Ecommerce Marketing: Ways to Increase Your Online Sales

Boosting online sales is one of the primary goals for most businesses, whether large or small.

Whether you’re selling physical goods or running a service-based business, online sales looks a lot easier from the outside than it actually is.

Luckily, there are several ways to boost your online sales and ecommerce fulfillment, some of which you can implement right away. A few of the tips below are narrow and tactical; others are more general habits worth building into how you run the store.

Here’s what actually moves the needle:

Upsell and cross-sell

Upselling and cross-selling both drive real revenue, no matter the size of the business. The two terms get used interchangeably, but they’re different moves and knowing which one fits the moment gives you an edge.

Upselling is encouraging a customer to buy a pricier version of, or add-on to, the product they’re already looking at, a set of batteries alongside the camera they’re buying, for instance.

Cross-selling is suggesting a separate product that pairs with the primary one, conditioner when someone’s buying shampoo. Both push more revenue per order; the difference is just which lever you’re pulling.

Focus on your target audience

Your products and services have a target audience, whether or not you’ve bothered to define it.

Part of the job as a marketer is figuring out exactly who those people are, so campaigns can speak to them directly instead of speaking in general. It sounds obvious written out like that, but plenty of marketers still act as if their product has universal appeal and everyone is the target market.

It isn’t. Narrow the audience and the messaging gets sharper.

Use social media deliberately

Social media is one of the most cost-effective channels available for advertising a business.

If you’ve already got accounts on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, that’s a start, but posting often on its own won’t grow the business, especially in a market this crowded.

What matters more is having an actual social media campaign behind it, not just a presence. Once the strategy exists, advertising becomes worth the spend.

Facebook is usually the best place to start, it lets you target a specific audience and route them straight into relevant pages on your site.

Build an email list

An email list starts with something as simple as capturing addresses at checkout.

You can also collect emails through social campaigns or on the site itself, in exchange for a discount or coupon.

Give your newsletter a deadline

People procrastinate. Given time to think it over, most shoppers will wait, and the longer that wait stretches, the more likely they are to forget the product or the offer entirely.

That’s the case for urgency. Run a 24-hour deal at a special price, or put a hard deadline on a discount. Either one nudges a shopper who’s sitting on the fence toward actually converting.

Use ad extensions

If you’re selling anything online, ad extensions are close to a free win. Available in both Bing and Google Ads, they make your ad take up more space with more places to click, at no extra cost, and they tend to lift click-through rates as a result.

Simplify checkout

This one gets neglected more than it should.

A complicated checkout is one of the biggest drivers of cart abandonment, and it’s also one of the easiest things to fix. All the trust you’ve built up to get a shopper to the cart can unravel in the last thirty seconds if checkout is clunky.

Keep it fast, keep it simple, and the trust you built earlier in the funnel carries through to a completed order.

Put user-generated content to work

User-generated content is one of the more reliable forms of social proof. When prospects see people like themselves already buying from you, they trust the product more, and more than half of shoppers say they trust reviews and recommendations from other customers over brand messaging.

Photos from past customers using your product are a strong example. Reviews count too.

Final thoughts

Figuring out which ecommerce marketing tactics actually work for your business takes some experimenting.

What can you do that your competitors aren’t?

The strategies above build customer trust over time and turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. Try a handful of them in your store over the next few weeks, then look at what actually moved sales, and keep doing that.