5 tips to boost your ecommerce sales in 2018

If you’re running an ecommerce website, you should always be searching for ways to improve your sales.

In this guide, we’ll look through some methods to entice more people to make a purchase from your website.

To make the most of some of these tips, you’ll either need to polish up your technical skills, or considering hiring an agency to help you out. That may seem like a big step, but doing so can really help take your business to the next level.

Run A/B tests

Could changing the colour of your “buy now” button boost sales? It may seem like a strange question, but the fact is you can never tell how a change to your website will impact sales until you try it.

Of course, it’s not a good idea to go round making site changes just for the sake of it. You need to identify potential changes and then test them against your existing website one at a time so you can tell whether they have a positive or negative impact on your sales.

That’s where A/B testing comes in. The concept behind the test is simple – you make one small change to a page on your website and see whether it makes a difference to your conversion rate compared to your existing page.

In practice, A/B testing is a little bit more complicated than this, as you have to worry about things like statistical significance, and the technical side of setting up your tests.

That said, the effort required to run A/B tests is more than worth it as you’ll almost certainly discover changes that boost your sales and hence your revenue.

Check out this guide to learn more about getting started with A/B testing.

Make better use of your email marketing list

You do have an email marketing list, right? If not, then make creating one your top priority. If you already have a list, then a great way to boost sales is by making sure you’re using it in the right way.

If you’re just sending out the same email to all your customers, then you’re not using the channel to its full potential.

Targeted, segmented marketing emails can boost your conversion rates. You can even make use of clever techniques like abandoned cart emails, which contact people after they leave your site with items in their shopping cart that they haven’t checked out.

This is the webinar for you if you want to learn more about how to make the most of your email marketing list.

Optimise your PPC ads

Pay per click (PPC) ads are the lifeblood of many an ecommerce business. Done right, they can drive plenty of sales and increase your profits. Done badly, PPC ads can be a time consuming, expensive failure.

So how can you make PPC ads? Well, if you haven’t tried them in the past, or have tried them and struggled to get them working for you, then why not check out this free course on getting started with PPC ads.

This is the place to go if you’re looking for some more advanced PPC tips and tricks.

Streamline your website

How many clicks does it take for someone to buy a product from your website? How many fields do they have to fill in when signing up?

If people have to jump through hoops to become your customer, then they’re far less likely to actually become a customer.

The worst thing is, you can sometimes put obstacles in people’s way without realising. What may seem like a perfectly logical website setup to you could be very confusing to first-time visitors.

Testing is the answer here. A/B testing can help you with basic questions such as “what happens if I reduce the number of fields in my sign up form?”.

However, to discover things like how your potential customers expect your site’s navigation to be structured, you need to run in depth user tests.

User testing is a great way to improve your site, because it allows you to get an insight into the minds of the people who matter – existing and potential customers.

As you might imagine, it’s a complex task. We have a guide to getting started with user testing here. But if you’re serious about it, you may want to seek out the help of a specialist agency.

Focus on customer service

If you’ve been running your ecommerce business for a while, you’ll have undoubtedly heard the old adage that it’s cheaper to keep a customer than it is to attract a new one. And it’s true.

So ask yourself are you really doing enough to keep customers happy? If you aren’t able to answer this question with a resounding yes, backed up by data that proves it, then it’s an area you need to focus on in 2018.

The key to improving customer service is understanding exactly what your customers think of your business.

By implementing the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system, you’ll be able to understand what customers do and don’t like about your business. From there, you can’t start making improvements to keep customers happy.

This guide will help you get started with NPS.

Summing up

Hopefully you’ve been inspired to try out at least one method of growing your ecommerce sales, and no matter how you’re planning to grow your business in 2018, 123 Reg will be with you every step of the way.