How to Increase Ecommerce Sales

You’ve set up your ecommerce store and you’ve been getting some sales online. Your business has been getting consistent orders, though you might be wondering how to increase ecommerce sales.

Whether you’ve hit a roadblock with your current marketing efforts, are trying to expand to new channels, or just want to be rolling in dough. This article will give you 4 practical steps you can take to improve your ecommerce sales volume.

4 Practical Steps to Increase Your Ecommerce Sales

Before you continue to read, we are assuming that you already have an established online presence (website, storefront, and a recurring monthly marketing budget on at least one online marketing channel). On top of that, you should be getting at least a few sales per day to show that you have a good market fit.

If you don’t – then you should start by establishing your online presence. We would be happy to help you with this if on a free consulting call.

Without further ado, here are our tips to increase your ecommerce sales:

1st – Give your business SMART goals:

Marketing goals are one of the most overlooked and undervalued steps in any marketing plan. If you know what you’re trying to achieve, then you’re more likely to achieve it because you can plan around your goals to give you/your team tangible steps to succeed. Another thing to consider is that you can always reassess your goals as you progress and give yourself smaller milestones in-between. 

For example, if you want to increase your sales by 50% in the next year on your current marketing channels but you’re finding that you can only increase sales by 20% over the next year after analyzing your performance data, you could lower the goal, look for different channels to achieve your goal, or find ways to save time getting to 20% more sales to then get to 50% more sales volume.

2nd – Analyze Your Data:

Getting a lay of the land is one of the best ways to find easy wins within your current marketing channels. Here are some things you could find from analyzing your marketing data:

• Demographic/Geographic insights on where people are most likely to buy your product from.

• Trends from your email list showing what type of consumer is more likely to buy and who is more likely to buy more with you overtime (your loyal consumers vs 1 time purchasers).

• Which channel produces the best ROI and where there’s more opportunity to grow based upon audience size.

• Information on website visitors showing where people exit before buying, what people are more likely to do or look at before buying, and if there’s any content on your site that’s particularly popular with consumers.

• The types of products that sell the most, get the best ROI, and when they sell them most. 

• Combining any of your insights to get a meaningful picture of how your ideal customer likes to engage with you and how to best reach them.

• How you stack up vs your competitors for price, quality, reviews, and so forth

Boost ecommerce sales by combining your different data insights. This will allow you to focus your ad budget on people more likely to purchase and hone your messaging to use the right benefits. Ecommerce stores have used these insights to increase online sales by improving their checkout process and reconfiguring their product pages based upon heatmaps too. You have a plethora of opportunities to increase ecommerce sales when it comes to your ecommerce store’s data.

This can be quite a time consuming task because there’s a lot you can review. It’s very useful to have the right person or team reviewing your data because these insights are vital to helping you/your team execute effectively to increase sales. 

We would be happy to help you with this step on a free consulting call.

3rd – Create a Plan & Execute:

You’ve set your goals and analyzed your data. Now all you need to do is bring it all together, create a plan, and execute on that plan to increase your ecommerce sales.

Here’s a quick example of what we did with one of our clients that went from 5 to 6 figure sales:

1. We met with the owner and discussed his marketing goals, talked about what his top products were, and went over his top target audiences.

2. We then analyzed the data in his accounts (Google, Facebook, Google Analytics) to see what his sales numbers were and looked for any key opportunities.

3. Overtime we noticed that his top performing products were the gloves and flannels with a 15% off sale or a BOGO deal including a free hat. 

4. As a result we added the top performing promotions on a recurring basis to increase his sales volume within his current campaigns and from other sources going to his website. Then as we scaled to new audiences and new channels like Amazon & Pinterest, we continued to focus on his top performing products and top performing promotions.

5. Then as Black Friday/Cyber Monday started, we scaled our ad spend to further increase his sales volume while maintaining a consistent ROAS.

6. In the end, he went from 37k in sales to 375k in sales with the same 2x ROAS while seeing an increase in LTV from his loyal customers.

Every business has their own unique opportunities so I wouldn’t recommend taking this plan too literally. The point is that we determined what his goals were, found key opportunities to take advantage of, executed on those opportunities to increase efficiency, then iterated at scale to increase sales overtime.

What’s great about this example is that you can generally do the same thing either with your current team or with our consultants.

4th – New Channels & Useful Tips to Incorporate:

The first three steps are great for taking you from point A to B and you can reiterate those steps to keep improving overtime. This final step is here to help you expand more in the future and give you useful tips you can use to get more out of your current marketing efforts without spending more.

Expanding to a New Marketing Channel – is easier said than done. Here’s the step by step approach you should take to test a new channel to find your future 80/20 for your marketing mix:

1. Read about the new channel you want to expand to. Do some research, ask a friend, and look at the benefits of expanding. A new opportunity can be excellent if it is a good match for what your business offers and where your target audience spends their time online. Though it’s good to do some research first before you even invest substantial time and money. We’ve had plenty of clients that want to try new channels and we fully support them. Though we recommend doing your due diligence and considering whether you can spend more on your current marketing channels or get more by testing a different channel first.

2. Look for a good place to start on the new channel and check out what’s available to you in-platform. Whether this is remarketing, a lookalike of a customer list, brand terms, or a particular email audience. You should figure out where to start and what test budget you have. Depending upon how much you’re working with, we recommend setting aside 10-15% of your total marketing budget to test. Furthermore, you should set an expectation with your test budget to know how long you should test for. We recommend 2-8 weeks depending upon your budget, though that varies a lot based upon a myriad of factors.

3. Get setup in the new channel, get someone with experience in the channel to support you, have the right creative prepared, and have reporting prepared to know whether you’re getting sales from that channel.

4. Then all you need to do is launch your test, see how it performs, then assess the results.

Useful Tips to Get More Sales Without Spending More:

• Maximize your free channels. Anywhere you don’t have to spend a dollar to get exposure (SEO, free email lists, and organic social). You can do this by:
  • A/B testing different ad creative
  • Testing new promotions
  • Testing different pricing strategies
  • Find new ways to engage with your customers on select channels (ex. Using chatbots on your website and organic social to talk with potential customers before they buy).

• Spend more of your budget on top performing audience segments. This sounds like a no-brainer but as you might have guessed, it can be difficult to figure out what those audience segments are. We recommend reviewing your audience data by channel to see what converts the best then adjusting your targeting or ad spend accordingly to spend more where you make more. We have more information about this in a prior article on improving your performance in Google Ads.

• Remove friction from the buying process. You can use A/B testing tools to see where people drop off on your site then test different user experiences to improve. Things like site speed, cart dropoff, checkout dropoff, and so forth can be gradually improved to increase your sales. 

• Check out the competition and see what they’re doing on the same channels. Especially if they’re doing something better than you and are offering a similar product. That way, you can either add what they’re doing to your marketing efforts or even improve upon it to get even better results!

Final Thoughts

Getting more sales can be challenging at first, but with the right plan and persistent execution you should be able to increase your ecommerce sales.

If you need help getting more ecommerce sales, then you should book a free consultation with us today. We would be happy to help and provide you with a 90 day project workflow to help you achieve your goals!