Strategies to increase online sales

So you have your online shop on the go and now what?

When you have already convinced that your audience is on the net and that thanks to the online channel your company will grow, the critical moment comes: to give or not visibility to your website.

It is quite common to see that many companies invest time and money in the creation of their online showcase but then, not knowing what to do, that effort is in vain. Well, if this is your case we say that there is a remedy, you only need two things: knowledge to know what strategies and actions to carry out and, above all, a lot of constancy. Rome wasn’t created in two days, so don’t expect them to increase your online sales overnight.

Increase your online sales: study your target audience

Before you start thinking about strategies to improve your online sales, you must first work on the basics: your target audience. You may think you already have it defined: sure you know if sex is important, if your product/service is focused on an age range and even have done a geographic segmentation but is this enough? The answer is no.

If you want to get to the heart of the users and make them trust your brand you must go a little further and inquire more about their needs and interests. Ask yourself what moves the user to find your service/product, learn about the places they visit to find information and what social networks are usually present.  

It is clear that for all this you can lead by your intuition, but are you really going to leave the future of your business in the hands of a hunch? We don’t really think so, so to make a true X-ray of your target audience and Buyer persona, we propose to follow the following steps:

• Study your competition. Yes, the study of your competition can also help you to better define your buyer person. How is the company headed? What channels? What kind of audience is more interacting with them?
• Get the information that Google Analytics gives you. Did you know that analytics tells you about the users that enter your website? Obviously not give you name and surname (the Law on data protection above all), but you can get information on what type of user visits your website: Age, Sex and geographic data are registered in analytics within the data section Demographic.
• Question. It seems obvious, but have you asked your target audience what you want and how do you get informed? If you can, do a market study of your own and, if you do not have that possibility, look for a generic.

These analyses are basic to get to know the public that enters your website and, therefore, more interested in your products and/or services.

What actions do you have at your disposal to increase online sales?

Once you are clear on what your target audience is you should choose the strategies that best make you come to him to show him everything your company can offer. As you well know, the digital world is full of many possibilities that, well used, can help you achieve your online sales goals. It is such the possibility of actions to realize that you may not know where to start. We propose to you to work three big blocks to get to increase the online sales of your ecommerce.

Social network Management

We will start with the most social section and that will allow you to have a more direct contact with your current and future clients: social networks.

In the year 2018, about 25.5 million Spanish users accessed a social network. According to the study made by IAB España, Facebook (96%) and Twitter (72%), are still the social networks that most people mention, being Instagram in third place (62%). Although these data seem encouraging to these social networks, not all of them have evolved the same since the last study. Specifically, Twitter accuses a decline in users and use, while Instagram grows exponentially, starting to be one of the best-valued social networks by users.

Although it is true that these social networks are the most named, we can not forget others like LinkedIn, Musical.ly, Spotify or even WhatsApp.

In the face of such a number of social networks, it is logical to ask whether they should be present. The answer is no.

For a moment before you start to open corporate pages on all social networks and study what your target audience is. For example, if your Buyer person is a more working profile, the ideal thing is that they are on Twitter and LinkedIn; If, on the contrary, you address a young target audience you should opt for Instagram and Musical.ly. As you can see, not all social networks are focused the same.

Once you have clear social channels is the time to establish a Content Strategy. In social networks the visual content is the one that draws the most attention, so it includes publications with Infographics, photos and even short videos that manage to capture the attention of the user, yes, everything you post remember that it must be related to your company and the brand image you want to project to your buyer person.

Take care of the language and the message to be treated, be constant and adécuate to the periodicity of publication of each social network and, of course, never forget that social networks are a bidirectional communication channel.

Our advice is that if your goal is to increase online sales do not stay in the publications of your feed and take a step further using the payment options that give you social networks. For example Facebook Ads It can help us to connect better with our target audience. He thinks that Facebook is considered one of the world’s widest databases, so he uses his full potential. If you don’t know where to start, we recommend that you read our article “Facebook! Campaigns that convertandFacebook Custom Audiences“To take a step further into your payment strategy within Facebook.

Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Surely you’ve heard of inbound Marketing and wondered if this technique works for your company. The Inbound Marketing It is nothing more than the process by which a user who is at the beginning of the purchase process, leaves his/her data and we accompany you with content of interest and automations until you are ready to make the purchase of the service/product.

Inbound Marketing is a long-term process that provides very good results: to increase the qualified contacts, generate a greater record of leads and increase the visits that a Web page receives. All these inputs are maturing thanks to automation marketing techniques in order to increase online sales.  

SEM campaigns

We get to the third idea we have for you in order to increase online sales, SEM campaigns.

Investing directly in Google and making payment campaigns is one of the most recurring options for advertisers. The objectives are usually achieved in the short term, something that encourages many companies to opt for this strategy rather than the previous two that are more long-term.

For her, you have to make a good choice of keywords: that have good level of searches, that are relevant and that have a certain transactional character. For this, for example, you can help yourself with tools like Keyword Planner. Once you have them, you will have to write the copy of the ads, so that they are direct and they call the attention of the user. It seems easy, but creating a good ad on Google is not a simple task as we tell you in “How to structure your Adwords campaigns correctly“.

If you like the idea of investing in Google but do not want to be so invasive with advertising, how about performing an inbound payment campaign? Yes, it may seem odd but the truth is that you can report many benefits. First of all let’s put ourselves in a situation: we want Capture Leads That are in the early stages of the purchase cycle, that is, users who are collecting information about one of their Pains. In this case, the most common thing is that users go to Google and look for what they are worried about and need a solution.  How about appearing in those searches with a pay post to solve that problem?

For example, in our case we could do a SEM campaign talking about that we are specialists in inbound Marketing that takes the user directly to hire our services but, what happens to users who are not yet at that stage of the purchase cycle? That if we only promote our services we lose them. Following the example, to make this payment strategy inbound we would have to promote a post of the type “The 5 fundamental Pillars of inbound Marketing“, so we get visits to our website that can be converted into leads, if we offer a lead magnet of quality and interest to, well, start again with the automation marketing phase.

These are the three basic pillars that, well worked, will help you increase online sales. And you, do you work these three areas? What do you do to get online sales to increase your store?