How to Overturn Poor Sales Conversion and Explode Your Ecommerce Sales
Are you experiencing poor sales conversion in your e-commerce business right now? You’re not alone. With multitudes of e-commerce stores being shut down on a daily basis, there’s a need to address the root cause of this problem.
In eCommerce, there’s nothing as important as being able to convert shoppers into paying customers. If you’re looking to increase your sales, you have to concentrate much effort on knowing and improving your Average Order Value (AOV).
Knowing how much is spent on each and every order will help plan the overall pricing & marketing strategies with the aim of improving your sales output. This will ultimately allow you to scale your income growth and position your profits for upward mobility.
However, many online retailers can’t seem to find a way around this. That’s why they keep investing huge amounts of money on marketing with little or nothing to show for it in terms of sales conversion.
Factors Responsible for Poor Sales Conversion
A lot of factors could be responsible for poor sales conversion. These are classified as internal and external factors.
Internal Factors
These factors have to do with everything you’re doing wrong on your eCommerce website which reduces your conversion rate. They are as follows:
- Inadequate lead capturing mechanism
- Targeting the wrong audience
- Poor sales and promotion strategies
- Non-secure payment options
- Poor product images
- Not optimizing for mobile
- Wrong pricing
- Difficult checkout process
- Unconvincing call-to-action
- Clumsy web design
- Not using tracking codes
- Not testing enough
- Not retargeting your web visitors
External Factors
These are factors that relate to the behavior and activities of your prospects and the market generally in relation to your business. You basically have no direct control over this. They include:
- Product return and refund
- Negative customer reviews
- Stiff market competition
It’s obvious from the above that the internal factors far outweigh the external factors. This brings us to the conclusion that online retailers should focus more on the former than the latter.
Effects of These Factors on Sales Conversion
Apart from a high bounce rate that plagues every poorly built site, the biggest symptom of low sales conversion for eCommerce websites is a high cart abandonment rate.
Cart abandonment implies that customers who visited an eCommerce website with the intention of buying leave without buying anything. It could also refer to a situation where visitors add items to their shopping carts but they leave without buying the added items.
According to Barilliance, the average cart abandonment rate as of 2017 was 78.65%. This implies that three-quarter of online shoppers fails to complete their purchases on eCommerce websites.
This, clearly, is a source of serious concern for many eCommerce store owners.
How to Explode Your Sales and Increase Your Ecommerce Revenue
As an eCommerce store owner, you should be concerned about converting every visitor that lands on your website into (repeat) buyers. One of the proven ways to generate more income and increase your site’s average order value is the use of effective cross-selling and upselling strategies.
What is Cross-selling?
Cross-selling is a sales tactic that helps to generate more sales through the act of suggesting supplementary, related or compatible items to a buyer who’s already made a buying decision.
It might interest you to know that 35 percent of Amazon’s revenue comes from products that are cross-sold to buyers. You must have noticed how Amazon suggests products that are frequently bought together to buyers and the frequent use of the phrase “customers who bought this item also bought…”
Another good cross-selling example that McDonalds uses to boost their sales is the use of the phrase “would you like some fries with that?”
What is upselling?
Upselling is a term that refers to the act of offering your customers a better or more expensive item. This takes place as soon as they add a product to their shopping cart or at the checkout page. This practice is aimed at increasing your average order value since your customers can now buy more than the initial product they selected.
It might interest you to know that an average of 83% of revenue comes from upsells. As a matter of fact, upselling is about 70% more affordable than acquiring a new customer.
Studies show that B2B companies generate about 90% of their revenue after the initial sales. This is mostly from the combined effort of upselling and cross-selling offers to their customers.
Therefore, if you want your revenue to increase drastically, you have to incorporate these strategies into your marketing. Both strategies, if combined strategically, work like magic and have the ability to 10x your revenue overnight.
Now that you know the secrets big companies use to maximize their profit, why not copy their method?
Implementing these strategies will definitely improve your eCommerce sales conversion. Apart from this, you’d also be helping your customers to make smart buying decisions.
For example, suggesting complementary products or other useful products to shoppers reduces the amount of time they spend looking for such products.
Again, this kind of bundling also allows your customers to save cost because products bought together often attract little price reductions. So, it’s a win-win situation for both buyer and seller.
10 Sales Conversions Tips
To help you place all of this in perspective, I hereby present 10 cross-selling and upselling strategies you can leverage right now to explode your sales conversions.
1. Suggest Related Products
This is obviously one of the best ways to present cross-sell offers. When a visitor purchases an item online, chances are they’d need a couple of other related items.
Suggesting such related products via a popup will surely make light their task. Not forgetting to say that it helps you to generate more sales.
2. Suggest Popular Products
Suggesting the popular products in your inventory is also a smart way of increasing your order value. Many customers like being sold the idea that they’re among the elite shoppers.
That’s why they love to buy what the top buyers are buying. Therefore, you should be using this tactic a lot if you want to see your sales shoot through the roof.
3. Employ an Element of Curiosity
How would you feel if you went shopping and someone suddenly says to you “wait; you’re leaving something important behind.” You’d be curious to know the important thing you’re leaving behind, isn’t it?
That’s the same feeling your site visitors get when you use the power word “wait” in the popups. Using this strategy at the point of exit will get them to add another item to the cart.
4. Remind Visitors They Still Have Items in Their Cart
Leaving a little reminder about those uncompleted orders is such a good idea. In this method, your intention is to call the attention of website visitors that are about abandoning their cart.
This is absolutely a great way to avoid losing potential sales. Also, a small discount offered will surely encourage them to purchase these additional items.
5. Personalize Your Offer
Did you know that you could improve your conversion rate by just adding a personal effect to your offer?
Customers appreciate it when you call them by their first names and this clearly influences their buying decisions.
So, instead of saying “just for you,” it’d be better to say “just for Mary.” Then offer them a discount on their next purchase, as seen in the exit popup image below.
6. Suggest a Big Money Saver
Creating sales discounts is one of the smartest ways to increase your eCommerce conversion. This is usually done by slashing the prices of your items and offering sales prices for a limited period.
Your site’s visitors would be more likely to pick up one or more relevant items especially when there’s a significant slash in the prices of items on sale. This cross-selling strategy can be achieved by using the exit intent or the slide-in popups.
7. Inform Your Buyers About Your New Products
If you want to boost your conversion rate, you must cultivate the habit of informing your subscribers or customers of your new inventory.
Many eCommerce businesses make the mistake of assuming that customers are up to date with the latest information on their blogs. Even when you mail them regularly, chances are a large percentage of them won’t read every email you send.
Apart from the email updates, pop-ups also convert well. This is because the messages are always straight to the point and your website visitors can see the product images in a single flash.
8. Help Your Buyers Make a Choice
At times, customers aren’t so sure of what they really want. In such instances, it becomes your duty to either educate them or present them with a few options to pick from.
Therefore, you should ask questions that’ll help them gain clarity and make it easy to make informed choices. Record their responses via an opt-in form and then present them with varieties of products that they might be interested in buying via email.
9. Suggest Products From Other Sellers
Suggesting products sold by other sellers is another great way to increase sales. This is quite possible if you run an eCommerce website that allows other vendors to list their products on your website.
This strategy allows visitors on your site to easily compare prices and to check out products from other vendors if they can’t find what they desire. Big brands like AliExpress have continued to use this method because it’s a proven winner.
10. Use Recommendations
Artificial Intelligence has been a really helpful tool when it comes to predicting buyers’ online behaviors. A lot of eCommerce sites now use cookies to retain useful data (based on your activities) in order to make the browsing experience better.
This stored information is mostly used to suggest products that visitors might like to buy. This is the strategy that eCommerce giants such as Amazon use to be able to recommend relevant products to their site visitors. You should leverage this too.
Conclusion
These powerful cross-selling and upselling examples are typical of many eCommerce websites. They help visitors to realize their need for certain products, improve your site’s average order value, and ultimately allow online stores to multiply their sales revenue.
It’s important to mention that sales conversion is not guaranteed by merely being aware of these strategies. What matters is your creativity in putting them to use. So, I urge you to go over this quintessential guide as many times as you can and implement the insights I shared in your business. That’s all you need to give your business the perfect turnaround it needs.
