Ecommerce sales are the lifeblood of any online retail business. However, simply having an online store is no guarantee of sales success. To truly thrive in the competitive ecommerce landscape, businesses must implement strategic sales initiatives designed to boost revenue. An effective ecommerce sales strategy is essential for attracting customers, driving conversions, and maximizing order value.
In this article, we will explore actionable sales strategies that ecommerce businesses of any size can leverage to take their revenue to the next level. You will learn proven methods for increasing website traffic, improving conversion rates, recovering abandoned carts, retaining customers, and more. Whether you are looking to meet sales targets, enter new markets or simply grow your existing ecommerce business, the strategies covered in this piece will help strengthen your sales engine and bottom line. Read on to discover key ways to catapult your ecommerce sales through strategic channel optimization, customer personalization and incentivization.
Offer Free or Discounted Shipping
One of the most effective ways to increase average order value is to offer free or discounted shipping. Shoppers love free shipping, and studies have shown that promotions like free shipping over a certain order value or discounted shipping rates can entice customers to add more items to their carts.
Offering free standard shipping on orders over a minimum amount (e.g. $50) gives customers incentive to spend more in order to qualify. You can determine the minimum order value that makes sense for your profit margins. Even offering free shipping on orders that barely meet your minimum order value can pay off in the long run by increasing the overall size of your average order.
You can also consider providing discounted flat rate shipping or reduced shipping rates on larger orders. For example, you might charge a flat $5 shipping fee on orders under $50 but offer free shipping on orders over $50. Or implement tiered shipping discounts where the more a customer spends, the less they pay for shipping. This rewards higher cart totals with shipping savings.
The key is finding the optimal balance between minimum order sizes for free/discounted shipping and your profit margins on shipping costs. Test different minimums and discounts to see which has the greatest positive impact on your average order value and overall revenue. Free and discounted shipping is an investment in future sales.
Send Abandoned Cart Emails
Recovering abandoned shopping carts is a major opportunity for boosting ecommerce sales. Studies show the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is about 70%. That means 7 out of 10 customers are putting items in their online cart but failing to complete the purchase.
Leveraging abandoned cart emails allows you to remind customers to finish their purchase and bring them back into the sales funnel. These automated emails goose customers who got distracted or hesitated at checkout. The stats show this simple effort pays major dividends.
Email marketing services report abandoned cart recovery emails have an average ROI of 120% or more. For every $1 you spend on these reminders, you can expect to generate $1.20 or more in recovered sales. The key is timing them appropriately and offering an incentive to complete the purchase.
Here are some best practices for maximizing the impact of your abandoned cart emails:
- Send the first email soon after cart abandonment, within 1-3 hours. Catch customers when the purchase intent is still top of mind.
- Offer a small discount or free shipping as an incentive to complete the transaction. Sweeten the deal.
- Personalize the email with the items left in the cart. Remind customers what they wanted to buy.
- Use urgency messaging about limited quantity or ending discounts. Prompt action.
- Send 2-3 reminder emails spaced a couple days apart to capture more conversions. Don’t give up after just one try.
Abandoned cart emails take just minutes to setup but bring in significant revenue. Make sure you have this sales strategy implemented on your ecommerce site.
Optimize Site for Mobile
Over 50% of all ecommerce traffic now comes from mobile devices. This means having a mobile-optimized site is absolutely critical for any ecommerce business looking to increase sales. If your site is difficult to navigate or use on a smartphone or tablet, you are likely losing customers and leaving money on the table.
Some key things to do in order to optimize your ecommerce site for mobile:
- Use a responsive design that automatically adjusts the site layout and elements based on screen size. This ensures your site looks great and functions smoothly on any device.
- Check site speed on mobile and aim for sub-3 second load times. Slow mobile sites lead to high bounce rates. Optimize images, enable caching, and minify code to improve speed.
- Ensure buttons and touch elements are large enough for tapping on mobile. Allow for imprecise tapping or make buttons expand when tapped.
- Eliminate unnecessary clicks and make it easy to navigate to key pages. The mobile menu and search functions should be given prime real estate.
- Keep forms short and reduce free text input fields. Typing on mobile can be tedious.
- Test the checkout process end-to-end on mobile. Identify any pain points or roadblocks and improve the user experience.
The mobile experience can make or break an ecommerce site. Follow mobile UX best practices to remove friction and keep customers engaged from any device.
Retarget Customers
Remarketing or retargeting to past visitors is an extremely effective ecommerce sales strategy. Display advertising tends to have low conversion rates, with average display ads converting at just 2%. However, remarketing to people who have already visited your online store performs much better, with an average conversion rate of 10%.
This is because you are targeting people who already have some existing interest or intent with your brand. By continuing to put your products and offers in front of them through retargeting ads across channels, you can nudge them along the path to eventually make a purchase. The familiarity also means they are more likely to click on and trust your ads.
You can create retargeting campaigns on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook to display your ads to people who have been to your website. The platforms use cookies and site visitor data to enable this. Dynamic remarketing that shows the specific products a person viewed makes ads even more relevant and high-converting.
Retargeting past website visitors with display ads and social ads is a proven way to boost conversions among people already familiar with your brand. Consider setting up retargeting campaigns and testing out dynamic remarketing to put your products in front of the right audience.
