Running an online business? Then it is quite evident that you are craving for more and more sales to generate higher revenues. With the increasing advent of electronic gadgets and internet connectivity, the outreach of online business is beyond imagination.
Measure of outreach
In this era of technology, the reach of web-oriented business is shooting sky high. To measure the outreach let’s check some numbers:
- A study in 2013 showed that about 41.3% internet users do online purchasing etc. and this graph is continuously rising upwards and is expected to reach 47.3% by 2018.
- The overall revenue generated on ecommerce in the year 2015 was calculated to be around 1,672 billion USD and the expected projection for 2018 was somewhere around 2,995 billion USD.
7 Golden steps to increase online revenue
With all these stats and data, one can reasonably guess the importance of online sales. As a brand owner, increasing sales and generating revenue exponentially always remains your prime target. However increasing online sales isn’t always easy. So here are 7 golden steps to increase your sales figures:
- Improving and tracking search usability
Now, this is probably the most important part of any ecommerce site. From a user’s end, a mobile-friendly, easy to use website always hits more traffic than a rigid and complex one. As a brand owner you need to understand the different amount of traffic that comes from various sources.
One set of users are the determined buyers who know what to buy and will search for that particular product of interest. For such users, increasing search capability and enhancing navigation with auto complete options will generate positive results.
The second category of traffic includes the ones who are unsure of what to buy and will just compare different products and options. For such potential customers, easy to use sections, different user-oriented navigation panels, auto completion abilities; search scope selectors etc. are required.
- Enticing photographs and descriptions
It doesn’t need further explanation that a beautiful and alluring picture can attract many minds. In the field of online business, a properly decorated website with enticing images and photographs can do wonders. In case you are a brand selling products such as apparels, a high definition photograph with proper clarity can help the customers in making a choice.
Along with products what plays a key role are the descriptions. The product description or details of your venture, different proposals etc. should be brief, bang-on, proper and in a lucid language.
A large ensemble of words and poetic descriptions can sound nice however from user point of view it may lose major traffic. Use subheads, bullets and points, larger fronts, vivid colours, videos, and schematics to increase visits to your site.
- A personalized experience
An online study showed that about 59% of users prefer a personalized home page and shop from the products shown in the preference section. So use your customer data and website’s customer navigation tracking features to record what a particular user is searching for. When that user logs in, try providing a personalized home page with variants and similar products according to the customer search history.
- Uniqueness
For any venture to stand out in the crowd, uniqueness in its idea acts a key factor. A proper branding of your product can reveal that uniqueness quite effectively. So invest more and more in content marketing.
Create factual yet peppy content to allure your potential customers. The best way of creating enticing content is by doing a proper research. Know your customers and understand their preferences, needs, and complaints. Design your products and content as per those demographics to ensure maximum engagement and higher conversion.
- Prompt to Cart
Like a cart in a physical store, online carts are the shopping buckets for digital shoppers. Users tend to drop things they like in their carts. To prevent your users from abandoning their items from cart make it more and more prompt.
A quick action cart with prompt features like selecting colours, sizes, product variations, quick billing pages, optimized address and information books can make things swift and hassle free hence encouraging users to buy more.
- Landing pages
Giving a personalized experience to your customers should always be on the priority list while trying to increase revenues. Landing pages with specific CTAs can enhance your sales. Landing pages that lead a potential customer towards making purchase decisions.
This, in turn, can increase revenues to a great extent. Along with this, you can add recommendations, receipts, bills, customer information, specified discounts and many more add-ons for enhancing sales.
- Marketing, Marketing , Marketing
Finally, we arrive at the most crucial part of any business and that is its proper marketing. Without marketing there are hardly any chances for sale. For ecommerce marketing try utilizing different social media platforms. You can use Google Adwords or Facebook Ads, make small and peppy videos to post on different platforms.
Make your website more user-friendly and use the data collected to catapult the number of visits. The more the site is user-friendly, the higher SEO rankings you get. A subtle way of increasing more hits on website is by utilizing content created by your targeted pool of customers.
Use customer-generated videos, clips, blogs, posts that are available in your website. A study showed that brands can increase their sales up to 78% when retailers interact with customers through user-generated contents.
Protips and end credits
Other than following the 7 golden steps, try to be more interactive with the customers. Organise contests, give away reward points, make chat groups, and media platforms to interact more with consumers. You can gather more customers by word-of-mouth publicity as well. You can also delve deep into the problems associated with your brand and get fresh ideas for improvements.
Your ecommerce venture can witness remarkable growth only when you work on the right strategies and implement them effectively. So follow these tips and attract prospective leads thus generating more revenues for your ecommerce site,
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Author Bio:
Being a senior business associate, Peter Davidson strives to help different brands and startups to make effective business decisions and plan effective business strategies. With years of rich domain expertise, he loves to share his views on the latest technologies and applications through his well-researched content pieces. Follow him on Google+ and Twitter.
