Building an e-commerce website is one the most popular business ventures today. Not only does it provide unlimited scaling potential, it is also open to a wider scope of audience. However, building an online store does not guarantee success. It can be hard to increase revenue without hard work or using creative strategies.
One of the best ways to improve e-commerce revenue is by increasing conversion rate.
Strategies to Improve Your E-Commerce Revenue
Here are some strategies to boost your site’s revenue.
1. Abandoned Cart Exit Offer
According to experts, average shopping cart abandonment is approximately 60-80%.
Let’s say that you’re selling a product for $50 and have an average of 1,000 customers adding it on their shopping cart per month. If 40% buy and 60% abandon, this results in $20,000 in revenue. However, if you can cut abandonment in half monthly revenue immediately shoots up to $35,000 or a $15,000 increase.
One of the ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment is by adding an abandoned cart exit offer. It’s an offer that pops up just as a customer is about to leave. The offer provides incentive for the customer to continue their purchase. Coupon codes and free shipping offers are good examples of effective exit offers.
2. Cross-Sells and Sell Up Offers
Wouldn’t it be great if 20% of your customers purchased more? You immediately increase revenue without spending more on advertising and marketing. You can achieve this by presenting the right cross-sells and sell-ups to your customers.
A cross-sell is a related product that can be bought together with the original purchase. For instance you can recommend lipsticks when somebody buys eye shadow. An up-sell is an offer to purchase a higher quantity at a reduced price. Buying a third lipstick at 20% reduced price for example is an up-sell. They key to an up-sell is an irresistible price offer.
This type of strategy worked very well for Amazon during 2006 when 35% of their sales were a result of cross sells.
3. Affiliate Programs
Affiliates can help drive traffic to your website without costing you money for advertising. Affiliates are compensated with commissions from the sales they generate.
You can join an affiliate network where there are many affiliate marketers looking for websites and products to promote. This will give you access to experienced marketers and eliminate your need for hiring somebody to run the program. Alternatively you can run an in-house affiliate program using software where you can monitor sales and leads generated by marketers.
It is important to offer affiliates an attractive commission scheme to motivate them to promote your product or service. Your website also needs to be optimized to help enable your affiliates’ success. Remember the more successful your affiliates, the more successful you are.
4. Paid Advertising
As the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money. Two of the most measurable and scalable online advertising is Google Adsense and Facebook Ads. This type of advertising has access to audiences around the globe with targeting options so that you can offer your product or service directly to your ideal customer.
Many e-commerce websites try Google Adsense and Facebook Ads and say that they have failed and claiming that it does not work. However, it is important to consider that this type of advertising has a learning curve. It takes split testing and optimization to run a successful Google and Facebook advertising campaign.
If you’re new to this, start small with a budget that you can afford to lose. This will help you learn as you go so that you can figure out what works for your company. When you find out what type of strategies work you can begin to scale your campaign and hopefully improve your revenue. Additionally, there are many resources and training that can help you create winning campaigns.
According to Big Commerce, 51% of people now prefer to do their shopping online with 95% shopping at least once a year. Online shopping has helped to propel E-commerce to a staggering 12 million online stores. However, only around 650,000 of them generate more than $1,000 in sales annually. Employing the above stated digital strategies can help to generate revenue even with small amounts of traffic.
What is your best strategy to boost sales?Have you tried any of these ideas? What are the results? Tell us by leaving your comments below.
