10 Tips to Increase Sales and Drive Profits

In today’s ultra-competitive market, you may be looking for ideas on how to increase sales. Sales are a direct line to profit and can make or break your business’s success. Now that the world has migrated to a predominantly online eCommerce landscape, it’s critical for you to understand how to increase online sales. In this article, we’ll discuss how to boost sales for your business, as well as the making a difference with our selected tips. By following the steps below you will increase eCommerce sales and enhance your business’s reputation and brand. Let’s get started!

1. Be Upfront with Customers

One of the best ways to see your sales increase is to be upfront with your customers. When you communicate in an authentic and sincere way, you will gain your customer’s trust, which will lead to an increase in online sales and earnings. To add to your credibility in this area, you need to be transparent when you communicate. It also helps to:

• Present yourself in a professional and genuine manner
• Thoughtfully negotiate and itemize the rates for the products or services you feature
• Determine any values, if needed, ahead of time
• Provide reassurances with respect to quality and follow up
• Answer questions directly and tell the customer you will get back to them if you do not have the answer. Then follow up immediately once you have the answer

Treat the customer as you would like to be treated, and you can form a more common bond.

2. Utilize Omnichannel Retail

To support your growth toward an increase in online sales, you also need to make full use of omnichannel retail strategies. This multichannel approach helps you learn how to increase sales by providing a seamless experience for each customer.

Therefore, using this method can enhance the customer experience (CX), whether a customer is shopping at a brick-and-mortar store, or online using a laptop or mobile device. Keep in mind approximately three quarters of retail customers use multiple channels before purchasing a product or service.

Examples of omnichannel strategies and percentages of use

Here’s a look at what an omnichannel approach to acquiring retail customers might look like. These are the percentages of customers who convert by channel:

• Websites (89%)
• Email campaigns (81%)
• Social media sites (72%)
• Direct mail (66%)
• SEO – PPC (Pay-per-Click) (65%)
• Web banners (60%)
• Mobile devices (34%)
• Aggregator websites (32%)
• Price comparison websites

Moreover, the possibility of selling to an already existing customer gives you a 60% advantage to experience sales success. While on the other hand, the chance of selling to a new prospect hovers between 5% to 20%. To boost sales then, you need to be found everywhere on and off the web. Omnichannel marketing gives you this advantage.

3. Create a Target Market Analysis

One of the most important things you need to know when you learn how to increase sales concerns creating a target market analysis. It’s vital to get into the minds of your customers and learn what solutions they need so you can communicate effectively. By targeting your base of customers and understanding their needs and expectations, you can relate to them better and enhance their overall customer experience.

So, how do you create your target market analysis to realize a sales increase?

Preparing a target market analysis

To perform a target market analysis, you must gather and do the following:

• Identify your target market by age, gender, annual income, career, and leisure activities
• Find out how much of your product your buyers own and how often they replace it
• Separate the market analysis into demographics, such as consumer beliefs, buying trends, and geolocations. Doing so will enable you to reach your customers more efficiently
• Perform market research by surveying current customers and obtaining demographic reports from vendors online
• Pick the markets you want to focus on
• Determine which markets your competition sells to
• Use the information you gather to make projections as to who will buy your products
• Forecast how much a target demographic will consume

After reviewing the information you’ve gathered, ask about repeat customers. Who will continue to return to your website or contact your business by phone or email?

4. Consider Email Automation

Increase eCommerce sales by including email automation in your marketing and sales goals. Send out email blasts to keep your market up-to-date on your latest product offers and incentives. Email marketing offers you a chance, as well, to tell your brand’s story and to share interesting and valuable information related to your product or service line. Having a relatable brand that customers recognize and are comfortable with will undoubtedly boost sales.

5. Offer Recurring Billing

Providing recurring billing services will incentivize customers to return and buy products on your site. When you invoice customers monthly, you increase your cash flow and relieve some of your workload by automating billing. Doing this helps retain customers and prevents oversights when you send out notices.

Offer an online subscription service so you can take advantage of recurring billing. Once customers sign up for a subscription, you can automatically charge them monthly, thereby giving you an almost immediate sales increase and predictable revenue stream. Just make sure you deliver your products, as promised.

6. Focus on Customer Service

Placing a focus on customer service means engaging with the customer in a way that meets or exceeds what they expect. In turn, this leads to greater customer loyalty and satisfaction. As today’s online competitors rival each other for their shoppers’ attention, customer experience management, or CXM, increasingly becomes more important. CXM entails managing your customer’s experience so they continue to return to your website. This is a great way to organically increase online and eCommerce sales.

Again, be upfront with customers. Give them clear answers to their questions. Make sure every aspect of their experience on your site motivates them to buy your product and engage in your brand. To craft a good customer experience, all interactions matter–from the emails you send your customers to the type of software you use for customer engagement.

Consider this, approximately 57% of people shopping online maintain they stopped buying from an eCommerce store because of a bad customer experience or chose a more upfront competitor who offered a better shopping experience. Being upfront with your customer means focusing on being customer-centric. To do this, find out your customers’ pain points, give them solutions, and share your brand’s focus and message.

7. Study the Competition

To keep on top of your market and to boost sales, you need to study and review the activities of your competitors. What do they do to incentivize customers? How do they retain customers and how do they attract leads? What can you do to stand out from the competition? You need to answer all the foregoing questions to ensure better customer retention and a sales increase.

8. Invest in Your Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy

You need to work out a method to convert leads to customers. This is critical to increasing eCommerce sales. Therefore, you need to invest in the conversion rate optimization method you choose to use. You can make any of these practices part of your overall strategy.

• Always use high-quality videos or images on the web pages you feature products and services
• Provide free shipping
• Offer limited-time coupon codes
• Offer competitive pricing to your customers
• Test your eCommerce checkout process. Is it something that will meet a customer’s expectations?
• Add cart abandonment software to your website. Abandonment software captures the customer’s or lead’s email address and sends the user an email about the abandoned purchase
• Use live chat software, so a lead or customer can easily get any question answered without difficulty
• Consider your customer demographic and the overall user experience (UX) when setting up a conversion rate optimization strategy

9. Reduce Friction on the Checkout Page

You can more easily learn how to increase online sales by reducing any friction a customer may experience during checkout. You can do this by implementing the following:

• Increasing the speed of your site, so the customer can get to the checkout faster
• Offering several payment methods. Doing so will help you realize a noticeable sales increase
• Revamping your website’s design so it features a more user-friendly platform – one where the user can easily navigate the pages
• Simplifying the selling process
• Optimizing for mobile use

By integrating these features, you will boost sales and keep your customers coming back.

10. Keep Your Branding Consistent

If you want to get recognized and stay branded online, you need to make sure your branding remains consistent. Otherwise, you may cause confusion for your leads or customers. Well-recognized brands can be easily identified by their fonts and colors. Keep the brand logo basic and applicable to your company’s products, services, or mission. Make sure your customer can identify with the brand and remember it.

Are You Ready to Boost Sales?

Now you know how to increase sales using the above methods. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend a large amount of money to increase online sales. You only need to expand your channels and create a pleasant customer experience. Don’t downplay the importance of adding sales tools and techniques to your marketing plan to increase eCommerce sales. Direct your online marketing and sales efforts on pleasing the customer, and you will quickly boost sales and gain more influence online and offline in the marketplace. You’ve got this!