As an e-commerce company, you want to increase your organic sales or break through a growth plateau without blowing your whole marketing budget in one go. But there’s no need to pay thousands of dollars for paid advertising. For the best tips on boosting your organic ecommerce without breaking the bank, read on.
Focus on existing customers first
If your ecommerce company is getting thousands of new customers a day, that’s great. However, customer acquisition can get expensive, and if you are going after an easy sales boost, it is not the place to start. Instead, work on increasing customer loyalty and retention first.
A study by Accenture showed that customer loyalty program members generate 12-18% more revenue than non-members. Moreover, research by Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention by just 5% could get you a 25-95% increase in profits.
It is also much more cost-efficient to go after your existing customers first. Since they are already familiar with your product, there is no learning curve, which shortens their buyer’s journey considerably.
How to implement it: Come up with a loyalty program that gives your customers a certain number of points per every dollar spent, then leverage it to keep them coming back for more.
Boost your SEO
More organic search traffic means more organic sales.
The best place to start? Your product descriptions. For example we found an Orlando printing company that does an excellent job of this. They have unique descriptions that you can tell were hand written and well thought out.
Instead of copy-and-pasting the product descriptions from the manufacturer, take the time to make each description unique and keyword-rich.
There’s no need to spam keywords, but it shouldn’t be too hard to incorporate at least one per each product description.
Make sure your site is 100% mobile responsive and get its loading time as low as it can possibly be. When it comes to getting more sales, the UX (user experience) is everything.
How to implement it: Generating some buzz is also helpful for SEO, so social sharing buttons are a must for your e-Commerce site.
Check that your product images are optimized using alt-text for an extra SEO boost, and make sure your site is organized and easy to get around for both humans and Google’s bots.
Make your testimonials come to life
A customer review from a nameless, faceless individual isn’t all that trustworthy.
However, if you add a photo, the person behind the words suddenly becomes much more “real” to your potential customer. It gives your ecommerce store a much more trustworthy appearance.
If you want to take this a step further, you can add a community sharing feature where customers can upload their own photos and share their stories with others. User-generated content provides powerful social proof that can enhance your testimonials.
How to implement it: Check your testimonials section. If you don’t have any customer photos added yet, go find some, and don’t forget to add their full name while you are at it. WordPress’s Testimonial Rotator is an easy-to-use plugin that lets you display testimonials, complete with job titles, star ratings, photos, and more.
Consider video content to increase engagement
Consumers love video. 52% of marketing professionals consider video the marketing channel with the best ROI.
It’s not limited to your website, either. By simply using the word “video” in an email subject line (e.g. in an abandoned cart email sequence), you can boost open rates by 19%.
How to implement it: If you have the budget for it, creating product tutorials or walkthroughs can be a great way to keep your customers entertained, give them more understanding of your product, and boost sales. This is used to great effect for products such as electronics or cooking equipment, where a guide can help inform and educate customers.
And if you don’t have the budget, sharing a simple video on your brand’s Instagram story can increase brand awareness and get some new sales rolling in.
And it doesn’t even need to be particularly useful either. For example, if you own a pet shop and want to generate heavy traffic, uploading videos of cute pets is a sure-fire way of driving organic sales. People love pet videos, and social media has no shortage of videos of adorable cats, dogs, rabbits, and more. Plenty of online pet shops use this kind of video content to generate leads — and you can too.
Add security icons and badges to build trust
Nobody wants to shop at an ecommerce store that looks sketchy.
One of the ways to build trust with your customers and boost organic sales is to add popular security badges and icons (Norton AntiVirus, Google Trusted Store, etc.) to your site.
How to implement it: What security measures have you already implemented on your site? Add their credentials and their icons/badges to your site. And if you don’t have any stringent security measures yet, it’s definitely time to get some.
Showcase your best-selling items
Don’t count on your customers finding your best stuff on their own, especially if you offer a large selection of products.
Instead, guide them to your best-selling items immediately upon entering the store.
How to implement it: Creating a “Best Selling” product category on your site to give your customer a little more direction.
If you want to take it a step further, create curated edits or collections showcasing different aspects of your products.
For example, if you sell fashion items, you can create a collection for different occasions, like “Night Out With The Boys” or “Brunch With The Gals”. American Apparel are particularly good at this, regularly rotating their collections with seasonal, brand, and occasion themes.
Take advantage of FOMO
FOMO (fear of missing out) can be a powerful motivator.
To take advantage of FOMO, you need to create some urgency on your site, even if there is none.
Have you noticed how airlines always seem to have “just one ticket left at this price”?
It’s rarely true, but it is a great way to push a price-sensitive customer towards the “Buy” button.
How to implement it: Tell your customer you have a limited number of items available (even if that’s not the case) before they check out.
Or, instead of sending them a coupon that’s valid until the end of the week, run a flash sale that ends at midnight.
You don’t have to something extraordinary or pay through the nose for paid advertising to boost your ecommerce sales. You can do it organically by following the seven easy tips above.