The primary concern of all online businesses is to increase their sales and revenues. Although several suggestions and guidelines exist for expanding and developing e-commerce sites, most are not practical.
This post will go over some technical, fundamental, and very powerful strategies that, when used properly, will help you take your e-commerce website to the next level effectively.
These strategies, which are listed in the following six categories, comprise both specific and more generic methods and techniques that can help you boost your sales in the long term:
- Optimize sale process
- Optimize UI/UX
- Customer Services
- Encouraging and Promotion Programs
- Advertising and Marketing Programs
- Reporting and Analyzing
We will discuss them further in more detail in this post. So you can choose the ones that will help your business the best in attracting more customers and increasing your sales.
Optimize sales process
One of the finest and quickest strategies to have more income is to make the purchasing process as simple as possible for your customers. Suppose you know how to streamline ordering and purchase processes in your WooCommerce store. In that case, you have the opportunity to keep your customers satisfied and make them buy from your shop repeatedly.
Here is some easy but crucial optimization advice that will help you to attract more visitors to your online shop and boost your sales.
– Securing your WooCommerce store
Customers of e-commerce websites must utilize online payments. Therefore they must feel confident that your website is secure and that their personal information won’t be compromised.
While there are many ways to increase an online store’s security, activating SSL is one of the most crucial. Because it can, on the one hand, ensure the protection of the site’s user accounts and, on the other hand, helps in improving the SEO of your website.
To clarify, SSL is the green lock you sometimes see next to a website’s address, and it is a security standard that changes your site’s URL from HTTP to HTTPS. But what is this protocol used for? In fact, by enabling this certificate, you can create a standard framework for securing users’ communication with your website.
– WooCommerce Up-sell and Cross-sell
Utilizing the upsell or cross-sell strategy is one of the most effective ways to boost online stores’ sales. According to e-commerce statistics, applying these strategies in online shops has increased purchases by 10 to 30%.
By implementing Cross-sell strategy, when customers choose their selected products and access the payment page, some similar and related products are displayed to encourage them to make additional purchases. For instance, if customers purchase a t-shirt, related items like sunglasses, jeans, etc., may be displayed to them so that they can, if necessary, add them to their shopping cart.
Another strategy for persuading people to buy more from your shop is upselling. By doing this, you can stimulate the clients to purchase slightly more expensive goods with better features and qualities by displaying them during the purchase process before payment. For instance, if customers add a 32″ TV to their cart, you might show them the 42″ and 50″ TVs so that they can compare the prices and choose to purchase the more expensive but higher-quality item from your website.
In WooCommerce, you can easily add Upsell and Cross Sell products as shown below:
However, you can use the WooCommerce product bulk edit plugin if you have a lot of products and want to bulk edit upsell, and cross-sell them simultaneously.
Installing this plugin will enable you to use a Filter Form that supports all WooCommerce fields to filter the products by your demands, as shown in the image below:
Then, for bulk editing Upsell or Cross-sell, you need to go to the Bulk Edit form and open the Type tab:
At the bottom of this page, you can see Upsell and Cross-sell options, which have two boxes in front of them:
In the first combo box, you can see three options, Append, Prepped, and Replace, which can be used to add, remove or replace the products of Upsell or Cross-sell fields.
In the second box, you can select the desired products so that the conditions you set in the first box are applied to them.
By clicking on the Do Bulk Edit button, all the changes you want will be applied to the products you filtered at once.
– Provide different payment gateway
The variety of payment options you offer customers is crucial in convincing them to buy products from your store. Even though credit cards are used for practically all financial transactions, many users still prefer to pay with cash when receiving their ordered goods ( Cash on delivery method).
So, if you want all customers to trust your shop, you must offer all suitable payment options to them. These can include cash payments, payments made online through a bank portal or wallet, payments made with credit and debit cards, payments made with foreign cards, payments made with money transfer services like Paypal, and cash on delivery payments.
– Offer free shipping
The shipping options are one of the critical components of an e-commerce website. Most of the time, you have to charge customers a fee to send the goods to their preferred addresses; nevertheless, providing free shipping is a great strategy to boost sales and entice your visitors to purchase more items from your website.
To improve this marketing strategy, you can set a fixed subtotal amount and offer free delivery of the products to customers whose shopping carts reach that amount.
Optimize UI/UX
Your online store should be designed and displayed to the visitors in a way that gives them a sense of security and trust, which will lead to turning potential customers into real buyers.
Investigating customer purchase behavior and designing the UI/UX of your online store according to it is the key to satisfying them to place their orders on your eCommerce store, especially when they visit your website for the first time.
To effectively attract customers to an online shop and increase sales, the website should be designed based on customer-friendly features, the principles of shopping psychology, and a proper sales strategy.
The most important part of an e-commerce website design is its store page. Visitors should be informed about the special promotions, discounts, sales offers, free gifts, etc., professionally and attractively on the store page, and have the opportunity to observe, search, filter, and choose their preferred products in a very simple and easy.
In this way, customers are persuaded to look at the products included in the promotions, and those who find the deals appropriate, undoubtedly enjoy a pleasurable shopping experience.
On the other hand, the speed of loading website pages has a significant impact on the customer experience. Reliable statistics show that the average wait time for loading a website page is only 3 seconds. Since many products are available in an online store, most of them experience slow loading times. This should be regarded as a serious problem, and store owners must try to resolve it using the proper techniques.
The greatest tips and tricks for enhancing the UI/UX design of your WooCommerce website are provided below:
– Choosing a theme for your WooCommerce website
Utilizing a WooCommerce theme that is attractive and simple to use can help you draw in customers and boost your sales. Choosing the best templates and themes for your website can be difficult because so many options are available.
In addition to having fantastic features and trustworthy functioning, a theme should be compatible with WooCommerce.
Read the article below to find out more about the top WooCommerce themes you can use to enhance the appearance of your store:
What Are The Best Free WooCommerce Themes For An Online Shop?
– Design an eye-catching WooCommerce store page
A user-friendly store page design is crucial when developing an e-commerce website. Instead of using outdated grid or list display methods, you may significantly increase your sales using a product table view. All the simple and variable items with their features are visible to the customer in the table view.
Buyers prefer to interact with your website to choose the products and services more quickly and simply on the store page rather than clicking on each product to view its features, which is one of the most crucial considerations when building a user-friendly store page.
Installing the WooCommerce Product Table plugin is a helpful way to update the store page’s appearance and replace the outdated method of displaying a product with a professional one.
You can give your customers a much more comprehensive selection of your products in the shortest time by putting all of your products on one table. You can also show your customers the option to search and filter the products and find the results of their searches in the same table.
Your sales will undoubtedly increase if customers can more easily access your products at a glance.
Use the WooCommerce Product Table plugin to create a user-friendly design for your store page. By installing this plugin, you can create a product table on the store page that shows all of your simple and variable items with unique features and prices in different columns.
– Create friendly user-experience
The website’s simplicity and ease of use are what the visitors want. Too many effects, big-sized images and videos, and challenging menus disappointed the users.
So, To make customers happy when they make purchases from your website, you must enhance the aesthetic of your eCommerce site. For instance, the greatest option is the website’s text should be easy to read.
The following are some more techniques for UI/UX optimization that can be used to enhance the shopping experience and draw in target audiences to your shop:
- Design an easy-to-use user interface.
- Offer a Hassle-free membership process.
- Simplify all procedures leading up to customer purchases.
- Display precise and clear product specifications, descriptions and product reviews.
- Give the customer the ability to compare products that are similar to one another.
- Provide easy access to different payment gateways.
– Impressive product images
Our perception of a product’s quality is intimately related to its appearance. Giving customers a high-quality product image enables them to make better and more comparable decisions. Still, it also serves as an intriguing example of the high quality of your products.
You should take this seriously into account and approach it professionally. Every trustworthy website and online retailer has a special room where they can take images of their products from various views. It is suggested to create your unique photos even if the pictures of the products you want to sell already exist on the Internet. One of the best methods to win your consumers’ trust is by doing this.
As numerous concerns in this regard will directly affect the outcome, try to get in touch with an expert. Make sure to take multiple shots of your products from various views because, according to the statistics, most customers like to check actual product images before placing an order. You will have a greater chance of increasing your sales if you meet their requirements.
– Mobile Optimization
Today’s smartphones are such a big part of our digital life. Ignoring them makes it impossible to succeed in digital marketing. However, many retailers prioritize their desktop websites over their mobile views. By establishing your mobile application or designing a responsive website, you may be able to win the competition in this market.
The statistics of search results showed that many searches that lead customers to click on a website were done on their mobile phones in 2021. This show how crucial it is to develop a responsive website that looks good on mobile devices. Therefore, whether you like it or not, you need to have a website that is optimized and suitable for displaying on mobile devices if you want to increase sales.
Making it as simple as possible to access all of the website’s components on mobile devices is the first step in optimizing a responsive website. After designing a responsive website, users can quickly get their search results and feel easy to choose their required products and order them from their smartphone directly.
Customer services
Providing customer service is vital to keep customer loyalty and converting them from potential customers to real buyers of your online store.
You can reduce the costs associated with attracting new clients and develop return customers by providing excellent customer service.
We go over a few of these customer service strategies that help boost your e-commerce website sales in the following:
– Offer quick support for increase sale
When potential customers visit your website, he is probably looking at other websites as well; but who will be successful in convincing them to buy? Indeed an online store that offers superior customer service.
Don’t let a lack of attention to customer requirements make them leave your website. Instead, ensure that someone is available to assist them even if you are absent for a while.
The best approach to communicating with your customers is through social networks. You can publish content rapidly on social media networks and reply to queries and comments from the audience with ease. The buyer’s questions may have been fully addressed on the product page, but unless they can get in touch with you directly, they won’t buy from you.
The customers will feel comfortable using your website if you offer them various customer service options, such as online chat, a contact us page with a phone number and address, and speedy email responses.
Therefore, if you want to persuade customers to make purchases from your store, you must reassure your clients that you are prepared to respond to their questions in various ways.
– Utilize live chat to connect with users in real-time
No customer wants to email you to discover your response between spam and other unwanted emails two days later.
Calling also has limitations; typically, customers will not call you to ask a simple question and wait in line for 10 minutes to receive their responses. They prefer to buy from a website that can respond to their questions swiftly, for example, through an online chat.
You must offer such customer services on your website to increase your sales.
Online chat is the best, quickest, and most economical way to communicate with visitors.
Customers ask inquiries, comment, and share complaints through online chat at all times with you, but under all circumstances, it is your responsibility to make everything so clear that there is no confusion regarding your business and the goods and services your company sells. One of the most significant problems in digital marketing is ignoring customer complaints, which means the site owners are given the proper attention they deserve.
Don’t forget that you need to give your users accurate information about the features of the supplied goods. In online conversations, describe the benefits and drawbacks of your product and help the customer who visits your store ask their questions and share their comments with you without interruption.
– Conducting comprehensive survey
Since many online stores ignore conducting a customer survey, they have encountered numerous problems in digital marketing. Many eCommerce businesses face severe issues by assuming that clients know the features and specifics of their goods and services.
However, most customers visiting your online store are looking for enough details on the products or services they are interested in. Users want to get answers to their potential inquiries from you for reassurance even when they have a lot of knowledge.
Hundreds of thousands of client inquiries leave unanswered when business owners ignore the conducting of customer surveys. According to research, more than two-thirds of customers stop purchasing from online shops due to this problem and go to a different website that respects their preferences and opinions more.
You have learned about customer service methods so far, but as you will see below, another crucial factor to consider if you want to boost sales on your website is to provide Encouragement and Promotion Programs for your customer.
Encouragement and promotion programs
Customers love free gifts, discounts, and other special deals. The more generous you are in this regard, the more orders you will receive from your clients and, eventually, the more sales you will reach.
In addition to increasing your brand awareness and making customers interested in your brand, providing special offers is a great strategy to introduce other products on your website and increase your sales.
You can apply the following techniques as the greatest encouragement and promotion programs on your online shop:
– Offer discount coupons for increase sale
Offering discount coupons is an effective marketing strategy to boost store sales. Displaying best-selling products on the store page with a discount coupon, which increases sales of those products, is one of the successful uses of this strategy.
We’re all concerned about missing wonderful opportunities, so when a product is provided with a discount price for a limited time, interested customers are enticed to purchase it while there is still time.
– Start a loyalty points program (reward customers with loyalty points)
One of the most cost-effective strategies to boost sales is to concentrate on maintaining the satisfaction of your company’s loyal consumers. According to published statistics, loyal customers provide 22% of a company’s overall revenue, whereas new customers only contribute 11%. Additionally, repeat clients spend 15% more than new ones on online shopping purchases.
Rewarding loyal clients with loyalty promotions is one of the most acceptable ways to keep them returning to your store and placing their orders again.
You can use Free Gift for WooCommerce plugin to offer free gifts as a promotional plan.
For example, by adding a new rule in the following way, you can give a free gift to the customers who buy from your store for the third time, which is automatically added to their shopping cart.
- Select a Simple adjustment method.
- Select the product you want to add to the customer’s shopping cart as a free gift in the Product – Get section.
- Mark the Auto add to cart option.
- In the Condition section, select the conditions you see in the image below:
– Leverage events, occasions, and holidays
Consider making your current website promotions more attractive, for example, by offering free gifts on specific occasions.
Whatever you are selling, you may boost your sales near some special occasions like Christmas or Halloween by offering a free gift with every purchase and other reward-based incentives. Giving away free gifts improves customer satisfaction and is a terrific method to advertise new products and encourage customers to buy them.
For instance:
You may use the Free Gift for WooCommerce plugin in the next three easy steps to display such an offer in your WooCommerce store in November:
- Select Simple Adjustment and check the Auto add to cart option.
- In the Product – Get section, select the product you want to be added to the customer’s shopping cart as a free gift on a special occasion.
- In the Condition section, select the condition you see in the image below:
– Online quizzes, the winner of which will have a surprise
Using the WordPress Quiz plugin, create informative and interesting quizzes and allow your customers to test their knowledge of your range and products and easily receive gifts in return.
This offer is very convenient to the extent that you will do several marketing steps at once.
- Increase Sale: The sales will increase because the more people you attract, interest in your store will increase and the more people will start using your products.
- Advertisement: With the help of the questions included in the quiz created with Quiz Plugin for WordPress, you will advertise the products mentioned there. So as in the first case, in this case as well, as interest increases, sales will increase
But how to deliver that information to potential riders? Of course, through social media. You can give information about two of your products to the customer twice a week. It is desirable that the information will be presented interestingly, not boring so that the customers enjoy reading or watching it (of course if it is presented through the video).
The second condition is that information should be quite short and concrete so that anyone can relate. One day before the competition, you should inform your customers to be ready, and after that, according to your given information, the questions will be prepared and asked by the customers. Here, it becomes important to determine the conditions for choosing the winner. It is necessary to make it as fair as possible and not disappoint the customers with the opposite result. There won’t be many winners, but naturally, there will be many participants who will certainly not stop once they don’t win.
- Active social media
Thus, we come to the fact that the third benefit of this way is to increase the activity of social networks.
– Flash Sales (Today Only) for increase sale
Providing special offers for a limited time, often known as urgency promotions in digital marketing, is an excellent tactic for enticing users and clients. To make this strategy work properly, you should display urgent offers of your goods or services on your website’s home page and advertise them on other communication channels like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Offering free gifts for a short period is another technique to enhance sales of a product that is still in stock or is about to expire. For instance, you could give away a best-selling item for one week when a customer purchases a product that remains in your stock.
Providing such an offer is easily possible with the Free Gift for WooCommerce plugin in the following simple steps:
- Select Buy x Get y and check the Auto add to cart option.
- Write 1 in the Qty box of both Get and Buy.
- In the Products – Buy section, Select the product you want to apply this strategy to.
- In the Products – Get section, choose the product you want to add to the customer’s shopping cart as a free gift.
- In the Condition field, select a limited period. For example, in the image below, a period of 1 week is set:
Offering products and services in a limited quantity is another effective strategy that has successfully assisted store managers in boosting their sales. Because there are only a few items or services available during this flash sale, visitors may be more interested in buying that item if the promotion appears as an advertisement on the first page of your eCommerce website. This promotion motivates customers to go to the product’s page and purchase the product before the time of offer expires.
If you implement this strategy, it is better to prominently advertise the offers on the homepage of your website, in social media campaigns, and on other well-known communication channels. Another excellent option is creating a unique landing page for each offer.
– Feedback as a tool for promotion
Discounts, coupons, and gifts are great tools for promotion and encouragement. But the problem that arises is how to choose the exact product for your discounts, as first of all, products should be of maximum interest to your customers. Only a few percent of customers should buy a product that does not interest them, they can’t use it, or it is just not even worth buying at a discount․ So choosing the product for a discount is also very important.
Many shop owners think that it is a very simple task. Of course, it will be clear in case of knowing which product is the most sold one․ But it’s possible that the most high-demand product is simply too expensive to make a lot of profit. Therefore, the most appropriate way to know the answer to this question clearly and correctly is to create a survey.
Using the WordPress Survey plugin, you can easily create superb surveys, through which you will be able to ask questions to your customers and understand which product they are most interested in so you will target just that product.
Do not forget that the profit which you receive comes from your customers’ purchases. So you should be attentive to their feedback. Every customer wants to be heard. Being informed about your cons and pros from your customers will allow you to become the store where every customer wants to buy something from.
Knowing your customers’ offers, and grievances is a great benefit for you as with the help of their feedback you will achieve success. By paying attention to feedback, and taking into account the wishes of your customers, you will not even feel how you improve the sales of your store and encourage your customers to use your store.
So surveys are great funnels with which you will not only gain new customers, but your old customers will also become your loyal customers․
Advertising and marketing programs
Without marketing and advertising, you won’t attract new clients to increase your sales. Digital marketing tools and customer-attraction advertising tactics are “essential and complementary” tools for developing all types of businesses.
That’s why you need to plan for your advertising and marketing and provide engaging material on the website and social media. Creating a business plan for yourself, determining your goals for the upcoming months, and having a vision for selling products in the next month will enable you to move forward appropriately. You cannot launch a successful online business without a marketing plan.
Among the most successful marketing strategies, the following can be mentioned:
– Advertise in social media (retarget your audience on social media)
You may dramatically increase your brand marketing expenses by using social media. Social media will help you find your target market and engage with them by gathering data on their profiles, interests, jobs, and other important information.
In fact, you may pinpoint the clients who are most likely to purchase your products via social media marketing and advertising. By better understanding their interests and needs, you can entice them to visit your website and make purchases, which can boost your sales.
– Create a memorable video campaign
Your online sales must include stunning photographs, but digital marketing is impossible without publishing amazing videos. Videos used in marketing campaigns should focus more on educating and information than selling. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to make these videos. Just express what the visitor is looking for with acceptable quality.
To increase the effectiveness of the advertising video, post it on social networks and video-sharing websites like YouTube in addition to your website. It is preferable to produce an instructional video rather than writing descriptions or captions if your items need instructions on how to use them. Don’t forget to share the video everywhere you can.
– Focus on store SEO
Improving SEO and site optimization is the best strategy for increasing online sales. Users of the Google search engine do millions of searches each day. Having your website appear at the top of Google’s search results can significantly increase the number of customers that visit it and, as a result, bring in more orders for your business.
The key features for site optimization (SEO) include:
- Producing unique and exclusive content for your site, which is of high quality and written in a way that meets the needs of the user, not just to promote the site, is the best option to increase sales on the Internet.
- Using the best keywords that will attract more users to you.
- Make visiting your product page a pleasant experience.
- Organize and improve the navigation of your website.
- Fix broken links and improve your 404 page.
- Use HTTPS to keep your store secure.
- Improve the speed of loading the store page.
Reporting and Analyzing
Analyzing sales reports is one of the most crucial tasks of any store owner that contribute to the growth of an online store and its sales. You need to know how many people have visited your website, how many purchases these customers have made, or which of your products have sold the most to properly plan and implement relevant sales strategies.
Making better judgments for your eCommerce website and establishing new objectives require analysis of this data.
In addition, the sales strengths and weaknesses are identified and diagnosed with the use of these reports, allowing you to monitor more useful sales indicators and improve the efficiency and growth of your business.
The following are listed as some of the most useful results of evaluating and analyzing reports and sales data:
– Tracking, analyzing, and optimizing your marketing
You may learn what variables are boosting your store’s sales and which products you need to enhance and update by monitoring and analyzing sales reports. You can apply more effective marketing strategies without increasing your ad budget by using the correct and comprehensive data in the product sales report.
It is preferable to search for the following information and outcomes in sales reports to maximize marketing strategies:
- Which products do your customers see as different and better than your competitors’ products and order more?
- In which cities do the customers buy the most from you, or at what age are your target audiences?
- How many of your products are left in stock, and should you consider special advertising strategies to sell more of them?
By reviewing these data, you can decide to make changes to your website and other parts of your marketing strategies to increase your revenue.
– Evaluate & revise your strategy every month
Choosing price, promotions, and sales indicators for your goods or services is part of planning your sales strategies. After some time, you should check sales reports to assess the impact of this data on your sales.
Typically the product sales reports are evaluated monthly. At the end of each month, store owners decide on the most critical activities for increasing brand awareness and boosting their sales after analyzing accurate and valuable reports.
You can select the sales indicator with the highest priority by monitoring these reports, then make your strategies changes to improve your sales based on them. Examining the sales data can also assist you in tracking your development, achieving your sales targets, and improving your bottom line.
You need a power tool to receive reports containing actual data from your online store to use any of the strategies above. The WooCommerce Report Plugin is an expert tool that enables you to get regular and customized sales reports. You can get regular sales data on your email by installing this plugin, which will make an evaluation of your sales process flexible, effective, and efficient.
Conclusion
Creating an online store is one of the most well-known strategies to make money these days. However, you shouldn’t abandon your store once it has been built. Consider using unique strategies and tactics that enhance the customer experience is a crucial task for you as a store owner to improve your sales.
In this article, we’ve covered the critical strategies for boosting your revenue and sales.
We also introduced the most useful WooCommerce plugins that you can use to boost website sales by enhancing customer experience, receiving sales reports, offering free gifts, and improving website design.
By installing WooCommerce Product Table, Free Gift for WooCommerce, WooCommerce Report plugins you can have all the necessary tools to attract customers’ attention and encourage them to buy.