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Are you looking for effective marketing strategies to increase online sales for your business? With the holiday season fast approaching, now is the time to ready your website for the surge in eCommerce as people begin looking for gift ideas.
Thankfully, ReferralCandy has created the awesome infographic below that's filled with marketing tactics and tools you can use to give your products a timely sales boost.
Marketing Strategies to Increase Online Sales
Here are 14 marketing tactics and tools your business should be looking at if you want to see your online sales jump, especially during the holidays when consumers are looking to spend money:
1. Improve Store Design
There are a number of reasons why someone leaves a website and poor design almost always has something to do with it. Ask for feedback from friends with a good sense of design or try working with tried-and-tested themes from established platforms. For example, Shopify offers users over 100 free and premium themes you can customize.
2. Make An Exit Offer
Even well-designed stores can lose customers if prices seem too high. Offer discounts or free shipping to your customers before they leave to persuade them to buy from your store.
3. Use Email Prudently
Email may be your best channel in online marketing. It drives traffic to your store, supplements content marketing and outperforms both Twitter and Facebook for generating sales.
4. Keep in Touch Often
It's good practice to keep your customer informed about the status of their order. Send out regular newsletters with deals and discounts to keep your customers interested. This aspect of your email marketing strategy will bring repeat business from existing customers, which is always a good thing.
5. Optimize Ad-Spending
Be sure to vary your keywords to see what works best for your business. It's also a good idea to try out slight variations on keywords in order to find a good niche for your business.
6. Leverage Social Proof
Customers are more likely to purchase something from a site if there are product reviews and ratings visible. This might just be the all the convincing they need to make a purchase from you.
7. Anticipate Future Sales
List items as out-of-stock (with good photography and appropriate text) to see which products your customers most want to buy. Don't let your depleted inventory get in the way of a sale though. Out Of Stock allows you to take orders in advance, shipping your products to your customers once they're ready.
8. Up-Sell Products
Upselling is 20 times more effective than cross-selling online. Make your upsells related to the original product and be sensitive to the price range of your customers.
9. Reduce Cart Abandonment
Abandoned carts mean that your sales are only a fraction of what they could be. An email recovery campaign can entice your customer to return to their cart and complete the transaction.
10. Wishlist Reminders
A Wishlist Reminder Email nudges the customer to take the final step and make the purchase. Send an email to the customer to let them know that an item on their wishlist will be soon sold out, or is on sale.
11. Include a Gifting Section
Exchanging gifts has been the interpersonal glue of human society for thousands of years. Selling gift sets can yield higher profit margins, especially when you have a variety of selections for your customer to choose from.
12. Launch a Facebook Store
Facebook is the biggest social media platform in the world, making it a great source of traffic. Merchants can sell directly to Facebook users when they set up a store. This is one way your business can use social media to gain an edge on the competition.
13. Engage With Instagram
Engage your audience by running contests and revealing "behind-the-scenes" work in the form of cool pictures. You can also give your social proof a boost by using pictures of customers with your products.
14. Promoting Word-Of-Mouth
Word-of-mouth has a massive impact because consumers trust friends and family more than marketers. Build a bigger audience by finding power influencers who already have your target audience's attention.
