With online shopping more popular than ever before, it’s no surprise that online stores are constantly searching for ways to boost their sales. If you’re one of them, you’ve come to the right place!
In this article, we’ll share 13 proven strategies to help you drive more online sales in 2023 and beyond. So buckle up, grab a cup of coffee, and let’s dive into the world of ecommerce!
13 techniques to increase sales in your online store
Let’s get right into the top 13 tactics that can boost online sales for any ecommerce store!
1. Find the best value proposition
Finding the best version of your value proposition is an essential part of increasing your online sales.
Value propositions are what first get potential customers to understand the key differences between your product(s) and those of your competitors. But unfortunately, it can be really difficult to predict which value proposition will most effectively entice customers to purchase from you.
That’s why A/B testing is the best way to optimize your sales pitch. This allows you to use hard data to find out which value proposition resonates and convinces your target audience to choose your product, rather than relying on your gut instinct.
How do you test multiple value propositions? Well, OptiMonk makes it easy!
- Create a Dynamic Content campaign.
- Select the headline that you’d like to A/B test on your landing page and rewrite it.
3. Start an experiment comparing your original headline with your new headline.
2. Match your headline to your ad copy
If you’re running paid ads on social media to attract website traffic, it’s a great idea to personalize the copy that potential customers see when they hit your landing pages. That way, the value proposition that your landing page promotes can echo the one that was in the ad.
This will increase your online sales and the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Luckily, it’s really easy to boost online sales using this tactic. Here’s how to set it up in just a couple of steps:
- Create a new Dynamic Content campaign with OptiMonk, then select the landing page section that you’d like to personalize. You can simply write different copy to match your social media ads.
2. Use the “Visited URL” rule to only show your campaign to visitors who are coming from a specific ad.
And that’s it!
3. Promote free shipping based on cart value
Free shipping has always been one of the most persuasive incentives for shoppers to buy online—9 out of 10 consumers say so.
And these days, you really need to offer free shipping because 66% of consumers expect it. And that’s not all: 48% of abandoned carts are left behind as a result of unexpectedly high costs like shipping during checkout.
By offering free shipping, you can meet customers’ expectations and increase online sales as a result. However, if you’re not just interested in increasing online sales but also your average order value, there’s a marketing strategy for you: free shipping thresholds.
With a free shipping threshold, you’re only offering free shipping to people who spend more than a certain amount. Lots of potential customers will happily spend that little bit more in order to qualify for free shipping.
Using OptiMonk, you can create a dynamic free shipping bar that promotes your offer. It will constantly remind visitors how much more they need to spend to reach your free shipping threshold, doing a lot to increase online sales fast.
Here’s how you can set up dynamic free shipping bars on your online store and boost online sales.
- Choose one of OptiMonk’s many sticky bar templates.
2. Add the “Cart value countdown” Smart Tag to your campaign.
3. Create a second page that automatically appears when a visitor reaches the free shipping threshold.
4. Increase urgency with limited-time offers
One of the best ways to increase your online sales is by creating a sense of urgency.
When it seems like there’s only a limited quantity of your product left or only a limited time to take advantage of a special deal, the fear of missing out (FOMO) will encourage customers to make a purchase now rather than later.
Increasing sales using this method is really easy to do:
- Choose an embedded message and fine-tune it to your style.
2. Use our Point and Click tool to place your message.
3. Schedule your campaign in advance so you can make sure that you won’t forget to activate it in time.
5. Personalize offers based on traffic source
Your target market likely contains segments of customers that have different interests and needs. That’s why trying to use one-size-fits-all messages for your entire audience isn’t a good idea.
With source-based targeting, you can display different messages for visitors arriving on your website from different ads. This is a quick, easy way to create buyer personas on a basic level and deliver relevant messages that will result in more sales.
All you need to do is:
- Create a new Personalized Experience in OptiMonk.
- Modify your Experience variants. Insert the name and logo of the traffic source that you’d like to display on your campaign.
3. Use source-based targeting to show your new message only to visitors from a specific source (e.g. Facebook).
6. Help returning visitors continue where they left off
Online sales don’t always happen right away, especially for new customers. Often, people need some time to explore all their options before making the final decision to make a purchase.
As a result, it makes sense to help your potential customers shop efficiently across multiple visits to your website. Luckily, there are plenty of chatbot templates, pop-up tools, and product recommendation campaign ideas that can be useful here.
Using OptiMonk, you can create a campaign that looks like the one below. It immediately reminds customers of the products they were browsing the last time they visited your site, jumpstarting their shopping experience. This added convenience will help you improve the customer experience and grow online sales.
Here’s the setup process:
- Create a product recommendation campaign.
2. Turn on the “recently viewed products” feature of the product element.
3. Set targeting to returning visitors.
7. Run seasonal campaigns
Online shoppers can get bored when they see discount code after discount code, for two reasons:
- Many ecommerce marketing efforts are repeated all across the internet, so shoppers start tuning them out.
- Existing customers of a particular brand will get bored if the website always looks the same.
Changing up your offer by using seasonal campaigns is a great way to keep your website fresh.
Here are just a few of the many seasonal campaign templates that OptiMonk offers.
8. Promote your bestsellers
Once a visitor makes it to your category pages, they probably know what kind of product they’re looking for. At that point, they just need to weigh their options.
That means your goal should be to help them find the best product for their needs as quickly as you can.
You can display your “most popular” or “trending” products in the category they’re currently browsing. This makes your products seem desirable, since many other people are buying them—especially if you back it up with social proof like customer testimonials.
Here’s an example of what this could look like:
To use this tactic, you’ll need to choose a product recommendation template again, just like you did with tip #6. But this time, you’ll need to choose the “Most popular” setting in the product card:
9. Offer a discount for cart abandoners
As anyone working in ecommerce knows, cart abandonment is one of the most important challenges to overcome. Studies show that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 66.5%.
Although you’ll never get this number down to 0%, any website sales you can make at this point will go straight to your bottom line.
Exit-intent popups are the best way to save cart abandoners because they appear right when a customer is about to leave, giving you a chance to “save” the conversion.
Cart abandonment popups like the ones below have a 17.12% average conversion rate. As you can see, OptiMonk has a lot of beautiful templates that make it easy to increase online sales by stopping cart abandonment.
10. Remind subscribers of their coupon codes
Whenever you’ve given a potential customer a coupon code, you want to make sure they don’t forget about it.
If you want to keep something at the top of your website visitors’ minds, a sticky bar is a great way to go about it. That’s because sticky bars are always onscreen but don’t interrupt the shopping experience. By helping ensure nobody forgets about their available discount, you’ll see your online sales shoot up.
Here’s a great example of Kiss My Keto using a sticky bar to remind their customers about a discount coupon.
Use these ready-to-use coupon reminder templates to increase your online sales:
11. Recommend relevant products in blog articles
Which blog posts your audience chooses to read gives you a lot of information about what each individual is interested in.
If you sell a few different types of products, you can deduce which category they’re interested in based on the blog posts they’re reading.
That’s why you should promote the products you sell that can help solve the pain points that customers are trying to address. This helps get users onto your product pages as quickly as possible, thereby increasing the likelihood they’ll make a purchase.
To get started, choose a product recommendation embedded campaign:
12. Launch a post-purchase attribution survey
Are you doing a lot of brand building, demand generation, offline marketing, or social marketing, but you’re not sure how effective these strategies are? That’s not surprising—these strategies are usually undetectable through Google Analytics.
A post-purchase attribution survey will help you to measure which strategies work best for your brand, which can help you invest your marketing efforts in the right channels.
Right after a customer makes a purchase, they’re feeling happy and enthusiastic, which makes it very likely that they’ll complete any survey that you give them. It also has the effect of making your customers feel like you’re listening to them.
You can use a feedback popup like one of the ones below on your post-purchase page to get a handle on which marketing tactics are working best for you.
13. Promote new products for existing customers
You know a lot about your customers who return again and again, and in turn, they know a lot about you. While on one level that’s great, it can also be hard to get this segment of customers excited about your products. They’ve already tried many of them!
That’s why you should heavily promote your new products to this segment. You can personalize this message for each loyal customer by including their name in the embedded content, like the example below.
Here’s the setup process:
- Choose an embedded message and fine-tune it to your style.
- Add the “First name” Smart Tag to your headline. This will allow you to welcome your returning customers in a personalized way.
3. Change the content and the button URL to show off your new products.
4. Use the Point and Click Placement tool and place this embedded message on your homepage below your hero banner.
5 CRO tools to help you boost sales
Now that we’ve gone over 13 great ways to increase online sales, let’s take a look at some of the best tools for implementing them.
1. OptiMonk
OptiMonk is a powerful personalization platform that helps ecommerce businesses improve their user experience, optimize their websites, win loyal customers, and—of course—increase online sales.
OptiMonk’s personalization features make it possible to identify user segments that share needs, preferences, and interests. That takes most of the work out of creating personalized messages for each segment.
OptiMonk is easy to use and packed with features. It also has tons of integrations with CMS and email marketing tools (like Klaviyo), meaning you can use your customer data across different marketing channels.
Let’s see some of OptiMonk’s innovative features.
Key feature #1: Dynamic Content
Dynamic Content is a campaign type in OptiMonk allowing you to edit your site’s content directly without involving developers.
What’s more, it can help you deliver more relevant messages to different audiences on the same page. Instead of having to create multiple landing pages for different offers, you just need to create personalized versions of the same one for different segments.
Key feature #2: Product recommendations
OptiMonk’s personalized product recommendations effectively leverage all the customer data you’ve collected. This allows you to zero in on customers’ intent and display the products your visitors really want to see.
Key feature #3: Experiments
Understanding which aspects of your sales process are working and which aren’t is a crucial part of increasing online sales. OptiMonk’s Experiments feature takes you past simple A/B testing, giving you the ability to test unlimited campaign variants.
Additional benefits:
- Easy-to-use editor: The drag-and-drop editor means that designing your campaigns is effortless.
- Point & click placement: Use an intuitive point & click tool to position your embedded content.
- Analytics: Advanced campaign analytics reveal how well your campaigns are performing.
- Smart Tags: This feature enables you to maximize your returns on the first- and zero-party customer data you’ve collected.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one content management system. It allows you to get your website up and running, keep track of your visitors and customers, and much more. They have lots of features that can lead directly to increased sales, such as their website personalization system.
3. VWO
VWO is an A/B testing tool that you can use to increase online sales. You can also import your performance on key metrics to see how you’re performing in the areas you really care about.
There are a number of pre-set experiments that help you get into the weeds even if you don’t have a degree in statistics.
4. Optimizely
Optimizely is a popular website personalization tool. They’ve developed a Digital Experience Platform that increases web traffic by boosting engagement and content sharing.
However, Optimizely’s high price makes it more suitable for larger brands.
5. Sumo
Sumo is a simple lead generation plugin that allows you to get your opt-in forms up and running within minutes. In fact, Sumo’s catchphrase is “set it and forget it.”
With their intuitive drag-and-drop builder, you can quickly adapt one of their opt-in form templates with minimal editing. And Sumo has several other products that integrate seamlessly with their popup maker, including King Sumo and AppSumo.
FAQ
How can I increase my online sales fast?
There are many strategies to increase sales, but there’s no one method that can guarantee immediate growth for every single business. All businesses are different and all of them have different target audiences.
Nonetheless, it’s always important to have the basics in place, like a great value proposition and a well-designed website. Once you have that covered, you can start focusing on personalizing messages for each customer. This makes it possible to increase your conversion rate, thus your online sales.
What are 4 general ways to increase sales?
In ecommerce, there’s a general rule that outlines the four ways that you can increase online sales (and revenue). Here they are:
- Increase the number of customers
- Increase the average order value
- Increase the frequency of transactions per customer
- Raise your prices
In general, the worst way to boost revenue is to raise prices. That’s because you might make more money in the short term, but lose customers in the long term. It’s better to use the first three paths to increase online sales.
How do you attract customers to your online store?
There are many ways to attract customers to your online store. SEO, content marketing, PPC, and social media are all great strategies.
Wrapping up
That’s it for now—you have what you need to start increasing your online sales today!
The tactics we went over give you lots of different options for improving the customer experience and boosting sales. You don’t need to implement all of them at once, but choosing one or two that you think your customers will appreciate is a great start.
You also know all about the OptiMonk features that can help you implement these tactics easily. Why not give it a try for your online store?
