes SEO, which isn’t just creating backlinks and content but actually optimising a website (i.e. page speed, tags, URLs), as well as selling a profitable product in a viable market.
