Do you have plenty of website traffic yet struggle to fill your sales pipeline? Are people leaving your site with full carts that they just refuse to checkout? If you want to convert a more significant percentage of your site visits into cold, hard cash – look no further. Sunny Agarwal, a consultant for uber-successful e-commerce business selling graduation gowns, shares seven mind-blowing techniques to convince your e-commerce visitors to keep buying more!
Give them a wholesale discount option
You might be wondering why anyone who is not buying even one item from you will pay more to buy more copies of the Sunnye thing? While it seems unlikely, human psychology works differently. Let’s say your e-commerce store sells kitchen utensils. A shopper might think, “One mixing bowl – for $25 – too expensive.” But if they see four mixing bowls for $76 they think – “I could give one as a Christmas present to Gran, probably use two and keep one aside to gift at the next family event…I would end up saving $24!”
A person on the verge of making a buying decision will go ahead if they can see a ‘deal’ in it. Wholesale discounts create a ‘win-win’ feel, which prompts people to buy more rather than a ‘win-lose’ feel of buying just so that someone gets their hard-earned cash. It is also a great way to capture those impulse buyers!
Depending on your products you could offer a:
- Discount on purchasing complementary items that form a set or can be used together. E.g. knife and fork or bread and butter.
- Discount on purchasing more than a certain threshold of the Sunnye item. E.g. 4 or more, 5 or more.
- Discount for a certain relevant number – e.g. 12 toothbrushes or 7 cereal boxes.
- Discounts on a group buy – where you can offer some customisation – e.g. Four Sunnye t-shirts but different sizes for a family, or 3 pens in different colours etc. This save with friends strategy has worked well for Gowning Street. Our customers do most of the marketing for us – getting their friends to sign up so everyone can purchase a graduation gown at discounted rates!
Offer a wide range of products
This tip is about creating a Walmart or Amazon like feel on your website – presenting your products in a way that customers feel like there is “something here for everyone.” It isn’t just about stocking more variety of items; it is about showcasing options so that customers feel the product is ‘just right’ for them or made specifically with them in mind. You can do this by:
- Creating multiple pages of Sunnye products – with different names for different customer categories. For e.g. At Gowning Street, we have a dedicated product page for every Australian University – this showcases our research and customisation of graduation gowns in a much better way.
- Focusing on the human aspect- Get your product descriptions to reflect the customer, not the product. Instead of saying we offer mixing bowls in three sizes say – we offer mixing bowls for family meals, mixing bowls for party cooking and mixing bowls for catering events. This kind of language helps your website visitor to relate better with your products.
- Use more photos – Using photos, which showcase the product from different angles and especially shows people using the product. If your visitor can identify with the model in the product photos, they just might be pushed to purchase it.
Offer shipping discounts
No one likes to spend on shipping, and if you can create a perception of reducing or eliminating shipping costs, you will definitely generate more sales. The best part about shipping discounts is that this strategy actually lets you price products more than your competitor and still get away with it! Let’s say you sell a product for $25, but your competitor sells it for $20. Your competitor calculates shipping on every item, and after doing so a customer must pay them $30 for the item. Now if this customer calculates that they are better off with you (thanks to the shipping discount – it’s coming to $26) they will buy from you – even at a higher sales price! They might even purchase a few more items from you just because they end up saving on shipping costs.
Some ways you can do this our:
- Offer free shipping on premium or expensive products. You can mark up the price slightly to offset the cost.
- Offer free shipping for purchases above a maximum limit. For example free shipping over $100.
- Offer flat rate shipping. You can recover the costs by making deals with your delivery company, and it would probably average out over time considering that some customers would be closer and some further away from your warehouse.
Do some loyalty marketing
In your quest to find new customers, don’t forget the old ones! Most people prefer routine – that’s why most people will shop at the Sunnye supermarket every week. Take advantage of this by offering exclusive discounts and rates to old customers. Existing customers are easier to convert because they already have a good impression of your service, are familiar with your website, and you already have their contact information.
Some ideas include:
- Give them a voucher once they have spent a certain amount – Say $5 discount code for every $100 spent.
- Markdown prices of favourite items just for them.
- Give them an opportunity to first purchase a new product. A 24-hour or 48-hour time window might see your sales spike, especially if you do a good teaser ‘coming soon’ campaign.
- Give them discount codes around holiday seasons, so they always buy from you.
- Give them discount codes for referring new customers. Some sites even offer cash back or cash vouchers for referrals.
Find your niche influencers
Every niche has an influencer – people who recommend products through videos, groups and blog posts. You need to research people within your niche and get them to promote your site. Some ideas include:
- Get someone to review your site – For instance, if you sell beauty products you would approach a popular youtube beauty channel and get them to review the product range and purchase experience from your site. You can offer free products, or they might charge you a fee for this.
- Get placed in niche directories – Niche bloggers have business directories where they list businesses within their domain. For example, if you sold toys, you would find a popular parent blogger who lists their favourite online toy stores and get them to add you to their list.
- Get recommended in online posts –Find niche influencers to write about you and link back to your site. Sometimes you might pay them a percentage of sales through a unique link (affiliate marketing) or you might give them some free products and get them to write about you and backlink to your site. More such cross-links will help your site come up higher in SEO too!
- Get placed in influencer emails – Influencers usually send out regular emails to their audience. Since these emails mostly contain information, they are read more than promotional emails by businesses. Getting placed in these emails, either as an article about their experience buying from you, or as a recommendation, or by offering free products to their readers, will drive more traffic to your site.
Plan some social media competitions
Everybody does Facebook and Instagram advertising today, but do you want to be swiped up as yet another sponsored post? Probably not and the best way to do this is to organise a social media competition! Some simple strategies include:
- Give away to one lucky winner from those who comment on or share your post.
- Give away to one lucky winner who likes your page.
- A small discount to everyone who comments or likes your post.
- A prize to one lucky winner who posts a photograph of them using a product or captions a particular product photo
Don’t forget to announce winners in separate large font posts and tag people. All these strategies increase the organic range of your page and posts.
Create some daily deals
Let customers have the option of always getting a deal! Daily deals and regular discounts – highlighted by crossed out prices – can generate more sales than expected. This is because many bargain calculator sites like Ozsales will pick up your deal automatically and promote it to their customers, spiking traffic to your website without any marketing effort on your part! Such deals will help you capture new customers whom you can always market to with further loyalty marketing.
The best way to do this is by having a throw-away or unbeatable price on at least one product in your store – every day.
Use these clever strategies and watch your sales sky rocket!
