Whether you are at the very beginning of your eCommerce adventure or a veteran of the online sales, it is an everyday battle to win conversions. Acquiring new customers is one way to increase your sales, but it is well known that retaining the customers you already have in your database is cheaper to generate revenue. The grail would of course be to both acquire new customers and make them spend more when they return. Everyone wants more traffic and more sales in their online store – but how many actually knows how to leverage it, and with which tools?
We have gathered here 6 tactics that you can use to drive up the revenue, along with specific metrics you should track and visualize on your sales reports.
1. Engage with your audience
First and foremost, engage with your audience. It is not about asking them to sign up for the newsletter – there are a lot of other ways to engage with them. With a Facebook page, a Twitter account or a beautiful Instagram profile: make these follow buttons prominent on your website, so that your audience can hear more often about you in different ways. Likewise, having a blog and posting regularly valuable content helps connecting with fans and ranking better from an SEO perspective.
2. Build trust with your customers
Whichever the relationship – be it a lover, a friend, or a client – trust is the solid foundation of the pillars without which nothing can work. Building trust with your customer is hence a priority on your priority-list! Trust badges, secure checkouts, safe URLs… trust comes in many ways. An Actual Insights study showed that over 75% of their respondents declared that trust logos affected their sense of trust for a website (logos like McAfee Secure, PayPal, VeriSign…). The same percentage of shoppers said that on at least one occasion, they didn’t purchase a product because of the lack of trust badges.
Another less “tangible“ way of building trust revolves around your company’s communication strategies. Humanizing your brand, acknowledging mistakes, being transparent, likeable, there are a lot of ways to solidify the trust foundation.
3. Implement a data-driven strategy
This point is so obvious for an eCommerce business that we still have to mention it – collect, analyze and visualize your data. Data about your audience, your customers, their behaviors on your site, on your social media channels, the interaction with your products, etc. There are many different important metrics for your marketing, sales, or support teams to track and analyze, that will help you improve your results and implement a better strategy, in line with the results of these metrics. Knowing your customers‘purchasing habits thanks to the data you gather is a great source of improvement to satisfy their expectations better and anticipate their needs. To fully understand the information you collect, it is highly recommended to visualize it through real-time sales dashboards. They help you make better informed decisions that’ll take your business to the next level.
4. Wait before paying for ads
At an early stage, money doesn’t flow in easily; that’s why you invest in SEO and do your research beforehand to bring in a steady stream of traffic. Once this is done, you can start spending on advertisement. Without surprise, social ads are performing extremely well – especially on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit. However, depending on the niche of your business, some other websites might be more worth while: you should experiment different platforms and measure their performance.
5. Leverage user generated content
According to Tomer Tagrin, co-founder and CO of Yotpo, brands with user-generated content are more likely to have a more sustainable growth than their competitors. If you manage to engage your customer and provide authentic content that is transparent, insightful, personalized, and data-driven, “you will lead your business to success”.
6. Increase the lifetime value
The lifetime value (the money you generate over time in your relationship with a particular customer) is a key metric to track and to maximize. Indeed, generating revenue from already existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. To increase customer retention and expand the lifetime value, you can improve your products and services thanks to customers feedback, improve your website user experience, personalize and customize services, boost your customer service, etc.
Building a loyalty/reward program can also be a good idea to increase conversions from your current customers, while rewarding them for their repeated purchases. From the point-system that makes customers go back to their coffee spot (because they are THAT close to having one cookie for free), to more elaborate reward programs with discounts or friends‘ sponsorship, find something that will maintain your existing customer base.
Final note
All of the above is just a tiny part of all the tactics you can use to boost your eCommerce business. There are a lot of data analysis tools online to help you leverage your data. And when data is analyzed properly, it can really be turned into a goose laying golden eggs. Start implementing some -or all!- of these techniques and get ready to enhance your online business!
