If you’re serious about your business, you’ll want to know how to increase online sales.
Here’s the deal: There’s no tricks or hacks that will help you achieve this. You must put in the work and use proven tactics.
In this article, you’re going to learn all the tactics you need to increase online sales.
Start with your objectives: you can’t improve what you don’t measure
Before you attempt to increase online sales, you must have objectives in place that you want to meet. For example, increase sales by 10% or get 2,000 email subscribers etc.
Increasing sales is a process and without a measurement to work towards it’s hard to achieve it. Start with SMART goals. Then set up a process to measure and report on success (and failure) so you can learn and improve.
Now let’s dive into the tactics.
24 Proven tactics that increase your online sales
Here’s the list of what I will cover in this article:
Basic Tactics
- Conversion rate optimisation
- SEO
- Paid Search
- Content Marketing
- Paid Social
- Email Marketing
Advanced Tactics
- Show Off Customer Testimonials and Trust Signals
- Create a Sense of Urgency
- Offer a Bulletproof Money-Back Guarantee
- Reduce Friction in the Checkout Process
- Provide as Many Payment Options as Possible
- Implement Tiered Pricing
- Add an Opt-In Pop-Up Offer to Push Them Over the Edge
- Grow Online Sales with Mobile Optimization
- Remove sliders from your homepage
- Make your landing page match your ad
- Show trust icons on the checkout page
- Use your customer’s voice in your copy
- Split-test your headline display
- Include social proof
- Use a personal call to action (eg. “Yes, I want to buy”)
- Offer something free (eg. free shipping)
- Improve your webpage load time
- Eliminate noise and distraction
The basic tactics to increase online sales that every business should consider
When trying to increase your sales online often there isn’t a one size fits all. But in general, the following tactics work for most businesses. Consider how you can put them in your strategy before trying more advanced tactics.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
At the heart of any effort to increase a websites sales is conversion rate optimisation (CRO). Many of the tactics I cover throughout this article can fall under this practices.
You might be wondering:
“What is conversion rate optimisation?” It’s a process of testing different parts of your website to improve your conversion rate.
If you’re wondering what is a conversion, it’s an action taken on your website. For example, someone completing a contact form or purchasing a product.
You can use CRO to increase online sales by running tests on your website. In this guide, I’ll give you plenty of ideas to test. But, you’ll need tools to run these tests.
If you’re low on budget I’d recommend using Google Optimise (it’s free). Otherwise, you could try premium paid tools, such as Optimizely or VWO.
Search engine optimisation or SEO
If you want to increase online sales you need to drive traffic to your website.
And the bottom line is:
Without a solid organic foundation, it can be very costly to get traffic through paid channels. And ultimately reducing the amount of profit made. You will need paid acquisition as a part of your strategy. But SEO should be a critical piece.
If you’re new to SEO, you can read up on my complete guide to SEO. If you’re no longer a beginner try out my advanced guide to ranking higher on google.
To increase online sales through SEO, you must target high intent keywords that drive traffic to your product landing pages.
To do this, you need to follow these steps:
- Research keywords that have commercial intent.
- Create landing pages for these keywords
- Create educational blog content that links to these product pages
- Get backlinks to both your blog content and product pages from quality websites in your niche.
This process sounds simple on the surface but requires a lot of work. Here are some great resources to help:
Paid search or search engine marketing
If you want scalability when increasing your online sales, then don’t look past paid search.
Using platforms like Google Adwords and BingAds can be an efficient way to ready to buy people to your website. If you’re new to paid search, I recommend reading my in-depth guide on Google Adwords.
To drive qualified traffic to your website through paid search you need to adopt a similar strategy to SEO. Target keywords with high commercial intent to your product landing pages. It’s also essential to have well structure campaigns.
To succeed in paid search follow these steps:
- Research keywords that have commercial intent
- Plan out your account structure into product or service related campaigns
- Use single keyword ad groups to improve the relevancy of your ads.
- Create tailored landing pages for each ad group (where possible)
- Make sure you’re tracking conversion and using an ROI-focused Adwords budget.
Content Marketing
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand with any strategy try to increase online sales.
But here’s the kicker:
According to Hubspot, 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. If you want to increase sales, you’ll want to get your brand in front of potential buyer’s while they are researching a product or service.
By doing this, you’ll be top of mind once the buyer goes further down the funnel. When they search for a ‘high-intent keyword’ you should be bidding on it via paid search. And also ranking for it on organic search.
To execute a successful content marketing strategy follow these steps:
- Set your objectives for content marketing.
- Research low-intent but keywords that people search while they are researching.
- Group these keywords by the products or services you offer.
- Create a blog article that covers everything in the group on a high-level
- Create more detailed pieces on each topic in the group and link back to the main article.
- Promote your content via the many content promotion tactics out there.
Paid Social
Over 3 billion people are active social media users. So it’s no surprise you have the potential to increase your sales through social advertising.
You have the option to use social media for free, but organic reach continues to drop. I’d recommend looking a paid options.
If you’re new to social advertising, the best approach to take is retargeting. Set up the required pixel on your website, so that you can serve ads to people who have visited your site on social media channels.
Once you’re confident with that approach, you should take a funnelled approach to advertising on social. This will help to attract a new audience of potential customers.
The process looks something like this:
- Awareness. Show an audience something non-salesy that helps solve a problem for them.
- Consideration. Show the same audience a ‘soft sell’ that still helps them to solve a problem. Possibly something they can download by giving you their email address.
- Sell. Show the same audience a hard sell ad with a strong call to action to take an action that matters to your business.
Email Marketing
One of the best ways to increase online sales is email marketing. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve probably got 100s if not 1000s of email address.
Are you leveraging this?
Often businesses focus on acquiring new customers and neglect the people already familiar with their brand!
There are many tools out there to help you with email marketing. Easy to use options like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. Through to sophisticated software for larger companies like Pardot and Marketo.
By trying to re-engage, up-sell or cross-sell your existing database you could see a massive uplift in sales.
There are a few strategies that you could try here:
- Re-engage with prospects that never made a purchase.
- Upsell existing customers to a more premium product or service.
- Cross-sell to customers with a related product or service they may be interested in.
- Engage them with content so your brand stays top of mind when they are ready to buy again
A key consideration as you scale your email marketing efforts is automation. When you start out, it’s okay to send emails out manually.
Advanced Tactics to increase online sales fast
You should master the fundamentals of the tactics that I mentioned above.
They will take your business in the right direction to increase sales online.
But once you’ve nailed them, and want to explode your growth the next 16 tactics are sure to help you drive online sales fast.
Show Off Customer Testimonials and Trust Signals
When people are buying online (especially if they don’t know your brand) they will have trouble trusting you.
How do you solve this?
Third party testimonials and trust signals. Use customer reviews from verified third-party sources to make
new prospects feel confident. Social trust tools are a new breed that can drive significant results.
Create a Sense of Urgency
To drive your potential new customer over the edge to buy, create some urgency.
Us humans can’t resist missing out. We get a severe case of FOMO.
By merely adding how much stock you’ve got left on products. Or adding countdowns to offers on your services can dramatically increase your conversion rate.
Offer a Bulletproof Money-Back Guarantee
When people buy online one of their primary concerns is that they can’t try the product first.
A super easy way to eliminate this pain point is to offer money-back guaranteed. If you can’t provide this, then you’re obviously not confident that you have a great product.
Koala mattress does an excellent job of this. But they go one step further in offering a 120 night trial of their mattress. And if you’re not satisfied, you get your money back.
There’s absolutely no risk to their potential customers.
Reduce Friction in the Checkout Process
This one isn’t just for e-commerce stores. Whether you sell products through checkout or capture leads from a form. One
of the main reasons people don’t complete the process is because it’s too hard or takes to long.
Eliminate the friction.
Only include things in the process that are essential. Evaluate your shopping cart and contact forms by asking one straightforward question:
Do we need this?
If your answer is no, then get rid of it.
Provide as Many Payment Options as Possible
It wouldn’t show up in your analytics or sales report if a customer left your website because you didn’t have the payment type they wanted.
It might not be possible to have every payment option available. But you should try to implement as many as possible.
Better still be sure to include more modern tech like Afterpay or Zippay, which let people buy now and pay later.
Implement Tiered Pricing
Most SASS companies have this strategy in place. Usually, three different price points that offer different features.
Add an Opt-In Pop-Up Offer to Push Them Over the Edge
If someone visits your website and then leaves, they may never come back.
This is an opportunity missed.
You can implement an exit pop-up on your website to capture their details. Offer them something they can’t resist. For example, 15% off their first order or a downloadable guide that solves there most significant pain point.
Grow Online Sales with Mobile Optimization
More than half of searches that occur on Google are on a mobile device.
Here’s a quick task for you:
Jump into Google Analytics (if you don’t have it get it!). Check the technology > Devices report and see what percentage of your traffic is on mobile or tablet.
Then ask yourself, do I provide a fast and excellent experience for people on devices?
If the answer is no this is an easy way to increase your sales online by optimising your mobile experience.
Increase your page load speed, make buttons and font bigger. By doing this, you could potentially increase your conversion rate overnight.
Remove sliders from your homepage
Sliders are conversion killers!
I’d say they are the worst feature in web design. Removing the slider from your homepage will increase your sales.
Make your landing page match your ad
If you send paid traffic from search engines to your website and don’t create relevant landing pages, I can guarantee you’re wasting money.
Match your landing pages to your ads and better still your landing pages. If someone searches, ‘Apple MacBook 15 inch’ send them to a page where they can buy one. Not a generic laptops page with multiple brands.
Or worse still your homepage.
By doing this, you’ll reduce the cost you pay per click and increase your conversion rate.
Show trust icons on the checkout page
Have you bought an SSL certificate or featured in a reputable news publication?
Show it on your checkout or contact page.
People are susceptible to hand over the personal data online and anything you can do to help them trust you to do it.
Use your customer’s voice in your copy
One of the most effective conversions copywriting tactics is using the customer’s voice.
Here’s the deal:
No matter what you sell your customer has objections. Ask them their most significant concerns preventing them from buying.
And then use that in your website copy. Are they worried that they won’t get the value for money? Give them a 120-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked.
Split-test your call to action buttons
One of the most straightforward tests to increase online sales is testing a variation of your call to action.
Use a free tool like Google Optimise to run an A/B test. You might find a few changes to the words you use can increase conversion rate.
Also, try testing different colours. One colour may entice people to click and buy more than another.
Include social proof
If you have a decent following on social media, I’m sure people have some nice things to say about your brand (or maybe not).
If you are getting positive reviews on social media, then embed them on your website. Like I mentioned earlier people trust people and not brands.
Any edge you can get to having people trust your brand is critical.
Use a personalised call to action
Personalising has taken marketing by storm. But most people are using it in their email marketing.
Why not try it on your website?
Merely shifting a call to action from ‘Buy Now’ to ‘Yes, I want to buy now’ can give you a substantial uplift.
Another example, ‘sign up now’ to ‘sign me up now’.
‘Download now’ to “Get your free content’.
Offer something free
It may seem counterintuitive if you’re trying to increase online sales but offer something up free.
You’d be surprised, but free shipping or a free $25 gift card with a purchase can push people over the edge.
Feeling like they are getting more than they are paying for can be enough for them to choose you over a competitor.
Improve your webpage load time
How fast is your website?
Every second slower that your website loads are revenue lost. Use Google’s free tool to get estimates of how much revenue you could get by improving your page load speed.
The classic case study is Amazon. They saw the 0.5 second slower page load could cost them 1 billion dollars in one year.
Improving your website load speed by a few seconds could make all the difference.
Eliminate noise and distraction
Distraction on a website is a conversion killer.
You want to make your website experience as seamless as possible for the customer to get from A to B (purchase).
Now it’s your turn
So there you have it my best tips to increase online sales.
I want you to keep in mind that even tests that fail are still a success because you should learn. Many growth professionals leave on the mantra of ‘failing fast’. With every failure your one step closer to discovering what works.
Good luck! And Let me know in the comments which tactics you’re going to try out first for your business. Better still tell me your results!
