How to Sell More Online Without Spending a Fortune on Advertising
How can I sell more online without spending more on advertising?
Online sellers know that an eCommerce store is only as good as its full shopping carts.
But how do you get more customers without spending a ton on advertising?
If you’re looking to increase your bottom line and sell more online, here are a few tips to help.
Start with the end in mind – Customer service!
It may seem counter-intuitive and feel a bit like the chicken-and-the-egg argument, but if your customer service is terrible, no amount of marketing will help.
Sure, great marketing and lots of customers coming to your site may work for a little bit, but online reviews and word of mouth will overtake those efforts, and people will stop coming to you.
So, start with customer service. How is your checkout experience? Do you send a receipt right away? Maybe add some personality to that typically transactional step.
What about shipping? How do you handle returns and refunds?
Each touchpoint with your customers should face scrutiny to ensure a positive experience.
Build your audience and convert visitors into contacts
You can’t have customers without first having visitors to your eCommerce site. Views can be a vanity metric – 1 million views may sound great but if no one buys they’re worthless. However, if no one visits your site or joins your audience, you can’t convert them into customers.
Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, writes about building an audience in his book Content, Inc.
“I believe the absolute best way to start a business today is not by launching a product, but by creating a system to attract and build an audience.”
– Joe Pulizzi in Content, Inc.
Throughout his book, Joe goes on to explain that an audience that’s loyal will want to hear from you and buy from you. It’s not just a transaction (although some online sales are). It’s a relationship.
If you’re blogging, make sure you have a way for readers to subscribe with their email.
Convert contacts into loyal customers – Delight
Delighting customers has become a much-talked-about scenario in social media. From hotels returning stuffed animals after an adventure to random steak deliveries because of a tweet, delight through surprise is great.
But it’s not enough.
In their book Talk Triggers, Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin break down how consistent, relevant, scalable and reasonable actions can turn into triggers to getting people to talk about your brand.
Great customer service, as mentioned earlier, helps with this. But before you get to this point, you have to convert contacts into customers.
Using time-sensitive sales can help. So do relevant emails. For instance, you you sell mittens and other winter wear, keeping an eye on weather reports and sending a timely email to a specific area where a winter storm is due could bring new sales about for your online store (if you plan for shipping times).
Finally on this point, abandoned carts are the bane of many online sellers’ existence. Put a plan into place for abandoned cart nurturing to increase sales where they fell apart. Sometimes consumers just get distracted and your prompt could push them into buying territory.
Put social proof to work – reviews
Whether it’s a review of your products or of your company, social proof works to increase an audience and build trust.
Much like what Jay and Daniel talk about in Talk Triggers, happy customers bring more happy customers.
Ask for reviews after the sale. You can use email to ask, linking to your reviews page, your Google business listing or your Amazon product page – however you sell.
Then, highlight those reviews on your website, in email communications and in social media.
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Increase your numbers
Of course one way to sell more online without spending a fortune on advertising is to increase the numbers across the scope of your selling process.
Let’s look at an example.
- A website has monthly visitors of 1,000.
- 40% of the visitors leave without interacting with the website. This is the bounce rate and we are left with 600 visitors.
- Out of the 600 visitors, 100 of them end up on the buying page or shopping cart.
- Out of the 100 visitors on the buy page, 10 end up actually buying.
From this example we have:
- 1,000 monthly visitors
- 40% bounce rate
- Monthly sales of 10
- Overall conversion rate of 1% (1 out of 100 visitors buy)
The goal is to improve the conversion rate so you have more sales from the same amount of visitors so you’re not spending more on advertising.
One way to decrease that bounce rate is with good SEO – fast page load times, relevant content, etc.
Marketing consultant and national speaker Neil Patel offers 13 ways to reduce bounce rates here.
Also, increase returning customers through good service and consistent communication after the sale as mentioned earlier.
Finally, you can also increase overall visitors through marketing (it doesn’t have to be paid advertising). Content marketing, social media content, Facebook live sales… it all comes together and costs you time more than money.
Offer live chat
One final tip to increase online sales for your eCommerce store is to offer live chat.
People want to interact.
A report from Econsulntacy estimated that over 80% of clients need assistance while shopping online.
Read that again. In the age of automation and digital commerce, more than 80% of clients need assistance while shopping online.
And they expect to get fast help. Instead of sending an email and waiting for a reply, or trying to call you hoping that the line won’t be busy, they want immediate help. If they can send you a message on chat a get an instant response, conversions will go up.
With the right tool, you can serve clients 24/7. You can also handle multiple conversations at one time. The best systems offer web, desktop, and mobile applications so you can answer questions on the go and provide help from any place.
According to that research, online shops offering live chat on their site claim to boost sales up to 30%.
When you’re ready to increase your online sales and build an outreach campaign, check out our guide below.
Shopping cart photo by Kai Oberhäuser on Unsplash
Happy woman photo by Kyle Loftus on Unsplash
